CHRISTIANITY AND WAR
The day will come when the student of human development will find war
one of the most remarkable institutions that ever entered and quitted
history. Civilisation took it over from barbarism; barbarism from the
savage; the savage from the beast. So we are accustomed to argue, but we
must make a singular reservation. The lowest peoples of the human
family, which seem to represent primitive man, do not wage war, and are
little addicted to violence. They seem by some process of natural
selection to have obtained the social quality of peacefulness and mutual
aid. There was, in a sense, a stage of primitive innocence. As, however,
these primitive peoples grew in numbers and were organised in tribes, as
they obtained collective possessions--flocks and pastures and hunting
grounds--they came into collision with each other, and all the old
pugnacity of the beast awoke. Skill, and even ferocity, in war became a
valuable social quality, and we get the stage of the savage. The
barbarian, or the man between savagery and civilisation, was still
compelled to fight for his possessions. He was usually surrounded by
fierce savage tribes. The civilised man in turn was surrounded by
savages and barbarians, and needed to fight. So through thousands of
years of development of moral sentiment and legal procedure the
primitive method of the beast has been preserved.
But I am not writing a history of warfare, and need not describe these
stages more closely, or examine the new sentiment of imperialist
expansion which gave civilisations a fresh incentive to develop methods
of warfare. The point of interest is to determine at what stage it might
have been possible for the moral element to intervene and bid the
warriors, in the name of humanity, lay down their arms; at what stage
the tribunal which men had set up to adjudicate between the quarrels of
individuals might have been enlarged so as to be capable of arbitrating
on the quarrels of nations.
Now this was plainly impossible in the early centuries of the present
era, and it is therefore foolish to ask why Pagan moralists did not do
what we expect Christian moralists to have done. I have already
mentioned, and have fully described elsewhere, how humanitarian
sentiments were generally diffused throughout the old Græco-Roman world.
There is not a phrase of the New Testament which has not a parallel
among the Jews, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. The great
fusion of peoples in the Roman Empire begot a feeling of brotherhood,
and, by a natural reaction on years of vice and violence, there was a
considerable growth of lofty and tender, and often impracticable,
sentiments. Moralists urged men to avoid anger, to bear blows with
dignity, to greet all men as brothers, even to love their enemies. Plato
and Epictetus and Plutarch and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius urged these
maxims as forcibly as Christ did. The Stoic religion or philosophy,
which guided Emperors and lawyers, and had a very wide influence in the
Roman world, was intensely and quite modernly humanitarian. Its
principal exponents condemned slavery and promoted a remarkable spread
of philanthropy.
It was, however, not possible for the Stoics to condemn war. Some of the
more ardent and less practical humanitarians of the time did this, but
no alert Roman citizen could advocate the abolition of the legions. The
Empire was completely surrounded by barbarians who would rush in and
trample on its civilisation the moment the fence of spears was removed.
From the turreted walls in the north of England, where men watched the
Picts and Scots, to the deserts of Mesopotamia--from the banks of the
Danube and Rhine to the spurs of the Atlas--it was essential to maintain
those bronzed legions who guarded the civilised provinces from
marauders. With those outlying barbarians no treaty was possible or
sacred; no legal tribunal would have protected those frontiers from the
men who looked covetously on the fertile fields and comfortable cities
of the Roman provinces. From the first to the fourth century Rome
fought, not for its expansion, but for its preservation against these
increasing enemies; and it was the final intensification of the pressure
in the Danube region by the arrival of enormous hordes of barbarians
from Asia which precipitated the final catastrophe. Paganism had never
the slightest opportunity to abandon the military system, and only those
who are totally unacquainted with Roman history can wonder why it did
not make the attempt. It would have been a crime to abandon the
civilised provinces to barbarism.
This was the essential position of the Roman Empire: the civil wars of
the fourth century, by which its military system was abused, need not
be considered here. And the student of history must recognise with
equal candour that the new Christianity, which succeeded Paganism in the
fourth and fifth centuries, was equally powerless to abolish warfare.
