THE HUMAN ALTERNATIVE
If the observations I have made in the preceding chapters are even
approximately just, the hope which many of the clergy express, that
there will be a religious revival at the close of the war, is very
singular. No doubt it means, on the whole, that some advantage to
religion will be sought in the flood of genial and generous emotion
which will surge through the country. In Germany and Austria, one
imagines, religion will have a rough experience. The people who wrote
and repeated constantly, "Gott strafe England"--which, by the way, is
another proof that the general German attitude is theological rather
than humanist--will have a few serious questions to put to the clergy,
as well as to their secular rulers. In France, despite the reports of
interested people, there will be little change. The nation, being
overwhelmingly Rationalistic, relied on its 75-centimetre guns rather
than on prayer, and will find its wisdom justified. But in England and
Russia, and in the backward Slav countries, there will be mighty
flag-waving in Church, and no doubt a great number of not very
thoughtful people will conclude that the clergy and the Y.M.C.A. and the
Salvation Army have behaved very nicely over the whole affair, and there
will be, for a time, an increased attendance at church.
We may suppose that this emotional storm will not last long, and the
nation will settle down to face the bill, the empty chairs at home, and
the disorganisation of its industries. Then will arise the questions I
have been endeavouring to answer in this little book. The clergy behaved
very well during the war, short of volunteering in any conspicuous
number for active service; but what is the sense of this lofty message
of "peace on earth and good-will among men" which never produces any
result? The Churches are fairly eager to join in the work of peace now
that it is being promoted by large associations of laymen; but where, in
the name of heaven, were they during these "ages of faith" which they
bemoan? God may conceivably have been at work somewhere among the
batteries or the infantry of the Allies--it is so very difficult to
analyse these things--but we should be infinitely more grateful if he
had asserted his power earlier and spared us all the bloodshed. He may
be a very stern schoolmaster, teaching us a valuable lesson by means of
this war; but we were really quite open to conviction if he had sent us
the lesson in a more humane form. A great many good people may have
derived spiritual advantages from the war, but the price was stupendous,
and we would rather they got their spiritual advantages in another way.
These questions and reflections must surely arise, and they will lead to
larger reflections. Men will perceive the antithesis I pointed out
between all that is claimed for Christianity in Europe and the actual
condition of Europe; between the supposed luminous traces of the finger
of God in the non-human world and the complete absence of them from the
human world. From the samples of clerical eloquence which we have
examined, we can hardly suppose that the clergy will have great success
in meeting the inquirers. An enormous proportion of their followers, of
course, will not ask questions, or will be satisfied with anything in
the nature of an answer. I heard a group of men discussing the subject
in a rural ale-house, and the most intelligent man in the group, to
whom, as an educated visitor, the natives looked up with respect, said:
"War is God's way of purifying and bracing nations from time to time."
This sort of stuff pacifies hundreds of thousands: like the stuff that
Archbishop Carr found it possible to put before his Australian
Catholics. But inquiry and reflection grow among the adherents of the
Churches, and, although the Press generally refuses to bring books of
this character to the notice of the public, and clergymen often stoop to
the most despicable means to exclude them from bookstalls and shops,
they seem to find a fairly large public to-day. Thinking is as needful
an exercise for the mind as work is for the body, and the only plausible
ground on which you can seek to suppress thinking about Christianity is
the fear that it will not be good for Christianity.
