orality. We submit that it is not the institution of the
founder of Christianity, but of his later followers. The Church of
Christ meant the assemblage of men _as men, as citizens_. The entry
thereto was not by the magical washing away of an imaginary birth-sin,
but through the natural and beautiful sacrament of human birth. The
world is the Church, and the Church is the world, and the "living
stones" out of which "the kingdom of heaven" is built here on earth are
precisely the stones out of which the civil commonwealth arises. There
is nothing secular, nothing profane, but from first to last the life of
every man, from the miraculous moment of his conception to the closing
of his eyes in bodily death, and beyond death, through the perfecting
of him by an ever-increasing approximation to the standard of all moral
perfection, everything is religious, sacred, divine. The Church is
nothing but an ethical society, co-extensive with the race, and it is
for the realisation of this ideal that the ethical movement is working,
to show men that religion is morality, is life.

This preamble, then, may serve as a justification for introducing here
such a subject as war. The Christian Churches, with one single
exception, that of the Quakers, vouchsafe no guidance whatsoever on the
moral aspects of this question. On the contrary, they rather suggest
that it is a highly moral proceeding, for their ministers pray to their
Deity for the success of their country's arms, and sing their _Te
Deums_ over the mangled corpses of the vanquished. An archbishop in
Spain offered to guarantee the harmlessness of every American bullet,
and unctuous prayers were reported in the newspapers of last spring as
emanating from Transatlantic pulpits. Indeed, it would be difficult,
if not impossible, to imagine what the supreme court of their heaven
must be, the perplexities of patron saints and angels, and ultimately
of their Deity himself, in face of the immoral mingling of bloodshed
and religion which went on during the recent Spanish-American war. But
the Churches, Catholic and Protestant alike, see none of the impiety
which is so revolting to moral men and women, who to their lasting
advantage have emancipated themselves from ecclesiastical guidance. On
the contrary, the public in America which looks for moral inspiration
to clergymen, is fed upon this sort of doggerel:--

Strike for the Anglo-Saxon!
Strike for the newer day!
O str