What we may justly blame is that the triumphant Christianity of the
fourth century did not merely sanction the use of arms in defence of
civilisation; it employed them in its own interest. The earlier
Christians had exasperated the Romans by refusing to bear arms in the
service of the Empire, plain as the need was. To a slight extent this
was due to an aversion from the shedding of blood; for the most part
military service was refused because it was saturated with Pagan rites.
When the Empire became Christian, this objection was removed, and the
Christians freely entered the army. Unhappily, the Christian body
deteriorated with the new prosperity and base instincts were indulged.
It is an undoubted historical fact, recorded by St. Jerome himself, that
the election of Pope Damasus, his friend and benefactor, was accompanied
by bloody and fatal riots. From undoubted historical sources we know
that the Christian mob compelled the Prefect of Rome to fly from the
city, and there is very serious evidence (in a document written by two
Roman priests) that Damasus employed the swords and staves of his
supporters to secure his position. Damasus and subsequent Popes then
obtained or sanctioned the use of the Roman soldiers for the suppression
of heresy and schism and Paganism, and Christianity was installed by
violence throughout the Empire. In the Eastern Roman Empire things were
even worse. Violence became the customary device in the seething
religious quarrels of the time, and, literally, tens of thousands lost
their lives. The Byzantine or Greek Christianity entered upon a record
of crime and violence which disgraced it for many centuries.
This development did not augur well for the application of Christian
principles to warfare. We may, however, observe at once that for many
centuries the Roman Church had not the slightest chance of establishing
peace in Europe. The destruction of the Roman Empire and disbanding of
its armies made an entirely new situation in Italy. The Popes were, for
the most part, good men, but they did not dream at that time of
controlling the counsels of kings and dictating affairs of State. Even
the story of Pope Leo the Great overawing the King of the Huns, Attila,
and turning his army away from Italy, is a mere legend of medieval
writers, and is at variance with the nearer authorities. The northern
tribes themselves were to a great extent, and for some centuries, of the
Arian faith, and took no advice from Rome. In a word, it would be stupid
to expect Christian leaders of the early Middle Ages to press the cause
of peace. The northern peoples, who would in time form the nations of
Europe, were essentially violent and warlike, and would have recognised
no pacific counsels in that imperfect stage of their religious
development.
Where the historian may and must censure the Church is in its adoption
of militarism for its own purposes. Pope Gregory the Great found Italy
in a chaotic and pitiful condition, and no doubt he acted, on the whole,
rightly in organising its military defence. The more serious
circumstance was that he began to receive immense estates, as gifts or
legacies, in all parts of Italy as the property of the Roman Church, and
from that time either a Papal army or the employment of the army of
some friendly monarch was necessary in order to protect these estates.
With the confirmation and consolidation of these estates into a kingdom
under Charlemagne in the ninth century the Papacy completed its moral
aberration. Most of the Popes were still men of good character, and they
no doubt persuaded themselves that, since the income of these estates
was needed for the fulfilment of their spiritual task, it was proper to
defend them by the sword. But casuistry of this kind has never prospered
indefinitely, and few historians will doubt that this temporal
development led directly to that degradation of the Papacy which
rendered it unfit to exercise moral influence on Europe. The Papacy
became a princedom to attract the covetous and the ambitious, and the
line of Popes sank so low by the tenth century that the grossest
characters were able to occupy the chair of Peter at a time when the
nations of Europe were sufficiently advanced to be susceptible of a
sincere moral influence. The record of the Papacy, from the ninth
century to the nineteenth, contains on almost every page a bloody
struggle for the temporal power. The most religious and most eminent of
the Popes, such as Gregory VII and Innocent III, were the most prompt to
set in motion the machinery of war in defence of their territories or in
punishment of rebels against their authority. Not one of them was in a
position to bid kings disband their armies, or ever dreamed of enjoining
them to do more than observe a few days' truce or keep their swords from
each other in order to save them for the common enemy of Christendom.