Then we shall have the next and inevitable question: What would you put
in the place of Christianity? Young men in various parts of the country
hurl that question at one as if it were really very serious, putting an
end to all dispute. Any person who is quite candid and sincere about
these matters can find the material for an answer easily enough. Take
France. Forty years ago the nation was overwhelmingly Christian; to-day
it is overwhelmingly non-Christian. It has not put anything in the place
of Christianity, and has prospered remarkably. There is a legacy of what
is called vice which comes down from earlier religious times, but any
person who cares to examine criminal and other statistics, the only
positive tests of a nation's health, will find that France has been
extraordinarily successful without Christianity and without putting
anything in its place. There are, it is true, moral lessons in its
schools, but I would not claim that they are much responsible: the
system is imperfect, and the teachers not well equipped. Take our ally
Japan. The moral discipline of the nation, which, in spite of some
recent deterioration through Western influence, is admirable, does not
rest on religious foundations. Take London or any metropolis of modern
Europe. The bulk of the people have ceased to receive any influence from
the representatives of Christianity, yet there has been moral progress
instead of deterioration. Those who speak of degeneration in London or
Paris do not accurately know and estimate the state of those cities in
more religious times.
This experience might be enlarged indefinitely, but one or two instances
will suffice for my purpose. The soundness of these instances which I
quote I have established elsewhere, and the general truth to which I
refer may be sufficiently gathered from the words of the clergy
themselves. The rhetorical way in which they characterise our times is
more or less typical of the carelessness of their judgments and the
strength of their prejudices. One group of clerical writers, which
generally includes the reigning Pope, speak in the darkest terms of our
age and suggest that a sensible degeneration has followed the decrease
of the influence of the Churches. Another group, considering the
remarkable spread of idealism in our generation, the growing demand for
peace, justice, and sobriety, claim that this moral progress, which they
cannot deny, is due to some tardy recognition of the spirit of Christ:
a strange contention, seeing that our age is less and less willing to
hear the words of Christ and ascribes its sentiments to entirely
different inspiration. Hence there are a few who frankly admit that the
idealism of modern times is to them a rebuke and a mystery. One of these
more sensitive religious writers once confessed to me that the fact that
the times became better while the influence of Christianity grew less
was to him a perplexing truth.
The really honest social student, who does not measure his age by his
prejudices, but fashions his theories according to the carefully
ascertained facts, will try to discover the causes of this phenomenon.
In those wide and varied areas where it is observed, we cannot say that
anything has taken the place of Christianity. The Press sometimes
flatters itself that it has taken the place of the pulpit, but opinions
will differ in regard to its efficacy as a moral agency. On the whole,
it is too apt to reflect the moral sentiments of the more reactionary,
who are generally the most self-assertive, and it has no moral, as
distinct from political, leadership. Then there are Ethical and kindred
societies which hold "services" of a humanitarian character, and are to
many people a substitute for the Christian Churches. Their influence is,
however, restricted to a few thousand people in the whole country, and
signs are not wanting that their usefulness will be only transitory. The
experience of any careful observer is that the mass of people who cease
to attend church desire and need no substitute whatever for
Christianity. The Rationalist literature which many of them read is, as
a rule, of a high idealist character; but here again the influence is
very restricted. No organised influence is at work to any great extent
as a successor to Christianity, yet it is indubitable that, as Christian
influence wanes, the temper of the age improves.
This improvement must have an adequate cause, and it would be merely
another form of crude social reasoning and of sectarian prejudice to
say, in the rich language of the older anti-clericals, that breaking
"the fetters of superstition and priestcraft" led of itself to such a
result. But this sanguine rhetoric does contain or obscure a certain
truth. In plain human language, when you prevent a man from relying on
the old traditional inspirations, he may for a time be tempted to act
without inspiration. In the matter of his dealings with his fellows it
is an undeniable fact that, on the whole, he has not been thus tempted.
It is absurd to heap up all the contemporary instances of corruption in
trade and politics, looseness in domestic life, and so on, unless you
make a similar study of the vices and crimes of an earlier and more
Christian generation, and carefully compare the two. It is not a
question whether there is evil in our generation; it is a question
whether there is more or less evil than in earlier generations. I must
be pardoned for reiterating this, because, although this comparison is
essential for forming an accurate judgment on the moral effect of the
decay of Christianity, it is rarely instituted with the least pretence
of rigour. I have sufficiently studied it in earlier works (especially
_The Bible in Europe_), and will not repeat the facts. Cotter Morison,
whom I quoted on an early page, was wrong in his expectation. The change
from Christian to humanist inspiration is taking place without disorder
and with increasing advantage.
