h, then, not to substitute any creed or organisation for
Christianity, but to sweep away these primitive or medieval speculations
about life, and let the human mind and human heart increasingly devote
themselves, directly, to human interests. In discussing the question of
peace and war, the application is obvious. We enclose or dispatch the
murderer, lest some fresh grave act of violence be perpetrated. We agree
that the violent and premature termination of a life is the most serious
transgression of social law that a man can perpetrate. Next to it we put
rape, mutilation, the destruction of a man's home or fortune; all acts,
in a word, that come nearest to it in threatening or causing the
greatest desolation. Yet we have suffered, age after age, that every few
years all these acts should be gathered into one mighty outrage and
showered upon whole populations. The time will come when men will read
with bewilderment the things that have been written about warfare in the
nineteenth, and even the twentieth, century. The men of clear judgment
and sound emotion of some coming age will see anguish rising, as vapour
does from some tropical sea, from our vast battle-fields. They will read
of Cats' Homes, and Anti-Vivisection Societies, and Homes of Rest for
Horses, and a hundred such institutions, and they will find contributors
to these institutions stirring not one finger when hundreds of thousands
of men writhe under hails of shrapnel, and crowds of homeless women and
children fly in terror before the unavoidable calamities or the
superfluous brutalities of war. They will see a generation shaken and
shuddering as the ghastly picture is daily unfolded before it, and they
will see that same generation in a few months grow dully indifferent to,
if not actively supporting, the military system which invariably brings
these horrors every few years upon the world. They will read of social
aspiration spreading through our civilisation, and statesmen regretting
that want of funds alone prevents them from remedying our social ills;
and they will read how Europe in one year wasted in butchery the
resources that might have renovated its disfigured civilisation, and the
next year complacently shouldered its military burden, its annual waste
of a thousand millions sterling, with the prospect of a costlier war
than ever.

In face of this situation the question, What would you put in place of
Christianity? is a mere mockery. One can see some