It would be useless to speculate about the date when the new nations of
Europe had become sufficiently civilised to hear a gospel of peace. The
idea of superseding the military system of Europe by a juridical system
occurred to no Christian leader, and therefore we need not consider what
prospect it might have had of realisation. The Christian gospel of
meekness had become a mockery: even the great abbeys, in which the
gentler and more religious were supposed to be immured, had their
troops, and abbots and bishops, and very often Papal Legates, appeared
at the head of armies. Two Popes, John X and Julius II, marched
themselves at the head of their troops. Cardinals had their suites of
swordsmen, and the castles of the Roman aristocracy were at times strong
fortifications from which war of the most ferocious and unscrupulous
character was waged. Christendom was steeped in violence; only a gentle
saint or bishop here and there caught a futile vision of a world of
peace. Every man was armed against possible trouble with his neighbour;
every noble had his retainers and kept them well exercised; every prince
was free, as far as the spiritual authorities were concerned, to covet
and bloodily exact the lands of his neighbour. The noble, of either sex,
found supreme delight in jousts which the modern sentiment finds as
inhuman as a sordid quarrel of _Apaches_ over a mistress; the peasants
found a corresponding pleasure in the play of quarter-staves or the
combats of dogs and cocks.
It is, as I said, little use to speculate about the chances of a gospel
of humanity in such a world. The overwhelming majority of priests and
prelates made no effort whatever to restrain the prevailing violence.
The elementary duty of any profound moral agency was to protest without
ceasing, even if the protest was unavailing. It is not at all clear that
it would have been unavailing. The power of the Popes was beyond that
of any other hierarchy known to history, and at least the moral
education of Europe would have proceeded less slowly, and war would have
been abolished centuries ago, if there had been any serious, collective,
and authoritative enforcement of Christian principles. There was not,
and to this silence of the clergy during those long ages of their power
we owe the maintenance in Europe to-day of the regime of violence. They
were so far from enjoying moral inspiration in this respect that they
were amongst the first to bless the banners and swell the coffers of an
aggressive monarch, and they gave the military system a final
consecration by employing it repeatedly in the interests of the Church.
All that one can plead in mitigation of this deep historical censure of
the medieval Church is that the frontiers of Christendom were for
centuries threatened by the Turk and the Saracen. The old need of
protecting civilisation by arms had almost disappeared. Few and feeble
peoples remained outside the range of Christian civilisation after the
tenth century. Armies were maintained only in the interest of criminal
ambition or for the settlement of disputes which ought to have been
submitted to judges. The menace of the Turk, with his hostile religion,
was, of course, a just ground for armaments, but a few nations generally
bore the whole brunt of his onset. Whatever religious feeling may make
of the great Crusades, which drew to the east armies from all parts of
Europe, secular history must dismiss them as appalling blunders. The few
advantages they brought to European culture cannot seriously be weighed
against the terrible sacrifice of lives and the even more terrible
consecration of militarism. In a word, the menace of the Turk could
have been met admirably by such an arrangement as we are advocating in
Europe to-day: the maintenance of a small force by each nation for
common action, under the direction of a supreme legal tribunal, against
nations which would not obey the common law of peace. But we need not
seriously discuss the influence of the Turk on the system. The last
phases of the struggle, when the selfish nations and the ambitious
Papacy spent their time in idle mutual recrimination and left the
Hungarians and Poles to do all the work, justify us in dismissing that
element. Kings and republics maintained armies for purely selfish
purposes, for brutal aggression and defence against aggressors; and not
a prelate in Europe had any moral repugnance to the system, or ventured
to condemn it, especially as the Church used the same agency in defence
of its own temporal interests.
With the development of the Papal power and the advance of the peoples
of Europe the opportunity of peace became greater, but the spiritual
authority pledged itself more and more deeply to the military system.