The solution of this apparent problem is really not obscure. If the
genuine basis of human conduct needed an elaborate search--if it had to
be revealed by a Deity or laboriously established by moral theologians
or moral philosophers--no doubt the age of transition would be an age of
disorder, and a very comprehensive educational organisation would be
needed. But the true basis of human conduct is simple. There are, of
course, Rationalists who feel that some very abstruse "science of
ethics" has to be constructed as the solid foundation of conduct; but
this has as little relation to the conduct of ordinary men as the
learned pedants of the science of prosody have to ordinary speakers of
prose. Experience is the real base and guide of conduct, and it forces
itself on every man and woman, even on the child. "Do unto others as you
would that they should do unto you" is the first principle of morals;
and to inculcate it you need neither the thunders of Jupiter nor the
impressive abstractions of a science of ethics: nor do you need any
moral genius or philosophical skill to discover it. It is a rule of life
that suggests itself spontaneously. It is a natural and prompt
expression of the fact that our life is social: our acts have the
closest relation to others besides ourselves. Now and again, perhaps, a
man is tempted to assert his own personality, or seek his own
gratification, in such a way as to ignore his fellows; but he is usually
arrested before long by the simple experience that he himself suffers
from the actions of others just as they may suffer from his conduct. It
is a lesson of life which one needs no power of analysis to learn.
And the chief reason why the abandonment of the old doctrines is
proceeding without any moral degeneration is that this experience was
really always the basis of general morality. We need not question--it
would be absurd to question--that refined natures have received moral
aid from their belief in the presence of God, or in a desire to please
God by accepting the law of virtue as a declaration of his will; though
we must be equally candid in admitting that men and women of this nature
have not been observed to deteriorate when they sacrifice their
religious beliefs, as thousands of them have done. On the other hand, we
will hardly question that numbers of people of coarser nature have been
deterred from evil-doing by dread of supernatural punishment. It is,
however, notorious in the moral history of Europe that these religious
beliefs have been consistent with a vast amount of transgression of the
decalogue: more than we witness in any civilised country in our own
time. How, then, are we to discover what were the real springs of
conduct in the mass of ordinarily decent people? It seems to me that the
only accurate method is to avoid theories and consider people in the
flesh. Do our Christian friends--did we ourselves in Christian
days--refrain from lying, dishonesty, injustice, cruelty, and injury,
solely or mainly because God forbids them or will punish them? I have
not met the man, except in the imaginative pages of religious
controversy, who confessed that he would stoop freely to these things if
there were no Christian prohibition. The mainspring of ordinary decent
conduct in any educated community has always been a perception of its
human and social value.
The only line of the decalogue about which there is likely to be any
dispute in this regard is that putting restraint on sexual relations. I
have not to consider here a subject so remote from my immediate
interest, and will observe only that any act which hurts either an
individual or the social interest will as plainly come under a
humanitarian law as the practice of lying: acts which inflict no injury
and have been forbidden only on mystic grounds are not likely to remain
on the moral code of the future. But I am concerned here with a definite
issue, and need discuss general morality only in so far as that issue is
affected.
Here, at least, the way of the humanitarian is plain. Sermons on the
brotherhood of men under the fatherhood of God have been totally
ineffective to prevent war and abolish militarism. There is something
incongruous in the introduction into a modern peace-meeting of some
clerical speaker who talks unctuously about the great promise and
precept of Christianity. The meeting itself, being held nineteen
centuries after the promise was made, is a sufficient indication of its
futility. No progress was made or seriously attempted in the work of
peace until a genuine human passion was substituted for that empty
phraseology. The brotherhood of men was, in the Christian sense of that
phrase, too abstruse and precarious a conclusion to be of use in such a
struggle. The plain fact is that it was of no use, and is of no use
to-day. There is, indeed, reason to think that we should make more
progress if we entirely discarded figures of speech like "the
brotherhood of men." The fact that we are all children of God, or
children of Eve, or children of some Tertiary anthropoid, does not very
obviously impose on us the duty not to take up arms in an international
quarrel.
