Peace promptly into temples of war,
and exhibit our parsons as the most pugnacious characters in the
community. I venture to affirm that the sense of scandal given by this
is far deeper and more general than the Church thinks, especially among
the working classes, who are apt either to take religion seriously or
else to repudiate it and criticize it closely. When a bishop at the
first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his flock around
the altar of Mars, he may be acting patriotically, necessarily,
manfully, rightly; but that does not justify him in pretending that
there has been no change, and that Christ is, in effect, Mars. The
straightforward course, and the one that would serve the Church best in
the long run, would be to close our professedly Christian Churches the
moment war is declared by us, and reopen them only on the signing of the
treaty of peace. No doubt to many of us the privation thus imposed would
be far worse than the privation of small change, of horses and motor
cars, of express trains, and all the other prosaic inconveniences of
war. But would it be worse than the privation of faith, and the horror
of the soul, wrought by the spectacle of nations praying to their common
Father to assist them in sabring and bayonetting and blowing one another
to pieces with explosives that are also corrosives, and of the Church
organizing this monstrous paradox instead of protesting against it?
Would it make less atheists or more? Atheism is not a simple homogeneous
phenomenon. There is the youthful atheism with which every able modern
mind begins: an atheism that clears the soul of superstitions and
terrors and servilities and base compliances and hypocrisies, and lets
in the light of heaven. And there is the atheism of despair and
pessimism: the sullen cry with which so many of us at this moment,
looking on blinded deafened maimed wrecks that were once able-bodied
admirable lovable men, and on priests blessing war, and newspapers and
statesmen and exempt old men hounding young men on to it, are saying "I
know now there is no God." What has the Church in its present attitude
to set against this crushed acceptance of darkness except the quaint but
awful fact that there are cruder people on whom horrifying calamities
have just the opposite effect, because they seem the work of some power
so overwhelming in its malignity that it must be worshipped because it
is mighty? Let the Church beware how it plays to t