the outbreak of the Great War in August, 1914, will ever forget the
conflict of emotions which the events of that dramatic period called
forth. If I may speak of myself--though I think that I am merely one of
a large class--I was torn by the contending convictions, first, that
every consideration of honour and policy made it necessary for Britain
to go to the aid of Serbia, Belgium, France, and Russia in their
struggle against the wanton attack of the Central Empires; but,
secondly, that war is a relic of barbarism, wholly incompatible with
civilization, and entirely antagonistic to the Christian ideal. On the
one hand I realized the magnitude of the German menace to the
Commonwealth of Europe; recognized that the Teutonic race had long
plotted conquest, and that it was out for world-dominion; perceived the
significance of its monstrous demands on Serbia, and its shameless
violations of its treaty obligations to Luxemburg and Belgium; saw that
the triumph of the imperial militants would involve the disruption of
the concert of the nations, the abrogation of International Law
(laboriously instituted through three centuries of painful effort) and
the collapse of the democratic order; and felt, finally, that upon
British intervention depended the very existence of the British Empire
with all that it means of good to one-fifth part of the human race. Over
against this group of convictions I was confronted on the other hand by
a vision of the cosmopolitan and pacific Kingdom of God as proclaimed in
the Sermon on the Mount, and exemplified by Christ and His disciples in
Palestine, long ago--a Kingdom whose law is love; whose fundamental
principles are inexhaustible goodwill, meekness, gentleness,
brotherly-kindness and charity; whose administration works along the
gracious lines of sacrifice, unselfish devotion, and untiring
beneficence. Obviously, within the limits of such a Kingdom war is
inconceivable. Under such a regime, if it were universally established,
the one service which could never be demanded would be military
service. How can the consecrated servant of the Prince of Peace in any
circumstances become a man of war?
The reconciliation of the contradiction is, I think, not impossible. It
is to be effected, it seems to me, by recognizing that unflinching
resistance to evil is the supreme duty of the present, while the
realization of the ideal, pacific, and world-wide Kingdom of God is the
goal of the future; and, further, that the attainment of the goal
depends upon the performance of the duty. At the moment our high task is
to defend our homes, our rights, our liberties, our institutions, our
standards of justice, our hopes for humanity, against the diabolical
aggressor. In a happier day and a freer world we may hope that, as one
of the results of our present struggle and sacrifice, beneath the sway
of restored and vindicated law, a larger scope may be given for the
spread of the divine realm of love. The vindication of law must precede
the proclamation of peace. The goodwill that shall put an end to strife
must be based on triumphant justice and sovereign righteousness. As yet
we see not law supreme, or justice and righteousness in the ascendant.
So long as violence is rampant, and evil stalks abroad, we must be
prepared to fight even to the death. It is vain--it is worse than vain;
it is treasonable--to cry "Peace, peace," when there is no peace, and
when the conditions of peace do not exist.
II. THE RELIGION OF THE BIBLE
The distinctive feature of the religion of the Bible is its indissoluble
connection with righteousness. Other primitive cults have been either
domestic, or economic, or political. Thus the Lares and Penates
safeguarded the pious Latin family irrespective of its ethical
character; the Greek deities, such as Dionysus and Aphrodite, were
frankly immoral, but if propitiated they gave plenty and prosperity; the
great gods of Rome were political personages who had no regard for
private virtues, and their proper worship was performed by State
officials whose functions strictly fell within the department of foreign
affairs. But the religion of the Chosen People, under both the Old and
the New Covenant, was, and still is, a faith whose keynote is divine
law. The standard which has led the hosts of Jehovah to victory
throughout the ages has been the lofty ethical code which it has
displayed and maintained. The Bible begins with the story of man's fall
from righteousness, and it ends with a vision of his restoration to
ideal holiness. The prime purpose of the religion of the Bible is the
conquest of sin, the defeat of the devil, the redemption of humanity,
the recovery of the lost paradise, and the re-establishment of the
Kingdom of Heaven. Milton made no mistake when he chose this as the
central theme of his two immortal epics. Everything else is secondary.
