dies, they are again hampering the work of reform. A
great national agitation, linked with similar agitations in other lands,
avoiding Christian formulae as well as anti-Christian reproaches, will
alone secure the object.

I confess--with ardent hope that I may be wrong--that I expect no
immediate realisation of the reform. It may take years, even after the
grim lesson that militarism has given us, to inspire the majority of our
people with an unsleeping and irresistible demand, and the work will
grow more arduous as the memory of the hardships of the war fades. On
the day on which I write this I have listened to the conversation, in a
train, of a wealthy, refined, and cultivated Churchwoman. "I said to my
son when he set out," she observed, with a laugh, to her neighbour,
"that it was far better for him to get shot than to die of diphtheria or
something at home." If that sentiment, that obtuseness to the massive
horrors of war even when a son was involved, is widespread, the outlook
is dark. One fears that it is not very promising.

The lady I quote would read these pages, if she could constrain herself
to do so, with a genuine shudder. Abandon Christianity! She would
volubly reel off the eloquent forecasts of the doom of society which she
has heard from a hundred pulpits. Meantime she is one of the gravest
obstacles (as a type of her class) to the removal from society of one of
its most crushing burdens and most criminal usages. To me her class
illustrates the limitations of Christianity, and it confirms me in the
belief that we shall make more rapid progress without it. She was a lady
of keen sympathies and of great activity for others: the kind of woman
who, as she would put it, practised her Christianity. Yet in face of
this mighty disorder she showed at once the failure of Christianity and
the reason of it. Her genuine human sympathy was directed by an ancient
and outworn code of duties. Where Christianity had delivered no clear
message, the expanding of her sympathy was barred. War was part of the
established order of things. She could even cheat her maternal sentiment
with thin fallacies, because they reconciled her to what the Church had
not condemned. She had never seen the vision of peace, never grasped the
comparatively easy alternative to war.

This, in general terms, is what one means by the expectation that a
surrender of Christian doctrines will certainly not check the growth of
sympathy, and is more l