Joseph McCabe

“ Now that the initial disorder has been allayed and we have attained a quiet and reasonable confidence in the issue, we turn to other and broader aspects of this mighty event of our generation. How comes it that the most enlightened century the world has yet seen should be thus darkened by one of the bloodiest and most calamitous wars that have ever spread their awful wings over the life of man? Where is all the optimism of yesterday? Must we reconsider our reasoned boast that our civilisation has lifted the life of man to a level hitherto unattained? ”

“ During those ages the Churches suffered none but themselves to pretend to a moral influence over the life of the nations, nor were there many bold and independent enough to make the claim. It is of the Churches we ask why this appalling system has taken such deep root in the life of Europe that it resists the most devoted efforts to eradicate it. It is not this war, but war, that accuses the Churches. We are entangled in a system so widespread and so subtle that, when a war occurs, each nation can persuade itself that it is acting on just grounds. It is the system which interests us. ”

“ They think of the lands beyond the sea to which they have been sending the Christian message of peace and brotherhood. They fancy they see China and Japan smiling their faint but distressing smile at the situation in Christian Europe. They have assured all these distant peoples that their faith has built up a shining civilisation in Europe, and now there flash and quiver through the nerves of the world the daily messages of horror, of fierce hatred, of appalling carnage, of the wanton destruction by Christians of Christian temples. ”

“ There is only one civilisation in Europe that has attempted to substitute a humanitarian for a religious training of conduct; one nation that is plainly and overwhelmingly non-Christian. That nation is France. And France has one of the best moral records in modern Europe, and has behaved nobly throughout this lamentable business. In fine, if we take Dean Welldon's words in the most generous sense, if we assume that he refers to the whole body of culture and sentiment which, in our time, aspires to mould and direct the race apart from Christian doctrine, the answer has already been given. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They eagerly record every flash of heroism, every spark of charity and mercy, that the war evokes. They refer sympathetically to the dead and the bereaved, the outraged girls and women—whom, in the narrowest Puritanism, they forbid to rid themselves of the awful burden laid on them by drunken brutes—the shattered homes and monuments. But there is a side of war which they must know, and it demands plain speaking. It relaxes the control of moral restraints even where it was before operative. The illegitimate-birth rate of England and France will faintly tell the story before the year is out. ”

“ When the way of life is smooth, and our nation or home is prospering, we may be genially disposed to think that God is near and is looking after us as well as the sparrows. But when a black storm bursts suddenly and disastrously on us; when the earth shakes their roofs on ten thousand of our fellows, or a great ship strikes a rock and pours a laughing crowd suddenly into the lap of death ”

“ Something is gravely wrong with our international life; and, plainly, it is not a question whether that international life departs from the Christian standard, but why, after fifteen hundred years of mighty Christian influence, it does so depart. Is the moral machinery of Europe ineffective? One certainly cannot say that it has not had a prolonged trial; yet here, in the twentieth century, we have, in the most terrible form, one of the most appalling evils which human agency ever brought upon human hearts. ”

“ The pathetic picture drawn by our great novelist of a worthless young lord lying at the feet of his opponent touched England profoundly and hastened the end of the duel in this country. If England, if the civilised world, be not even more deeply touched by the descriptions we have read, week after week, of tens of thousands of braver and more innocent men lying in their blood, of all the desolation and sorrow that have been brought on whole kingdoms of Europe, one will be almost tempted to despair of the race. War is the last and worst stain of barbarism on the escutcheon of civilisation. ”

“ And when we acknowledge the comparative failure of religion in Germany, and restrict our attention to the sphere of our own clergy, we find that they have created an entirely new spirit. The lust for territory and for gold is felt no more in England. Here there is no mafficking over victories, there are no hymns of hate. The British nation has been sobered by the influence of Christianity. We may regret that the German people has not proved equally susceptible, and its pastors equally energetic, but we cannot bear their burden. ”

“ The great conception of substituting justice for violence, law for lawlessness, did not enter the mind of Christianity. It was born of the secular humanitarian spirit of modern times.
For any serious person this is the gravest charge which the clergy have to meet, and they one and all evade it. The civilisation of Europe has a unique greatness on its material side; in its applied science, its engineering, its industries, its commerce. For that, assuredly, the Churches are not in any degree responsible. Our civilisation is unique also in its political power, its mastery over other peoples ”

“ If the war was designed for certain practical uses, such as those we have had suggested by various divines, one may reply at once that a more brutal and unjust way of attaining those ends could not have been devised. It is almost impossible to conceive any man seriously entertaining the notion. Yet all the jubilation and thanksgiving that will follow the war, all the supplication that accompanies its fortunes to-day, and the whole teaching of Christian theology, imply that God did direct the political movements and military ambitions which have culminated in the war. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Modern science, prolonging the sufferings of living things over earlier millions of years, has made that problem one of the great issues of our age, and this dread spectacle of human nature red in tooth and claw brings it impressively before us. Is the work of God restricted to counting the hairs of the head, and not enlarged to check the murderous thoughts in the human brain? Nay, when we survey those horrid stretches of desolation in Belgium and Poland and Serbia, where the mutilated bodies of the innocent, of women and children, lie amidst the ashes of their homes ”

“ 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. ”

“ Any man who thinks that the awful perversion of the character of a great European people, the death of such vast numbers in such painful circumstances, the ruin of further millions, and all the innumerable ugly results of a great war, were worth bringing about in order to secure a few spiritual advantages has neither sense of proportion nor sense of decency nor sense of humour. The theory would be too repulsive if it were put in this plain form, and it is more usual merely to point out these good results and hint that war is not absolutely and in every respect an evil. ”

“ It had been their boast that Christianity had civilised Europe, and none of them has the audacity or indecency to claim, as some writers have done, that such a war is in harmony with the principles and ideals of civilisation. They have preached brotherhood and peace, and the greater part of Christendom is engaged in a strife of the most terrible nature. It is not a struggle of Christian and infidel; it is a struggle of Christian and Christian, and one or several of the Christian nations involved are guilty of a crime greater in magnitude than all the murders in Europe during a decade. ”

“ I have assuredly no intention of questioning either the justice of Britain's conduct or the prudence of the Churches in adapting the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount to the practical needs of life. If and when a nation sees its life and prosperity threatened by an ambitious or a jealous neighbour, one cannot but admire its clergy for joining in the advocacy of an efficient and triumphant defence. ”

“ Some one of those peoples is lying or is deceived, and, in the future interest of mankind, it is imperative to determine and condemn the delinquent. There is no such thing as an inevitable war, nor does the burden of great armaments lead of itself to the opening of hostilities. It is certain that on one side or the other, if not on both sides, there is a terrible guilt, and it is the duty of Christian or any other moralists, whether or no they belong to the guilty nations, sternly to assign and condemn that guilt. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”