our arms and awarded us the victory. Now that we are in the
midst of the horrors and burdens of the war God is little mentioned. One
would imagine that the great majority of the clergy conceived him as
standing aside, for some inscrutable reason, and letting wicked men
deploy their perverse forces. When the triumph comes, gilding the past
sacrifices or driving them from memory, God will be on every lip. The
whole nation will be implored to come and kneel before the altars.
Royalty and nobility and military, judges and stockbrokers and working
men--above all, a surging, thrilling, ecstatic mass of women--will
gather round the clergy, and will avow that they see the finger of God
in this glorious consummation. The relation of the war to God will then
become the supreme consideration for the Christian mind. It may be more
instructive to consider it now, before the last flood of emotion pours
over our judgments.

I have already discussed some of the clerical allusions to the share of
God in the war. They are so frankly repellent that one cannot be
surprised that the majority of the clergy prefer to be silent on that
point. They prefer to await the victory and build on its more genial and
indulgent emotions. The war is either a blessing or a curse. One would
think that there was not much room for choice, but we saw that some are
bold enough to hint that the spiritual good may outweigh the bodily
pain. They remind us of a Treitschke or a Bernhardi writing smugly of
the moral grandeur of war, the need to brace the slackness of human
nature periodically by war, the chivalry and devotion it calls out, and
so on.

Still worse is the theory of those who regard war frankly as a curse,
yet put it to the direct authorship of the Almighty. This theory is
natural enough in the minds of men and women who believe in hell. In
earlier ages men could not distinguish between the law of retaliation
and the need to deter criminals by using violence against them when they
transgressed. In many primitive systems of justice the law of
retaliation is expressly consecrated. It is even introduced,
inconsistently and as a survival of barbaric times, in the Babylonian
and the Judaic codes, side by side with saner views. It is, of course,
merely a systematisation of brute passion. In the beginning, if a man
knocked your tooth out, you knocked one of his teeth out. With the
growth of law and justice, the barbarous nature of the impulse was
recognised