The ultimate basis of morality is, as Schopenhauer said, sympathy,
though in an advanced social order this sentiment approves itself to
the intellect, and its requirements may be precisely formulated by
reason. One is not sure whether there will not be more morality in the
world when the word "morality," with all its mystic entanglements, is
discarded, and we speak plainly of social law. Violence, the infliction
of pain and injustice, is one of the most obvious infractions of social
law, quite apart from any religious commandments. Its social evil is so
obvious that the community has, at an early date in its development,
elaborated a special machinery for restraining it, and has imposed
penalties in this world, whatever it thinks about the next. There may be
questions raised, and one can understand people who are confined to a
religious environment feeling a genuine concern, about other sections of
moral law; but it would be obviously absurd to think that a humanitarian
ethic would fail here. There have been attempts in modern times to
question the validity of ethical law altogether. In so far as this
movement aims at stripping moral law of its mysticism and fearlessly
investigating its traditional content, it is admirable and will grow;
but in so far as these moral rebels would resent restraint of any kind,
and pronounce the freedom of every individual impulse, they seem to
overlook a factor of great importance--the impulse of retaliation. A
pretty state of society we should have if such a theory were generally,
or largely, carried into practice.
But these are academic vagaries, like those of the mystic or the moral
theologian. Whatever be the future fortune of Christian legends, men are
not likely to sacrifice the peace and security of social life to such
theories of freedom any more than they are likely to expose property to
a general scramble. The instinct of sympathy is now growing deeper in
every century. Most of the great improvements of social life (in its
widest sense) during the nineteenth century, which we have inherited,
were due to that development of sympathy. It matters not whether the
reformer was Christian or non-Christian--Elizabeth Fry and Florence
Nightingale or Robert Owen and John Stuart Mill--the impulse was
sympathy with suffering fellow-humans. All the hope of improvement in
the twentieth century looks to a continued growth of that sentiment. It
becomes a veritable passion in certain natures, as long as there are
large and cruel evils to redress; and this passion of a few leading
spirits, communicating something of its fire to the colder mass, is the
great cause of progress. Surely that is the correct interpretation of
the progressive life of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries? Men
realised that to cultivate sympathy because it was enjoined by religion
was a more or less mercantile procedure: it was worth cultivating for
its own sake.
Here we have the reply to those who, unfamiliar with any but their own
religious environment, ask what place there will be for sympathy in an
intellectual or nationalistic age. It is a very grave error to suppose
either that our age is becoming less emotional or that Rationalism has
no place for emotions. In pursuing its task during the nineteenth
century Rationalism was an intensely emotional movement. Mr G. K.
Chesterton, in his _Victorian Age in Literature_, speaks of J. S. Mill's
"hard rationalism in religion" and "hard egoism in ethics." Like very
many other statements in that lamentable book, these are inexplicably
unjust. Mill was so far from being "hard" in religion that he ended his
days in a kind of sentimental theism; he was so far from being a "hard
egoist" in ethics that he declared that he would burn in hell for ever
rather than lie at the supposed bidding of a Deity. Robert Ingersoll,
the most popular Rationalist of that age, was--I judge from his private
letters, not his ornate speeches--a man of the most tender and fine
sentiment. It is simply ludicrous to suppose that, because we do not
admit emotion to be a test of the accuracy of statements of fact (as all
religious dogmas claim to be), we do not find any room for emotion in
life. Is the whole of man's life an affirmation about reality or
criticism of such affirmation? This supposed "hardness"--I detest these
vague phrases, but one knows what is meant--of the Rationalist temper is
one of the strangest myths the clergy have invented.
