y suggestion that God sent this war upon Europe--whether as a
judgment on the clergy, or a judgment on unbelievers, or a judgment on
the arrogance of the Germans, etc.--is part of this old barbarism, and
may be disregarded. It conceives that God is vindictive, and at the same
time assures us that Christianity sternly condemns vindictiveness. It
allows God to deal mighty blows at those who affront him, and tells men
to bear affront with patience and turn the other cheek to the smiter. It
is simply part of that mixture and confusion of old and new ideas which
a codified religion always exhibits. We pass it by, and turn to more
serious considerations. I pass by also eccentric ideas of Deity like
those of Sir Oliver Lodge or Mr. G. B. Shaw--two oracles who have been
singularly silent on the religious aspect of the war. Let us examine the
main religious problem as broadly and as honestly as we can.

The first and chief reflection that occurs to any man who does thus
seriously examine the relation of the war to theism is that, after all,
it is not so easy to disentangle theology from the crude old doctrines
which our more liberal divines think they have abandoned. They tell us
that they do not believe in a vindictive Deity, they disdain the
doctrine of eternal punishment, they smile at many of the Judaic
conceptions of Jehovah in the Old Testament. God is the all-holy and
benevolent ruler of the universe. They refuse to believe that the souls
of sinners and unbelievers are tortured for ever after death, and trust
the whole scheme of things to the love and justice of God.

The grave difficulty of this enlightened theology, indeed of all
theology, is the immense amount of pain and evil in the universe, and
this mighty war we are considering puts it in a very acute form. It is
amusing to look back on some of the lines of apologetics in recent
years. There was a school of people, following some "profound" religious
thinker, who held that evil was "only relative." They made the wonderful
discovery that everything real is good, in the metaphysical sense, and
evil is unreal. Evil, they said, is merely the negation, the
falling-short, of good; and you do not ask for the creator or cause of a
negative thing. More recently a school endeavoured to come to their
assistance with the discovery that pain does not really exist at all.
One did not need to know philosophy or science in order to realise that
a sensation of pain is just as posit