Now the means which the Bible describes and recognizes for the
attainment of its supreme end are broadly two, viz., the persuasion of
love, and the compulsion of force. In the case of all those who can be
reached thereby the gentler means are employed. With what infinite
patience were the Children of Israel led throughout their chequered
career; with what divine compassion were the faltering disciples guided
along the way of salvation! But where gentler means fail or are
inapplicable, sterner measures are unhesitatingly sanctioned. The Bible
knows nothing of the pernicious Manichæan objection to the use of
physical force to attain moral ends. In the beginning the rebellious
angels were overthrown in battle by Michael and his hosts. The
consummation of all things is to be reached as the result of the field
of Armageddon. The Old Testament history is a long record of wars
undertaken at the divine command, and to the Children of Israel Jehovah
was peculiarly the God of Battles. Nor does the New Testament, with all
its insistence on the power of love, ever condemn the Old Testament
theology as false, ever repudiate force as a moral agent, ever denounce
war as necessarily evil. On the contrary, it celebrates the achievements
of the heroes of Israel who "waxed valiant in fight"; it announces
irremediable destruction to the impenitent and unyielding wicked; it
recognizes to the fullest degree the civil authorities who wield the
sword of justice, and make themselves a terror to evil-doers; it
proclaims that those who take the sword shall perish by the sword; it
admits centurions and soldiers to the company of the elect without
suggesting that they should forsake their military duties; it tells how
on one notable occasion Christ Himself used force to cleanse the temple,
and so for ever sanctified its use.
III. THE DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF THE CHURCH
The Church as a whole during the long and varied course of her history
has been true to the general Biblical principle that evil should, where
possible, be overcome by gentle means which give the evildoer room for
repentance, but that it should be stamped out by the force of inexorable
justice where gentle means have failed. No one can contend, I fear, that
the Church has always been wise or Christly in her application of this
sound Scriptural doctrine. She has, it must be admitted, sometimes
encouraged premature resort to force, and has given her blessing to
countless wanton wars. She has at other times treated as evils to be
suppressed by violent means offences which have been mere deviations
from her own arbitrary standards, and not violations of the eternal laws
of truth and right. Nevertheless, however imperfect her practice, all
her great teachers from Athanasius to Aquinas, and from Aquinas to the
present day, have rightly recognized the legitimacy of the employment of
force for moral purposes in the last resort, have admitted the
compatibility of Christianity with military service, and have confessed
that, evil as war is, there are evils still greater, and that the duty
of every Christian man may be to fight lest the cause of righteousness
and justice should suffer defeat. If the Church had taught otherwise--if
she had been captured by the Gnostic heresy of non-resistance--Mediæval
Christendom and Western Civilization would inevitably have been
destroyed by the assaults of Huns and Saracens, Magyars and Tartars,
Vikings and Turks; while within the borders of Christendom itself law
and order would have perished at the hands of wicked and violent men.
Similarly in modern times common Christian opinion has agreed that there
are causes worth fighting for and worth dying for. The English Puritans,
for instance, including the early Quakers, considered that political
freedom and religious liberty were ideals that justified and indeed
demanded armed resistance to tyranny. During the last three centuries
there have been few who, on religious grounds, have condemned the revolt
of Christian peoples against Turkish misrule. In the American Civil War
many professed pacificists felt that for the abolition of slavery they
must need take arms. In our own recent history men like Havelock,
Gordon, and Roberts have regarded as sacred trusts the tasks of saving
women and children from massacre, of suppressing fanatical and cruel
tyranny, of preventing intolerable wrong. The Church with confident
consistency has rightly sanctioned and sanctified their heroic
enterprises. While condemning wars of ambition, conquest, or revenge,
she has taught that those who take arms to defend from murderous
violence the weak and helpless, to maintain the priceless heritage of
freedom, and to vindicate the majesty of law, may with humble assurance
and firm faith pray for and expect the benediction of the Lord of Hosts.
The Christian doctrine of war is admirably summarized by Burke in the
words:--"The blood of man is well shed for our family, for our friends,
for our God, for our country, for our kind; the rest is vanity; the rest
is crime."[46]
FOOTNOTE:
[46] Burke. _Regicide Peace_, vi, 145.
IV. FORCE AS A MORAL INSTRUMENT
Force, in short, has a proper and necessary place in the ethical sphere.