The Popes aspired--as Gregory VII and Innocent III repeatedly state--to
control the temporal as well as the spiritual affairs of Europe, to
transfer crowns when they thought fit, to direct invasions and military
expeditions against any who questioned their authority. Hildebrand
boasts (_Ep._ vii, 23) that, when William of Normandy sent envoys to ask
Pope Alexander to sanction his unscrupulous invasion of England, and the
Papal Court was itself too sensible of the enormity to give its
sanction, he (Hildebrand) overbore the wavering Pope and forced him to
bless the enterprise; and, when he had in his turn mounted the Papal
throne, he vehemently claimed that his action had made England a fief
for ever of the Holy See! Gregory VII and Innocent III are the two
greatest and most sincerely religions of the medieval Popes, and they
carried the power of the Papacy to a height which excites the amazement
of the modern historian. But they were at the same time the most
militant of the Popes, and on the least provocation they set
armies--even the most barbaric and ferocious troops in Europe--in motion
to carry out their imperial commands. They arrogated the power of
deposing monarchs, and thus encouraged civil war and the ambitions of
neighbouring kings.
The rise of heresy and of protests against the corruption of the Papacy
was another very grave pretext of the Church to support the military
system. In the days of Gregory VII a body of Puritans known as the
Patareni spread over the north of Italy, and Rome encouraged a few
soldiers to lead armed mobs against them and drown their idealism in
blood. Innocent III has a more terrible stigma on his record. The
Albigensians, an early type of Protestants, were spreading in the south
of France, and the Pope sanctioned a "crusade"--an expedition, largely,
of looters and cut-throats--against them from all parts of France. The
appalling deceit practised by the Papal Legate and sanctioned by the
Pope, the ferocity of the campaign, and the desolation brought on one of
the happiest and most prosperous provinces of France, may be read in any
history of the thirteenth century. Tens of thousands of men, women, and
children were savagely put to death. And this was only the beginning of
the Papal war on heresy, which from the thirteenth century never ceased
to spring up in Europe until it won its right of citizenship in the
Reformation. Even more vehemently was war urged against the Moors, then
the most civilised people in Europe.
In face of this notorious history of Europe during the long course of
the Middle Ages it is now usual for Catholic apologists to plead that
the blood of the barbarian still flowed in the veins of the Christian
nations and men were not yet prepared to listen to the message of peace.
This plea cannot for a moment be admitted in extenuation of the Church's
guilt. The clergy had themselves no conception of the criminality of
war, and did not rise above the moral level of their age. Here and there
a saint or a prelate raised a feeble voice against the violence of men,
but we do not estimate an institution by the words of an occasional
member, especially if they are at variance with the official conduct and
the general sentiment. On the other hand, to boast that the clergy at
times enforced a temporary cessation of fighting (the "Truce of God")
only increases our appreciation of their guilt. The men who enforced
that Truce gave proof at once of their power and of their perception of
the un-Christian nature of warfare. But they were unwilling to condemn
outright a machinery which they might employ at any moment in defence or
advancement of their own interests. Had the Church been a serious moral
influence in Europe, had it been true to the message in virtue of which
it had grown rich and powerful, it would have protested unceasingly
against this reign of violence. It was not a great moral influence. The
grossness and illiteracy of the people, the appalling immorality of the
clergy and monks and nuns, and this almost entire failure to apply
Christian or ordinary human principles to the worst feature of the life
of Europe, are terrible offsets to the little good it achieved. Europe
was steadily educated and encouraged, century after century, in the
shedding of blood.
The Protestant is at times disposed to dismiss the whole sordid story
with the remark that this Roman Church was not Christianity at all. He
contrives to overlook the serious difficulty that, if the Roman Church
did not represent Christianity from the sixth century to the sixteenth,
there was, contrary to the promise of Christ, no Christianity in Europe
for a thousand years; and he surrenders all the wonderful art of the
Middle Ages (as he ought) to entirely non-Christian forces. That,
however, does not concern me here. The slightest recollection of history
would warn the Protestant that the Reformation brought no improvement
whatever, as far as this reign of violence is concerned. The forces set
up by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation fought each other for
some decades with the comparatively peaceful weapons of mutual abuse and
heated argument. When it was perceived that these weapons were of no
avail, there was the customary appeal to the sword. In the historical
documents which tell the life of Pope Paul IV we see the Papacy and the
Jesuits urging the Catholic princes to lead out their armies. Heresy was
to be extinguished in blood; and, seeing how many millions in the north
had by that time embraced the heresy, there can have been no illusion as
to the magnitude of the oceans of blood that would be required to drown
it. So Europe entered upon the horrors of the Thirty Years' War
(1618-1648), which put back the civilisation of Germany for more than a
hundred years and utterly ruined some of the small principalities. The
population of Bohemia alone fell from three millions to less than a
million. Nearly every nation in Europe was involved, and the war was
conducted with all the brutality of the older medieval warfare.