Reason not merely approves, but enjoins, the cultivation of sentiment.
When the sentiment in question is one that shows a power of transforming
life and impelling men to struggle against pain and evil, reason
applauds it as one of the most valuable forces we can cultivate. Such,
plainly, is the sentiment of sympathy. We look back to-day with horror
on the industrial and social condition of England in the earlier part of
the nineteenth century: the burdened lives and few gross pleasures of
the workers, the horrible cellar-homes of the poor, the ghastly
treatment of child-workers, the stupid and brutal herding of criminals,
the tragedies of asylums and workhouses, the fearful political
corruption and despotism, the subjection of women, the revolting
proportions of the birth-rate and death-rate. We have still much to do
to redeem our civilisation from medieval errors, but when one
contemplates the social revolution that human sympathy has brought about
in the life of England, one feels that this, and not the long-futile
teaching of Christianity, is the hope of the future. Christian preaching
of virtue has been individualistic. Even in our time the clergy hesitate
and are divided in face of social problems which plainly involve moral
principles. But the humanitarian ethic is essentially social, and this
passion of sympathy is its chief root.
We wish, then, not to substitute any creed or organisation for
Christianity, but to sweep away these primitive or medieval speculations
about life, and let the human mind and human heart increasingly devote
themselves, directly, to human interests. In discussing the question of
peace and war, the application is obvious. We enclose or dispatch the
murderer, lest some fresh grave act of violence be perpetrated. We agree
that the violent and premature termination of a life is the most serious
transgression of social law that a man can perpetrate. Next to it we put
rape, mutilation, the destruction of a man's home or fortune; all acts,
in a word, that come nearest to it in threatening or causing the
greatest desolation. Yet we have suffered, age after age, that every few
years all these acts should be gathered into one mighty outrage and
showered upon whole populations. The time will come when men will read
with bewilderment the things that have been written about warfare in the
nineteenth, and even the twentieth, century. The men of clear judgment
and sound emotion of some coming age will see anguish rising, as vapour
does from some tropical sea, from our vast battle-fields. They will read
of Cats' Homes, and Anti-Vivisection Societies, and Homes of Rest for
Horses, and a hundred such institutions, and they will find contributors
to these institutions stirring not one finger when hundreds of thousands
of men writhe under hails of shrapnel, and crowds of homeless women and
children fly in terror before the unavoidable calamities or the
superfluous brutalities of war. They will see a generation shaken and
shuddering as the ghastly picture is daily unfolded before it, and they
will see that same generation in a few months grow dully indifferent to,
if not actively supporting, the military system which invariably brings
these horrors every few years upon the world. They will read of social
aspiration spreading through our civilisation, and statesmen regretting
that want of funds alone prevents them from remedying our social ills;
and they will read how Europe in one year wasted in butchery the
resources that might have renovated its disfigured civilisation, and the
next year complacently shouldered its military burden, its annual waste
of a thousand millions sterling, with the prospect of a costlier war
than ever.
In face of this situation the question, What would you put in place of
Christianity? is a mere mockery. One can see some pertinence and use in
the question: How shall we induce the Christian Churches to employ their
still great resources in helping to bring on the reign of peace? But it
is not to them that we now look for redemption. It is to the
humanitarian spirit, the clearer reason, of our age. I have described
the situation in terms of emotion, because thus it spontaneously rises
before me; but it may be recorded in terms of pure reason. We maintain
in Europe a machinery for settling international quarrels which costs us
more than a thousand millions sterling annually, while we could erect at
a cost of a few thousands annually an efficient machinery for dealing
with those quarrels, and for a few millions we could add the machinery
for carrying out its decisions. We boast that our civilisation is
founded on justice; yet, of the two types of machinery for adjusting
quarrels, we retain the one that is the least possible adapted for
securing the triumph of justice and discard the one that is
pre-eminently fitted to secure it. We flatter ourselves that we rise
above the savage in enjoying security of life and property, and we
retain this system though we know that, periodically, it will invade
life and property on a scale that surpasses the experience of the savage
as much as a Dreadnought surpasses a canoe.