It is an indispensable instrument of the will to righteousness. The good
man and the good government resolve, in the spirit of the Lord, that
certain abominations shall not take place. They express their will in a
law. That law remains futile, it is a mockery and a fraud, unless they
are prepared to enforce it by all the means in their power, even if need
be by the shedding of blood. Much, no doubt, can and will be done to
secure obedience by education, by persuasion, and by appeal. Every
effort will be made to prevent the evildoer, and to convert him to the
good way. But the fact has to be faced that there are in the world
insensate scoundrels and hardened malefactors wholly beyond the reach of
education, persuasion, and appeal; men who have deliberately chosen evil
to be their good, and have made a binding compact with the powers of
darkness. With them force is the only possible argument. Unless it is
applied, there is nothing to prevent them from dominating the earth,
defying all law, and establishing the kingdom of the devil. At the back
of all effective law there is, in fact, physical force. Behind the
police stands the army. The magistrate would be wholly ineffective
without the soldier. The criminal population would laugh civilian
restraints to scorn, if it did not know that out of sight, but never far
away, are the bayonets and the guns of the ultimate defenders of the
peace. The salvation of the criminal is not everything: the salvation of
Society is more. Society would perish in a day if the basis of force
were removed from beneath the fabric of law. One of the falsest of false
generalizations is that which says that "force is no remedy." It is in
many cases the only remedy. In other cases it is better than a remedy;
it is a sovereign preventive of wrong. Force is the very essence of
government. By its means countless evils have been suppressed in the
past, such as highway-robbery, private war, duelling, piracy,
slave-trading. Only through fear of it is their recrudescence obviated.
If a man sees wrongs being perpetrated which he has strength to
prevent--if, for instance, he sees a child being tortured, a woman being
outraged, a helpless fellow-man being set upon and murdered--if he sees
these things and does not intervene with all his might, then he is not a
pacificist but a traitor to humanity, not a man but a contemptible or
infatuated worm. Similarly if a State stands on one side inactive while
small nations are wantonly stamped out of existence, while treaties are
violated, while International Law is defied, while unprecedented
barbarities are perpetrated, it sinks to the level of an accomplice in
crime, and proves itself worthy of the perdition which awaits those who
make "the great refusal."
The days of universal and enduring peace, for whose dawning we all
ardently look, will not be ushered in by any diminution of the forces
wielded by the powers of goodness in the world, but rather by their
immense increase. Just as in our own country the King's Peace became
the secure possession of every Englishman only when the King's might
became irresistible, so in the larger sphere of the Society of Nations
the world's peace will be firmly established only when it is maintained
by the united forces of all the federated Peoples of goodwill.
V. THE IDEAL OF THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
We, then, at the present moment are in the throes of a conflict from
which we had no honourable means of escape. Not to have taken our place
by the side of our Allies would have been to break our word, to violate
our faith, to betray the righteous cause. We are doing, at the cost of
awful sacrifice, our high duty; we have before us the noblest of
purposes; we are fighting with hands that are clean, with consciences
that are clear, and with hearts that are inspired by the courage of
conviction. It is our fervent hope and our faithful belief that if, in
spite of our wicked lack of preparation and our subsequent incredible
follies, Heaven grants us a good victory, we shall use it to further the
advance of humanity towards the goal of the Kingdom of God.
What that kingdom is we are shown in that matchless mosaic of
utterances attributed to Christ, known as the Sermon on the Mount. It is
the kingdom of righteousness, justice, love, and peace. When, however,
we study the details of the polity of that kingdom, as they are set
forth in the evangelical picture, we perceive (as the Church Universal
has always perceived and taught) that they are capable of realization
only in a Christian society cut off from the world, or in a world become
dominantly Christian. To give to all who ask, to lend indiscriminately
without expecting any return, would in society as at present constituted
not only speedily reduce ourselves to destitution; it would also
pauperize and demoralize those into whose hands our squandered wealth
should pass. To take no thought for the morrow, and to refuse to lay up
treasure on earth, would under existing economic conditions simply mean
that we should become useless burdens upon a thrifty and prudent
community. To ignore the legal and judicial institutions of our country
by neither judging nor going to law in cases where wrong has been
inflicted would be to foster the perpetration of crime in a world whose
very propensity towards crime has necessitated the establishment of the
courts. Similarly to decline to resist evil, where evil is rampant and
aggressive, would be to play the part of a traitor and to surrender the
world to the devil. The precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, however
liberally they may be interpreted, are, in short, the negation of civil
government; that is to say, they assume the existence of a community of
sanctified persons among whom civil government is unnecessary. The
irreducible minimum of civil government--as even the administrative
nihilists of the school of Herbert Spencer admit--involves three things,
viz., defence of life, protection of property, and enforcement of
contract. With these three things the precepts of the Sermon on the
Mount are, as they stand, incompatible.
All this is very obvious, and the consecrated common-sense of the Church
in every age has clearly perceived it. The political science of the
Apostles and the Early Fathers, and still more expressly that of their
successors, recognized the authority of kings, the jurisdiction of
courts, the justice of taxation, the rights of property, the majesty of
human law, the protective function of soldiers, and the necessity of
military service. All these were accepted as inevitable in society in
its present state of imperfect development; although it was proclaimed
that none of them would be required in the ideal Kingdom of God.