The fact that political as well as religious ambitions were engaged in
the Thirty Years' War does not affect my argument. In so far as
religious sentiment was responsible--and it will hardly be questioned
that it had a large share in the Thirty Years' War--we find a fresh
consecration by Christianity itself of the use of the sword. But the
main point we have to consider is that the new spiritual authorities
were no more inclined than the old to declare that warfare was opposed
to Christian principles. The last three centuries have been as full of
aggressive war as the three centuries which preceded, but there was no
protest by Christian ministers either in Protestant England and
Scandinavia or in Catholic France and Austria. It was the period when
the modern Powers of Europe were building up their vast dominions, and
no one who is acquainted with the story can have any illusion as to the
application to that process of what are now described as clear Christian
principles.
This is precisely the plaint of modern Germany. We seek, they say, to do
merely what England and France--it were indiscreet to mention
Austria--did in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were
vigorous peoples with an impulse to expand and to extend their
civilisation over backward lands. They appealed solely to the right of
the sword, and all the Christian authorities in Europe--the bishops of
William and of Anne, the bishops of Louis XIV, the bishops of Peter the
Great--had not a single syllable to say against the right of the sword.
The various branches of the Christian Church were at that time
singularly unanimous in accommodating their principles to imperialist
and aggressive warfare. Now that you have obtained all that you
need--the aggrieved Teuton says--now that I in turn would expand and
colonise, you discover that this imperialist aggression is supremely
opposed to Christian principles.
On some such meditations, in part, the German bases his conviction of
the hypocrisy and perfidy of the English character. He is, of course,
entirely wrong. A real change has taken place in the moral sentiment of
this country; a change so real that when, in South Africa, the nation
entered upon a war which many regarded as aggressive and merely
acquisitive, there was a very widespread revolt. The cynic might
genially observe that it is not difficult to retire from evil-doing and
cultivate lofty principles when your fortune has been made, but it is
important to realise this change and understand its significance. There
is, no doubt, a sound human element in the cynic's observation. It _is_
easier to recognise moral principle when the period of temptation is
over. Every thoughtful and humane Englishman will make allowance for the
less fortunate position of Germany, and not foolishly pride himself on
his own superiority of character. The fact remains, however, that there
has been a real moral improvement in England and France, and it would
now be impossible for those nations to enter upon the aggressive and
nakedly ambitious wars which they were accustomed to undertake before
the nineteenth century. We have a genuine abhorrence of the "lust for
land" which has impelled Germany to plunge Europe into war. But until a
century or two ago that lust for land was considered a legitimate
appetite in Europe, and the clergy crowded with the people to greet the
warriors who came home with the news that they had added, by the sword,
one more province to our spreading Empire.
That this change of heart is not merely a feeling that we have no
further need of aggression, and would ourselves suffer by the aggression
of others, could easily be proved, if it were necessary. In the same
period of change we abolished the duel, and there was no material
advantage in discovering the immorality of the duel. We abolished
dog-fighting, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, and other brutalising
spectacles. We undertook a reform of our industrial and penal systems
which, however imperfect it be, was very considerable in itself, and was
inspired solely by motives of humanity. There was a general and marked
improvement of public sentiment, and it is as part of this improvement
that we now find a universal condemnation of aggressive war and a
widespread demand for the entire abolition of war. The construction of
English history and English character on the lines of Mr. G. B. Shaw may
be entertaining, and may save considerable trouble of research, but it
does not conduce to sound judgment. The laments of social pessimists and
of certain religious controversialists are never supported by accurate
knowledge. Every social historian who gives evidence of knowing the
evils of the England of a century ago as well as the England of to-day
admits that there has been a great moral advance.
