pertinence and use in
the question: How shall we induce the Christian Churches to employ their
still great resources in helping to bring on the reign of peace? But it
is not to them that we now look for redemption. It is to the
humanitarian spirit, the clearer reason, of our age. I have described
the situation in terms of emotion, because thus it spontaneously rises
before me; but it may be recorded in terms of pure reason. We maintain
in Europe a machinery for settling international quarrels which costs us
more than a thousand millions sterling annually, while we could erect at
a cost of a few thousands annually an efficient machinery for dealing
with those quarrels, and for a few millions we could add the machinery
for carrying out its decisions. We boast that our civilisation is
founded on justice; yet, of the two types of machinery for adjusting
quarrels, we retain the one that is the least possible adapted for
securing the triumph of justice and discard the one that is
pre-eminently fitted to secure it. We flatter ourselves that we rise
above the savage in enjoying security of life and property, and we
retain this system though we know that, periodically, it will invade
life and property on a scale that surpasses the experience of the savage
as much as a Dreadnought surpasses a canoe.

It is just as easy to state our situation in terms of reason as in terms
of sentiment: it would not be easy to say in which guise it is ugliest.
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 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 opportu