feeble discharge of a small part of their duty. Had Leo XIII or
Pius X issued a plain and explicit Encyclical on the subject, and
directed his vast international organisation of clergy to labour
wholeheartedly for its realisation, who can estimate what the result
would have been? Had the clergy of Germany issued a stern and collective
denunciation of the Pan-German and Imperialist literature which was
instilling poison into every village of the country, can we suppose that
it would have been without avail? Had the Archbishops and Bishops of
England, and the leaders of the Free Churches, definitely instructed
their people that the pacifist ideal was not merely in accord with
Christian principles, but was one of the most urgent and beneficent
reforms of our time, would the English people have passed as
inobservantly as it did through the five years of preparation for a
great war?

It is no part of my plan to analyse this deplorable failure of the
Churches as moral agencies. The explanation would be complex, and is now
superfluous. The clergy were, like the majority of their fellows,
obsessed by the military system and unable to realise the possibility of
a change. In part they were deluded by the catch-words of superficial
literature. They had an idea that we were asking England to lower its
armament while the rest of the world increased its armament. They
muttered that "the time was not ripe," not realising that it was their
business to make it ripe. They had been accustomed for ages to preaching
a purely individualist morality, and they felt ill at ease in the larger
social applications of moral principle which our age regards as more
important. They feared to offend military supporters, and did not
realise that one may entirely honour the soldier as long as the military
system lasts, yet resent the system. They felt that this new movement
was suspiciously hailed by Socialists, and that to denounce armies had
an air of politics about it. They were peculiarly wedded to tradition,
on account of the very nature they claimed for their traditions, and
they instinctively felt that to denounce war would be to attempt to
improve, not merely on their predecessors, but on the Old and the New
Testaments. They solaced themselves with the thought that unnecessary
violence was condemned in their general teaching, and that, if it
eventually transpired that war was unnecessary, they could point out
once more the all-embracing character