Religion and the War

REYNOL

r alleged lack of intelligent, sympathetic interest in the war. It was written by an Englishman who for several years has been vacillating between the ministry and secular journalism, but is now the pastor of a small church in northern New Yo

en after listing the enormities of the mad military caste which heads up at Potsdam, he asked the clergymen of the United States, "Why were you so scrupulously neutral, so benignly dumb?" His main cont

ometimes with a sneer, and sometimes with a look of pain, "Why did not Christianity prevent the war?" It never seemed to occur to anyone to ask, "Wh

asters. These useful forms of social energy are not strong enough. They do not go deep enough in their hold upon the lives of men to curb those forces of evil which let loose upon the world this f

rites-Evolution, with a capital E, not as the designation of a method which all intelligent people recognize, but as a kind of home-made deity operating on its own behalf! The Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age, all in capitals! The "Cosmic Urge," whatever that pretentious

finer forms of spiritual energy have covered a whole continent with grief and pain. They have written a most impressive commentary upon that word of the ancient prophet, "The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God." Men are saying on all sides that u

ad was not always of the right sort. In certain countries the churches had been emphasizing the personal and private virtues of sobriety, chastity, kindliness and the like; they had been preparing the souls of men for residence in a blessed Hereafter. But they had not giv

Lord is upon me because he hath anointed me to preach good tidings to the poor. He hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the

Christian faith should have been voicing that same demand for social righteousness all the way from Berlin to Bagdad, and from London to the uttermost parts of the earth. The only Christianity which can avert simi

fficiency and mental cleverness quite apart from any moral considerations, toward a flat indifference to all those manifestations of the religious spirit which are found in public worship,

as that same nation which did more than any other nation to resist the encroachments of lawlessness and crime as we have seen them in Belgium and in northern France. We have had abundant reason to thank God for the Christianity there was in the lives of such men as Herbert H. Asquith, Arthur

ty for bringing it on-not even Germany. That military caste in Potsdam has tried by all manner of intellectual shuffling to save its face by seeking to make it appear to its own people that the war was one of self-defense thrust upon them by unscrupulous enemies. The claim was so absurd that the

f course. It was costly, irrational, inhuman, then as it is now, but it did not have arrayed against it the moral sense of the race as that moral sense has come to be arrayed against this method of settling international difficulties in this twentieth century. In these days war is looked

helpless people whose homes have been destroyed by the ravages of war. It has all been done in the name of the Red Cross-the name is significant, as is the spirit behind it. It is the flowering out, not of Buddhism o

r the relief of wounded soldiers and for the relief of stricken people in Belgium and Poland, in Serbia and Armenia, whose names we do not know, whose languages we cannot speak, but whose sufferings we have made our own in warmest sympathy. It was the response of a nation to t

en called to the colors. The officers of our own army and of those armies with whom we are allied have by personal example and by

e Methodist Episcopal Church. Its secretaries and other workers are drawn, all of them, from the membership of our churches. And the money which makes possible its world-wide activities is given mainly by the people of the churches. The people of this country were asked for thirty-five millions of dollars, and in a single we

e not entered this war with any sordid desire for material gain. We were already becoming disgracefully rich in the manufacture of munitions and in furnishing supplies to the belligerent nations. If they could have fought it through without our help, it would have been money in our purse to have s

of government they like, so long as they keep it for home consumption. We believe here that all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. We confess to a frank preference for the methods of democracy, and we could wish no happier lot for any land than to live under the reign of the common people. We like to remember that in the year of our Lord 1815, Great Britain and her Alli

awlessness and crime, and in the defense they were making for those principles of justice and freedom which are the glory of our own national history. And s

is it a magnificent reality in the moral world to be upheld at any cost? Is that body of usages and agreements slowly built up by centuries of effort, which constitutes our international law, to be trampled under foot by any nation for the sake of some immediate advantage, or is it meant to be obeyed? Is t

ned and realized. And because our people have vision for the full recognition of the place spiritual

nt the moral quality of the German Government stood revealed in all its hideousness by its outrage upon Belgium. It was t

in honor. It was the moral idealism of the war which brought the choicest youth of our land, the sons of good fortune and the sons of toil, the young men of the colleges and the young men less privileged, to stand shoulder to shoulder in t

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th century will be the enthronement of the idea of public right as the governing idea in the affairs of Europe." We are here this day to assist with the last ounce of our str

e country has put on khaki. The moral sense of the whole nation has become militant. The brave men and women of this land are working and fighting for human betterment with their eyes upon t

ur own! "What people has God so nigh unto them as the Lord our God is in all things that we call upon Him for? Has God assayed to take him a nation from the midst of another nation by signs, by wonders and by war, as the Lord hath done for you? Did ever a people hea

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