In the Sermon on the Mount itself, however, the truth as to the
relativity of Christian institutions is obscured by the faith of the
compiler that, when he wrote, the second advent of Christ was at hand,
and that the Kingdom of Heaven was immediately to be established. For
him there was no terrestrial future worthy of consideration; the reign
of the Messiah had already begun; the consummation of all things was
impending. Hence he did not feel it necessary, or indeed possible, to
distinguish between the ideal of the perfect day and the practical
policy of the actual moment. His citizenship already was in Heaven: to
him present and future were one. The eschatological hopes of the
evangelist were of course speedily dispelled, partly by mere lapse of
time, partly by the growing wisdom and experience of the Church. The
Church learned that its early expectation of the speedy and triumphant
return of its Lord was ill-founded, and that its task was to convert the
world to righteousness, not to preside over its immediate dissolution.
Hence it accommodated its doctrines and its institutions to the changed
outlook.
This fact causes no difficulty to those who believe in the
progressiveness of revelation. Such as admit that New Testament ethics
show an advance on those of the Old, will hardly contend that in
politics any New Testament writer said the last word. What Tolstoy and
his literalist school call the corruption and secularization of the
Church was to no small degree a simple recognition of the facts that the
Earth continued to exist, and that the Roman Empire and not the New
Jerusalem was the dominant power therein. But though the Church as a
whole was guided safely through the crisis of disillusionment, it
nevertheless remains unfortunate that the compiler of the Sermon on the
Mount should have made the false assumption. For the picture which he
presents of the perfect man and the ideal society is so fascinating and
magnificent that it is not marvellous that saints and visionaries, in a
long and pathetic succession, should have repeated his error, should
have ignored the distinction between present and future, should have
assumed the actual existence of the Divine Kingdom towards which, as a
matter of fact, mankind has still a weary and protracted pilgrimage to
make; should have proclaimed the celestial anarchy, and should as a
result have been overwhelmed in tragic or ludicrous disaster.
VI. THE PACIFICIST SUCCESSION
Those who have asserted the present applicability of the full detailed
programme of the Sermon on the Mount, and have endeavoured to carry it
into immediate effect, have been scanty in numbers, and obscure. A few
early Christian communities, soon extinct; a few hermits isolated from
their fellows; a few monks in secluded cloisters; a few friars
repudiated by their own orders; a few small antinomian Protestant sects
springing up and vanishing with gourd-like rapidity; a few groups of
Slavonic dreamers forming the innocent extreme of the Nihilist
fraternity--such have been the leading professors of Gospel Anarchy. One
can, even while condemning them, respect them for their purity of
purpose, their lofty idealism, their sincerity, and their consistency in
following their false premiss to its logical conclusion.
Much more numerous, but far less worthy of regard, are those who have
picked and chosen among the precepts of the Lord, have accepted what
seemed good to them and have explained away the rest. It would be easy,
did space allow, to present a motley succession of fanatics and heretics
from apostolic days to the present who have developed fantastic theories
and have maintained them by means of passages drawn from the Sermon on
the Mount.
No damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it, and approve it with a text.
Only one group, however, now concerns us, and that is the group of
anti-militarists who, for the most part arbitrarily ignoring or
repudiating the other commands of their authority, fasten on those
precepts that seem to inculcate the doctrine of non-resistance, and on
the strength of these erect the visionary superstructure of pacificism.
They form a strange and suspicious company. Among their early
representatives stand prominent the able advocate, but furious
schismatic, Tertullian; the amiable scholar, but heretically Gnostic,
Origen; the accomplished stylist, but bigoted and ignorant
special-pleader, Lactantius. It would not be a harsh judgment to say
that most of the early pacificists had some twist of mind or character
that disturbed the perfect balance of their sanity.
The later sects who have included pacificism in fleeting religious
systems of varying degrees of impossibility and absurdity are still more
open to suspicion on mental and moral grounds. The Cathari, the
Waldenses, the Anabaptists, and the "Family of Love," not only
developed monstrous doctrines: they also boasted of an antinomian
freedom from legal restraint which led some of their devotees into such
wild excesses of conduct as made their destruction inevitable. The
Franciscan Tertiaries, who never wholly abjured war, became involved in
the conflict between the Empire and the Papacy, and departed from their
ideal. The more recent Nazarenes in Hungary and Doukhobors in Russia and
Canada have shown themselves, by their refusal to recognize and obey any
form of government, a hopeless nuisance to any community that is
unfortunate enough to be afflicted by their presence. It surely must
give the present-day pacificists pause, if anything can do so, to find
themselves mixed up with such a throng. If men are to be judged by their
company, they can hardly hope to escape certification.