bvert beliefs which are plainly necessary for their moral well-being.
Cases of this kind will continually occur in life, and a good man who
deals with each case as it arises will probably find no great difficulty
in steering his course. But the vague and fluctuating lines of moral
compromise cannot without grave moral danger be reduced to fixed rules
to be carried out to their full logical consequences. The immortal pages
of Pascal are sufficient to show to what extremes of immorality the
doctrine that the end justifies the means has been pushed by the
casuists of the Church of which Cardinal Newman was so great an
ornament.

A large and difficult field of moral compromise is opened out in the
case of war, which necessarily involves a complete suspension of great
portions of the moral law. This is not merely the case in unjust wars;
it applies also, though in a less degree, to those which are most
necessary and most righteous. War is not, and never can be, a mere
passionless discharge of a painful duty. It is in its essence, and it is
a main condition of its success, to kindle into fierce exercise among
great masses of men the destructive and combative passions--passions as
fierce and as malevolent as that with which the hound hunts the fox to
its death or the tiger springs upon its prey. Destruction is one of its
chief ends. Deception is one of its chief means, and one of the great
arts of skilful generalship is to deceive in order to destroy. Whatever
other elements may mingle with and dignify war, this at least is never
absent; and however reluctantly men may enter into war, however
conscientiously they may endeavour to avoid it, they must know that when
the scene of carnage has once opened these things must be not only
accepted and condoned, but stimulated, encouraged and applauded. It
would be difficult to conceive a disposition more remote from the morals
of ordinary life, not to speak of Christian ideals, than that with which
the soldiers most animated with the fire and passion that lead to
victory rush forward to bayonet the foe.

War indeed, which is absolutely indispensable in our present stage of
civilisation, has its own morals which are very different from those of
peaceful life. Yet there are few fields in which, through the stress of
moral motives, greater changes have been effected. In the early stages
of human history it was simply a question of power. There was no
distinction between piracy and regula