war will be
assiduously pressed when nature has drawn her green mantle once more
over the blackened area of the war and our hearts are lifted up by
thought of victory. It is already being urged, and I would add a little
to the comments I have already passed on it.

The clergy would do well to realise that, whatever virtue this theory
may have in soothing the minds and dissolving the doubts of their
followers, to an outsider it seems monstrous. In the first place, it
includes no sense of proportion, and amounts to a colossal untruth. We
must surely take into account the amount of evil inflicted and the
amount of good that ensues. Take sickness, for instance. One would
imagine that, if Christians seriously believe that illness is sent by
God to achieve certain salutary modifications of character, they ought
strenuously to oppose the modern determination to reduce disease to a
minimum. They do not, and would, on the contrary, soon reduce to silence
any religious crank who proposed it. They know perfectly well that the
cases of "spiritual advantage" from illness bear no proportion whatever
to the amount of suffering in the world. Slight but painful illnesses
rarely have any beneficent effect on character; very frequently the
reverse. Any large city, at any given moment, is racked with pains which
do but give rise to curses, or a polite equivalent. Most of the
irritation and perversion of character is due to morbid influences. And
for every case in which a long illness issues in some signal advance of
character, a hundred others could be quoted in which the illness was an
unmitigated calamity. So it is with bereavement and with adversity of
fortune. Look honestly into the experience of any class of the
community, and ask in what _proportion_ of cases narrowness of means,
especially after comfort, brings a "spiritual advantage."

So it is above all with this war. Any man who thinks that the awful
perversion of the character of a great European people, the death of
such vast numbers in such painful circumstances, the ruin of further
millions, and all the innumerable ugly results of a great war, were
worth bringing about in order to secure a few spiritual advantages has
neither sense of proportion nor sense of decency nor sense of humour.
The theory would be too repulsive if it were put in this plain form, and
it is more usual merely to point out these good results and hint that
war is not absolutely and in every respect an ev