ve been the most
warlike and have pursued in war the loftiest political ends. This fact
is significant, because war, like religion and like language,
represents not the individual but the race, the city, or the nation.
In a work of art, the _Phaedrus_ of Plato or the _Bacchus and Ariadne_
of Titian, the genius of the individual is, in appearance at least,
sovereign and despotic. But as a language represents the happy moments
of inspiration of myriads of unremembered poets, who divined the fit
sound, the perfect word, harmonious or harsh, to embody for ever, and
to all succeeding generations of the race, its recurring moods of
desire or delight, of pain, or sorrow, or fear; and as in a religion
the heart-aspirations towards the Divine of a long series of
generations converge, by genius or fortune, into a flame-like intensity
in a Zerdusht, a Mohammed, or a Gautama Buddha; so war represents the
action, the deed, not of the individual but of the race. Religion
incarnates the thought, language the imagination, war the resolution,
the _will_, of a race. Reflecting then on the part which war has
played in the history of the most deeply religious races, and of those
States in which the attributes of awe, of reverence are salient
features, it is surely idle enough to essay an arraignment of war as
opposed to religion in general?

Secondly, with regard to a particular religion, the Christian, it is
remarkable that Count Tolstoi, who has striven so nobly to reach the
faith beyond the creeds, and in his volume entitled _My Religion_ has
thrown out several illuminating ideas upon the teachings of Christ as
distinct from those of later creeds or sects, should not have
perceived, or should have ignored the circumstance that in the actual
utterances of Christ there is not to be found one word, not one
syllable, condemnatory of war between nation and nation, between State
and State. The _locus classicus_, "All that take the sword," etc., is
aimed at the impetuosity of the person addressed, or at its outmost
range against civic revolt. It is only by wrenching the words from
their context that it becomes possible to extend their application to
the relations of one State to another. The organic unity, named a
State, is not identical with the units which compose it, nor is it a
mere aggregate of those units. If there is a lesson which history
enforces it is this lesson. And upon the laws which regulate those
unities named States,