Part 4 (2/2)

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 r.e.t.a.r.ded by the use of rhetoric. An outpour of vehement language seems to release, both in the speaker and in the a.s.senting 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 formulae 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 hards.h.i.+ps 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 ma.s.sive 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 cla.s.s) to the removal from society of one of its most crus.h.i.+ng burdens and most criminal usages. To me her cla.s.s ill.u.s.trates 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 ma.s.s 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 G.o.d-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 grat.i.tude. It is the system I impugn.]

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