I will examine in the next chapter certain comments of religious writers
and speakers on this advance. Here I wish to determine the facts with
some clearness. It has not been necessary for me to discuss the medieval
and the early modern period with any fullness. There is no dispute about
the features of those periods. They were ages of violence, of incessant
and frankly aggressive war, of unrestrained ambition. The smallest
pretext sufficed for a monarch, if his forces and finances were in
order, to invade his neighbour's territory and annex as much of it as
he could hold by the sword. Frederic the Great and Napoleon did not
introduce new ideas into Europe; they attempted to revive medieval ideas
in a changing world. Austria in its annexation of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Germany in its ambition to annex Belgium and the colonies
which other Powers have laboriously cultivated, are following their
example. They are not inventing new forms of criminality; they are not
returning to Pagan ideals: they are reverting merely to ideals which
were accepted throughout Europe for more than a thousand years. In the
more brutal features of war to which they have descended they are even
more emphatically reverting to the Middle Ages. The Romans did not
commit such outrages at the command of educated officers. Medieval
Christians did: the record of Papal warfare, down to the "Massacre of
Perugia" in 1859, is as deeply stained as any by these abominable
methods.
My further point, that the Christian Church or Churches made no serious
resistance to the prevailing brutality, is just as easy to establish. It
is a sheer travesty of argument to put forward the gentle exhortations
of a Francis of Assisi as characteristic of the Christian Church when
the Pope of the time, one of the most powerful and conscientious Popes
of all time, Innocent III, was threatening or directing the movements of
ferocious armies all over Europe. Most assuredly there were among the
numbers of fine characters who appeared in Christendom in the course of
a thousand years many who deeply resented the prevailing violence. But
when we speak of the Church, we speak of its official action and its
predominant sentiment. The official action of the Popes was, during all
that period, to make the same use as any terrestrial monarch of the
service of soldiers; they failed, from Gregory the Great to Pius X, to
recognise one of the supreme moral needs of Europe. The bishops of the
Church of England and the heads of the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches
did not prove to have any sounder moral inspiration in this respect. It
was left to despised bodies like the Friends, who were hardly recognised
as Christians, and to rare individuals to protest against the system
which has brought such appalling evil on Europe.
In the nineteenth century the moral sentiment of Europe began to advance
more rapidly than it had previously done, and the idea of substituting
arbitration for war began to spread. The history of this reform has not
yet been written, as far as I can discover, but it is hardly likely that
any will be bold enough to suggest that the idea was due to
Christianity. After the Napoleonic wars, at least, Europe was ripe for
such a reform. I do not mean that public feeling in Europe was prepared
for the idea. It would have met with a very considerable degree of
resistance, and would have generally been conceived as the dream of an
amiable fanatic. Such resistance makes the duty of the moralist or the
reformer all the more pressing, and it is merely amazing to hear the
earlier Christian clergy exonerated on the ground that the world was not
prepared to receive a message of peace from them. They did not try the
experiment because it did not occur to them, or because they were too
closely dependent on the monarchs of the earth to question the wisdom of
their arrangements. Europe was, in point of fact, quite ripe for the
change in the second decade of the nineteenth century, and there would
assuredly be no war to-day if the Churches had had the moral inspiration
and the moral courage to insist on it. The frontiers of the nations were
(except in the case of Italy and Poland) defined with a fair show of
justice, and the time had come to disband armies and submit any future
quarrel to arbitration: to retain only a small standing army in each
country for the defence of its colonial frontiers against tribes which
do not respect arbitration, or for the enforcement of the decisions of
the central tribunal. The conditions were almost as favourable for such
a change in 1816 as they are to-day, or will be in 1916, and it is
another grave point in the indictment of Christianity that it had no
inspiration to demand that change. The bishops of England no less than
the bishops of Rome were deeply concerned about the rise of democracy
and the spread of unbelief, and they joined with the monarchs in
enforcing a system of violent repression. For the larger and more real
need of Europe they had no feeling whatever, and militarism entered upon
its last and most terrible phase: the stage of national armies and of
means of destruction prepared with all the fearful skill of modern
science.
