dity of their traditions, which they
regard as sacred and unalterable, imposes restrictions on them. Hence
the fact that, while Protestants have so very largely rejected the
doctrine of hell, Roman Catholics, with their more rigid conservatism
and claim of infallibility, still cling to it, and offer the amazing
spectacle of a body claiming to possess the highest ideals in the world,
yet actually cherishing an entirely barbaric theory. There is probably
not a Catholic lawyer in the world who does not reject the old idea of
punishment as barbaric, yet he placidly believes that God retains it.
That is why we find a Catholic archbishop like Carr putting forth so
revolting an idea of the war, while Protestant preachers as a rule
shrink from mentioning God in connection with it. These things make it
impossible for one to understand how non-Christians can say, as they do
sometimes, that if they _were_ to accept a creed, it would be the Roman
creed.

Any theory of the war which proceeds on the lines of the hell-theory is
simply barbaric, and is beneath serious discussion. We know to-day that
both ethics and religion are in a state of constant evolution. We look
back over a stream of several thousand years of historically traceable
development; we follow that stream faintly through earlier tens of
thousands of years in the ideas of primitive peoples; and we see the
evolution going on plainly in the creeds and ethical codes of our own
time. But the practice of registering certain stages of this evolution
in sacred books or codes, which are then imposed on man for centuries or
millennia as something unalterable, has been and is a very serious
hindrance to development, both in ethics and religion. It is all the
worse because these codes and sacred books always contain certain
elements which belong to even earlier and less enlightened stages, and
whole regiments of philosophers or theologians are employed for ages in
putting glosses on ancient and barbaric ideas at which the world
eventually laughs. However, we need not linger here over these ancient
ways of regarding life. The man who keeps his God at a moral level which
we disdain ourselves rarely listens to argument. He protects his "faith"
by believing that it is a mortal sin (involving sentence of hell) to
read any book that would examine it critically. It is a most ingenious
arrangement by which the doctrine of a vindictive God protects itself
against moral progress.

Now an