inary critic, we
could reply only that Europe has grown to regard the military system as
so permanent and unquestioned an institution of our civilisation that it
simply cannot imagine the abolition of that system.

For this incapacity, this widespread inertia, this blundering idea that
there is some serious intrinsic difficulty in the matter, the Churches
are responsible. If they had directed to war the smallest particle of
the ardent rhetoric they have poured on disbelief in dogmas which they
are to-day abandoning, the public mind would have awakened long ago.
There is no intrinsic difficulty in substituting arbitration for war.
There are technical difficulties which the great lawyers and statesmen
of the peace-movement have given ample promise of surmounting, but the
overwhelming obstacle is merely this--the peoples of Europe do not
insist on the reform. Of all the large problems which confront the
modern mind this is incomparably the simplest. We are hopelessly divided
as to the nature of the remedy for most of our social ills. Here the
remedy is acknowledged: the plan has been elaborated almost in entirety:
the international tribunal already exists, and awaits only its
executive, which the nations of Europe could supply to-morrow. It is the
will, the demand, that is wanting. For that lack we charge the utter
failure of the Churches during the ages of their power to enunciate a
plain moral lesson, and their positive encouragement of an evil system.
That is the real indictment. It affects the Christian Church in every
nation.

CHAPTER III

THE APOLOGIES OF THE CLERGY

Any person who cares to read the reports of the utterances of our clergy
in the current religious periodicals will recognise that they are
painfully conscious of the reproach which this war implies. One
constantly finds them repeating that in this year of tragedy
"Christianity has failed" and "the gospel has broken in our hands." It
had been their boast that Christianity had civilised Europe, and none of
them has the audacity or indecency to claim, as some writers have done,
that such a war is in harmony with the principles and ideals of
civilisation. They have preached brotherhood and peace, and the greater
part of Christendom is engaged in a strife of the most terrible nature.
It is not a struggle of Christian and infidel; it is a struggle of
Christian and Christian, and one or several of the Christian nations
involved are guilty of a crim