As the nineteenth century proceeded, humanitarianism attained clearer
conceptions and more articulate speech. The scheme of substituting legal
procedure for military violence was definitely put before the world. It
is not necessary, and would be difficult, to trace the earliest
developments of this idea. On the one hand, I find no claim that it was
put forward by representatives of Christianity; on the other hand,
literary research among the records of the early Rationalist movements
in this country has shown me that the idea was familiar and welcome
amongst them. No doubt the aversion of the Friends from bloodshed had
some influence, and we find representatives of that noble-minded Society
active in more than one of the early reform-movements. But, as far as I
can discover, it was Robert Owen who first definitely advanced the idea
of substituting arbitration for war, and it was repeatedly discussed
among the "Rational Religion" Societies--which were not at all
religious--that he founded or inspired in various parts of the country.
The immense influence which he obtained in the thirties and forties
enabled him to direct public attention to the reform.
This early history is, however, as yet vague and unstudied, nor do we
need to enter into any ungenerous struggle about priority. It is enough
that the idealist scheme was well known in England long before the
middle of the nineteenth century. Did the Christian Churches adopt and
enforce it? Here, at least, no minute research is needed. The Christian
bodies failed lamentably and totally (apart from the heterodox Friends)
even to recognise the moral and humane greatness of the idea when it was
definitely presented to them. It is only in the last few years that a
Peace Sunday has--at the suggestion of lay associations--been adopted in
the churches and chapels of England. It is only in quite recent times
that bishops and ministers have stood on peace-platforms and advocated
the reform. And even to-day, when peace associations founded by laymen
have been endeavouring for decades to educate the country, no branch of
the Christian Church has officially and collectively decreed that
Christian principles enjoin the reform; no Pope or Archbishop or Church
Council has supported it with a stern and official injunction that
Christian and moral principle demands that all the members of the
particular Church shall subscribe to and work for the reform. Even at
this eleventh hour, when the issue of peace or war confronts the whole
of mankind, one notices hesitation, reserve, ambiguity. During the
fateful years between 1900 and 1914, when the nations were, in the eyes
of all, preparing the most appalling armaments ever known in history,
when men were speaking freely all over Europe of "the next war" and the
terrific dimensions which modern science and modern alliances would give
to it, the various branches of the Christian Church adhered to their
ancient and futile practice of preaching general principles (as far as
national conduct is concerned), and had little practical influence on
the development.
I am not unaware of the small movements among the clergy for cultivating
international clerical friendship, or of the extent to which individual
clergymen have co-operated in the various arbitration movements. That is
only a feeble discharge of a small part of their duty. Had Leo XIII or
Pius X issued a plain and explicit Encyclical on the subject, and
directed his vast international organisation of clergy to labour
wholeheartedly for its realisation, who can estimate what the result
would have been? Had the clergy of Germany issued a stern and collective
denunciation of the Pan-German and Imperialist literature which was
instilling poison into every village of the country, can we suppose that
it would have been without avail? Had the Archbishops and Bishops of
England, and the leaders of the Free Churches, definitely instructed
their people that the pacifist ideal was not merely in accord with
Christian principles, but was one of the most urgent and beneficent
reforms of our time, would the English people have passed as
inobservantly as it did through the five years of preparation for a
great war?
