hat gallery. If all
the Churches of Europe closed their doors until the drums ceased rolling
they would act as a most powerful reminder that though the glory of war
is a famous and ancient glory, it is not the final glory of God.

But as I know quite well that the Churches are not going to do anything
of the kind, I must not close on a note which might to some readers
imply that I hope, as some highly respected friends of mine do, to build
a pacific civilization on the ruins of the vast ecclesiastical
organizations which have never yet been able to utter the truth, because
they have had to speak to the poor according to their ignorance and
credulity, and to the rich according to their power. When I read that
the icon of the Russian peasant is a religious force that will prevail
over the materialism of Helmholtz and Haeckel, I have to contain myself
as best I can in the face of an assumption by a modern educated European
which implies that the Irish peasants who tied scraps of rag to the
trees over their holy wells and paid for masses to shorten the stay of
their dead relatives in purgatory, were more enlightened than their
countryman Tyndall, the Lucretian materialist, and to ask whether the
Russian peasant may not find his religious opinions somewhat neutralized
by his alliance with the countries of Paul Bert and Combes, of Darwin
and Almroth Wright. If we are to keep up any decent show of talking
sense on this point we must begin by recognizing that the lines of
battle in this war cut right across all the political and sectarian
lines in Europe, except the line between our Socialist future and our
Commercialist past. Materialist France, metaphysical Germany,
muddle-headed English, Byzantine Russia may form what military
combinations they please: the one thing they cannot form is a Crusade;
and all attempts to represent this war as anything higher or more
significant philosophically or politically or religiously for our
Junkers and our Tommies than a quite simple primitive contest of the
pugnacity that bullies and the pugnacity that will not be bullied are
foredoomed to the derision of history. However far-reaching the
consequences of the war may be, we in England are fighting to shew the
Prussians that they shall not trample on us nor on our neighbors if we
can help it, and that if they are fools enough to make their fighting
efficiency the test of civilization, we can play that game as
destructively as they. That is