esent attitude of the Pope to the war shows) but as
mischievous to it."

It is strange that whilst the war has caused a number of ordained
representatives of the Christian Church to declare that practical
Christianity is an impossibility and the Sermon on the Mount a beautiful
but ineffective ideal, it has brought agnostics and heathen to a
conviction that socialized Christianity is the sovereign remedy for the
national and international disease. They have reached the conclusion
that the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount is the revolutionary leaven
for which the world is waiting. In his preface on _The Prospects of
Christianity_, Mr. Bernard Shaw tells us that he is "as sceptical and
scientific and modern a thinker as you will find anywhere." This
assurance is intended to help us to regain breath after the preceding
pronouncement:

I am no more a Christian than Pilate was, or you, gentle reader;
and yet, like Pilate, I greatly prefer Jesus to Annas and
Caiaphas; and I am ready to admit that after contemplating the
world and human nature for nearly sixty years, I see no way out
of the world's misery but the way which would have been found by
Christ's will if He had undertaken the work of a modern practical
statesman.

This is one of the outstanding mental phenomena of the war: sceptics and
thinkers have begun to examine Christianity as a practical way of
social salvation. There is a tendency to re-examine the gospel, not with
intent to lay stress on historical weakness or points of similarity with
other religions, but with the poignant interest which men lost in the
desert display towards possible sources of water. It may appear as a
coldly intellectual interest in some who are wont to deal with the
tragedies of life as mildly amusing scenes in a drama of endless
fatuity. But the coldness is a little assumed. There are others who do
not attempt to disguise that their whole emotional life is stirred to
passionate protest and inquiry, who, though Christians by profession and
duly appointed ministers of God, call for a recommendation of
Christianity and the establishment of a social order based on the
principles of life laid down by Jesus Christ. In _The Outlook for
Religion_, Dr. W. E. Orchard condemns the way of war as the complete
antithesis of the way of the Cross. "How can people be so blind?" he
cries. "Has all the ethical awakening of the past century been of so
little depth that this b