It is just as easy to state our situation in terms of reason as in terms
of sentiment: it would not be easy to say in which guise it is ugliest.
Let us talk no more nonsense about needing religion to help us to get
rid of this atrocious nightmare. It drives both reason and sentiment to
the brink of insanity. Both protest against it with every particle of
their energy. Why Christianity failed to protest against it in fifteen
hundred years may or may not be obscure; but there is no obscurity
whatever about the probable effect on militarism and war of a
cultivation of reason and sympathy.[3]
Many a reform has been actually retarded by the use of rhetoric. An
outpour of vehement language seems to release, both in the speaker and
in the assenting audience, a part of that energy which ought to issue in
action. It has been one of the grave blunders of the Churches that they
thought their function ended with the eloquent announcement that men
were brothers. We must be more practical. Now, while the imagination of
the world is filled with the horrors of war, and sympathy is ready to
fire us with a mighty energy, is one of the great opportunities of
peace. One may trust that, after this experience, the Churches will
awaken to the implications of their moral doctrine and set to work to
impress it emphatically and repeatedly, as a moral duty, on their
followers. It is, however, not impossible that, with all their
scoutmasters and chaplains and services of thanksgiving for victory, a
very large part of the clergy will find themselves so closely allied
with militarism when the war is over, so confused in their appreciation
of what it has done for us, that they will continue to mumble only
general principles and halting counsels. In any case, in the cities and
large towns of this kingdom, where are found the effective controllers
of our destiny, the majority do not any longer sit at the feet of the
clergy. Precise statistical observation has shown this.
Let us remember that the one task before us is to inspire the _majority_
in each civilised nation with a determination that the system shall end.
The only practical difficulty of considerable magnitude is the economic
difficulty: the disorganisation of the industrial world by suppressing
war-industries and large standing armies. It is, however, foolish to
regard this as an obstacle to disarmament, since--to put an extreme
case--it would be more profitable to a nation to maintain these men in
idleness than run the risk of another war. For disarmament itself what
is needed is that half a dozen, at least, of the great Powers shall
agree to submit _all_ quarrels to arbitration, and reduce their armies
to the proportions of an international police, at the service of the
international tribunal and for use (under its permit) against lower
peoples who turn aggressive. No one doubts that this can be done when
the Powers agree to do it. But for one reason or other, which I need not
discuss, the Governments will probably not do this until a majority of
the electorate indicate a resolute demand for it. The immediate task is
to secure this majority by education; and the work of education will be
best conducted by vast non-sectarian peace-organisations. The mixture of
futile Christian phraseology and genuine humanitarian interests in some
of these movements has been hitherto a grave disadvantage. The movement
has been compelled to split into sectarian branches, and has
proportionately lost efficacy. If the clergy insist on winning prestige
for themselves, or respect and recognition for their doctrines, by
acting in these bodies, they are again hampering the work of reform. A
great national agitation, linked with similar agitations in other lands,
avoiding Christian formulæ as well as anti-Christian reproaches, will
alone secure the object.
I confess--with ardent hope that I may be wrong--that I expect no
immediate realisation of the reform. It may take years, even after the
grim lesson that militarism has given us, to inspire the majority of our
people with an unsleeping and irresistible demand, and the work will
grow more arduous as the memory of the hardships of the war fades. On
the day on which I write this I have listened to the conversation, in a
train, of a wealthy, refined, and cultivated Churchwoman. "I said to my
son when he set out," she observed, with a laugh, to her neighbour,
"that it was far better for him to get shot than to die of diphtheria or
something at home." If that sentiment, that obtuseness to the massive
horrors of war even when a son was involved, is widespread, the outlook
is dark. One fears that it is not very promising.
