and provocative literature inflaming public opinion. We
all saw these things, and knew that a war of appalling magnitude would
follow the first infringement of peace. Yet I think it will hardly be
controverted that the Churches made no serious effort to avert that
calamity from Europe. They were deeply concerned about unbelief, about
personal purity, about the cleanness of plays and books and pictures,
even about questions of social reform which a rebellious democracy
forced on them; but they took no initiative and performed no important
service in connection with this terrible danger.

That is the indictment which many bring against Christianity, and we
have now to consider the general defence. I will examine later a number
of religious pronouncements about the war, and will discuss here only a
few general pleas which are put forward as a defence against the general
indictment.

It is, in the first place, urged that the moral and humanitarian
teaching which the Christian Churches never ceased to put before the
world condemned in advance every departure from the paths of justice and
charity; that it was not the fault of Christianity if men refused to
listen to or carry into practice that teaching. But at no period in the
history of morals has it sufficed to lay down general principles.
Everybody perceives to-day, not only that slavery was in itself a crime,
but that it was essentially opposed to the Christian morality. Yet, as
no Christian teacher for many centuries ventured to apply the principle
by expressly denouncing slavery, the institution was taken over from
Paganism by Christian Europe and lasted centuries after the fall of the
Roman Empire. The Church itself had vast numbers of slaves, and later of
serfs, on its immense estates. Leo the Great disdainfully enacted that
the priesthood must not be stained by admitting so "vile" a class to its
ranks, and Gregory the Great had myriads of slaves on the Papal
"patrimonies." So it was with the demand for social reform which
characterised the nineteenth century. To-day Christians claim that their
principles sanctioned and gave weight to those early demands of reform,
yet their principles had been vainly repeated in Europe for fifteen
hundred years, and, when the people themselves at last formulated their
demands in the early part of the nineteenth century, it is notorious
that the clergy opposed them. The teaching of abstract moral principles
is of no avail. Man is es