ds of
fate, and in the immortality of the country which he serves, war could
not exist.

The mood of war always contains a religious sanction, and every
important religion sanctions war. This explicit relation between
religion and war is seen very early. Wherever there is ghost worship,
and the warriors justify war and fortify themselves for it by
believing that their ancestors still participate in the combats of
their children, and that in waging war they are doing a duty in
keeping up the traditional feuds of their race there is found the root
of the relation between war and religion. Every war is a holy war; it
is but a change in degree from these primitive wars in which the ideas
of ghosts must have had almost the clearness of reality to our modern
wars with their deeper but more indefinite religious sanctions. Since
war always creates the need of moral justification, the war mood at
all times tends to seek religious sanctions. Christianity, the
doctrine of peace and good will, very readily lends its support to
war, since wars are almost invariably regarded as defensive by all who
participate in them. War in the service of the weak and endangered
can always invoke the spirit of Christianity. The logical ground for
this has been laid for us by many writers; Drawbridge (19), one of the
most recent, finds no support in Christianity for the doctrines of
pacifism. All nations, when they fight, fight for God, for liberty and
the right, with the implied belief that their own country has a
mission in the world, supported by divine authority.

All governments have in them a strain of theocracy. We see this in
many degrees and forms, from the original totemistic belief in descent
from animals that are also gods to the vaguest remnants of the habit
of interpreting national interests as guarded by divine powers that we
often see in the language of practical statesmen. The doctrine of the
divine rights of kings of course had its origin in that of divine
descent. The most striking revelation of the place such theories may
have, even in modern times and in enlightened nations, is to be seen
in the revival and deliberate use of the doctrine of divine descent as
a fundamental principle of the government and theory of State in the
New Japan. All nations hold something of this philosophy; God and
State are always related and all wars, whatever else they may be, are
waged in the service of religion and with the sanction of it. This