The lady I quote would read these pages, if she could constrain herself
to do so, with a genuine shudder. Abandon Christianity! She would
volubly reel off the eloquent forecasts of the doom of society which she
has heard from a hundred pulpits. Meantime she is one of the gravest
obstacles (as a type of her class) to the removal from society of one of
its most crushing burdens and most criminal usages. To me her class
illustrates the limitations of Christianity, and it confirms me in the
belief that we shall make more rapid progress without it. She was a lady
of keen sympathies and of great activity for others: the kind of woman
who, as she would put it, practised her Christianity. Yet in face of
this mighty disorder she showed at once the failure of Christianity and
the reason of it. Her genuine human sympathy was directed by an ancient
and outworn code of duties. Where Christianity had delivered no clear
message, the expanding of her sympathy was barred. War was part of the
established order of things. She could even cheat her maternal sentiment
with thin fallacies, because they reconciled her to what the Church had
not condemned. She had never seen the vision of peace, never grasped the
comparatively easy alternative to war.
This, in general terms, is what one means by the expectation that a
surrender of Christian doctrines will certainly not check the growth of
sympathy, and is more likely to promote it. It will direct itself
spontaneously to departments of suffering to which the Church had not
directed it. But we should be foolish to rely on this free growth and
spontaneous application of sympathy. It must be cultivated: our
generation must be educated to a sense of its value. As far as the child
is concerned, the need is plain. Children do not merely have veins of
cruelty; they have, as comparative psychology knows, the blood and
impulses of primitive man. The general impulse of a healthy boy is to
exact an eye for an eye: the impulse which it is the supreme care of a
modern State to curb in its citizens. To educate such children in
military history, whether of ancient Jews or medieval Englishmen or
modern Germans, is, as William II knows, the best means of maintaining
war. As to the New Testament, its language is not addressed to children,
its sentiments are often so obviously impracticable that it defeats the
end of education, and its precepts and counsels are so emphatically
based on a disputable reward in heaven that their ethic savours of a
risky commercial speculation. We must abandon "Bible lessons," and teach
children to be human.
But for the work of education to end when the child leaves the school is
one of the crudities of our elementary civilisation. The human material
is just becoming fit for the efforts of the educator when the child
leaves school, yet from that moment we leave it to the casual and
largely pernicious influences of its environment. Some day, perhaps, our
education department will be more seriously concerned about the youth
and the adult than about impressing a few facts of history and geography
on the memory of the child: even if it did no more than organise and
direct the innumerable foundations and voluntary organisations which
actually exist, and bring them into living and practical contact with
our splendid museums and libraries and art-collections, a vast amount
could be done in the education of the adult. Meantime a persistent,
comprehensive, intensely earnest propaganda of peace is needed. Since I
wrote a little work on those lines in 1899 I have had fifteen years'
experience of preaching the gospel of peace, and know well how
convincing are its arguments and how little it has to overcome except
inertia. We need only to help the imagination of the mass of people; to
put clearly before them the comparative easiness and the incalculable
value of the change. Christianity has not tried and failed; it has not
even tried. It has wasted its resources in generalities which have
proved wholly futile. We must speak as men to men; and men will be more
open to conviction when we plead that, not the supposed commands of a
Galilean preacher of nineteen hundred years ago, but their own highest
and most sacred instincts, bid them lay down their arms and inaugurate
the age of international peace.
[Footnote 1: _The Service of Man_ (_6d._ edition), p. 16.]
[Footnote 2: As I write, the Press describes Canon Green of Burnley as
saying that "the war is a divine judgment on the world--England for the
last ten years has been God-forgetting, drunken, immoral."]
[Footnote 3: Let me again guard myself against misrepresentation. Were I
of military age, I should to-day be in the trenches. The men who, as
long as the military system is retained, expose their lives in our
defence have my entire respect and gratitude. It is the system I
impugn.]
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