It is no part of my plan to analyse this deplorable failure of the
Churches as moral agencies. The explanation would be complex, and is now
superfluous. The clergy were, like the majority of their fellows,
obsessed by the military system and unable to realise the possibility of
a change. In part they were deluded by the catch-words of superficial
literature. They had an idea that we were asking England to lower its
armament while the rest of the world increased its armament. They
muttered that "the time was not ripe," not realising that it was their
business to make it ripe. They had been accustomed for ages to preaching
a purely individualist morality, and they felt ill at ease in the larger
social applications of moral principle which our age regards as more
important. They feared to offend military supporters, and did not
realise that one may entirely honour the soldier as long as the military
system lasts, yet resent the system. They felt that this new movement
was suspiciously hailed by Socialists, and that to denounce armies had
an air of politics about it. They were peculiarly wedded to tradition,
on account of the very nature they claimed for their traditions, and
they instinctively felt that to denounce war would be to attempt to
improve, not merely on their predecessors, but on the Old and the New
Testaments. They solaced themselves with the thought that unnecessary
violence was condemned in their general teaching, and that, if it
eventually transpired that war was unnecessary, they could point out
once more the all-embracing character of the Christian ethic. In fine,
they were for the greater part, like the greater part of their fellows,
mentally indolent and indisposed to think out or fight for a new idea.
Whatever the explanation, the fact remains. By the tenth century
Christianity was fully organised, and all the peoples of Europe were
Christian; by the thirteenth century the power of the Church was
enormous and the nations of Europe were settled and civilised. But
neither then nor at any later period did Christianity perceive the crime
and stupidity of the prevailing system. The perception is even now only
faint and partial. It is this long toleration of the military system,
the thousand-year silence on what is now acclaimed as one of the
greatest applications of Christian principle, that one finds it
difficult or impossible to forgive. The zeal of some of the modern
clergy is open to a certain not unnatural suspicion: in view of their
shrinking authority and the growing indifference of the world to dogma
and ritual, they have been forced to take up these new and larger ideas
of our time.
Even if one lays aside that suspicion, and in many cases it is quite
unjust, the clergy must realise that the indictment of Christianity is
grave, and is almost unatonable. Those thousand years of conflict,
during which they sanctioned every variety of war and initiated many
wars in their own interest, have given the military system such root in
the hearts of men that it will require a supreme and prolonged effort to
destroy it. The proverbial visitor from Mars would not be so much amazed
at any feature of our life as at this retention amid a great
civilisation of the barbaric method of settling international
differences. He would ask in astonishment how an intelligent and
generally humane race, a race which raises homes for stray cats and aged
horses, could cling to a system which, on infallible experience, plunges
one or more countries in the deepest suffering every few years. He would
learn that there has not been a war in Europe for a hundred years the
initial cause of which would not have been better appreciated and
adjudicated on by a body of impartial lawyers; and that, if the quarrels
had thus been submitted to arbitration, we should have saved (including
the annual military expenditure and the cost of the present war) some
three million lives and more than £15,000,000,000--since the end of the
Napoleonic wars. In answer to the amazement of this imaginary critic, we
could reply only that Europe has grown to regard the military system as
so permanent and unquestioned an institution of our civilisation that it
simply cannot imagine the abolition of that system.
For this incapacity, this widespread inertia, this blundering idea that
there is some serious intrinsic difficulty in the matter, the Churches
are responsible. If they had directed to war the smallest particle of
the ardent rhetoric they have poured on disbelief in dogmas which they
are to-day abandoning, the public mind would have awakened long ago.
There is no intrinsic difficulty in substituting arbitration for war.
There are technical difficulties which the great lawyers and statesmen
of the peace-movement have given ample promise of surmounting, but the
overwhelming obstacle is merely this--the peoples of Europe do not
insist on the reform. Of all the large problems which confront the
modern mind this is incomparably the simplest. We are hopelessly divided
as to the nature of the remedy for most of our social ills. Here the
remedy is acknowledged: the plan has been elaborated almost in entirety:
the international tribunal already exists, and awaits only its
executive, which the nations of Europe could supply to-morrow. It is the
will, the demand, that is wanting. For that lack we charge the utter
failure of the Churches during the ages of their power to enunciate a
plain moral lesson, and their positive encouragement of an evil system.
That is the real indictment. It affects the Christian Church in every
nation.