, but "at present," he went on to
say, "we ought to pay more attention to Old Testament texts"; thus
deliberately, and with a smile, throwing Christianity overboard. Arthur
Brausewetter, another theologian, made a remarkable discovery. War
revealed to him the Holy Spirit. "Never, till this year of war, 1914,
did we really know the nature of the Holy Ghost...."

While Christianity was thus publicly denied by its priests and its
pastors, the religions of Asia were no less ready to jettison the
inconvenient thoughts of their founders. Tolstoi had already pointed
this out. "The Buddhists of to-day do not merely tolerate murder; they
positively justify it. During the war between Japan and Russia, Soyen
Shaku, one of the leading Buddhist dignitaries in Japan, wrote a defence
of war.[59] Buddha had uttered this beautiful word of afflicted love:
'All things are my children, all are images of myself, all flow from a
single source, and all are parts of my own body. That is why I cannot
rest as long as the least particle of what is has failed to reach its
destination.' In this sigh of mystical love, which aspires towards the
fusion of all beings, the Buddhist of to-day has safely discovered an
appeal to a war of extermination. For, he declares, inasmuch as the
world has failed to reach its destination, has failed owing to the
perversity of many men, we must make war on these men and must
annihilate them. 'Thus shall we extirpate the roots of evil.'"--This
bloodthirsty Buddhist recalls to my mind the guillotine-idealism of our
Jacobins in '93. Their monstrous faith is summed up in the words of
Saint-Just which close my tragedy _Danton_:

"The nations slay one another that God may live."[60]

When religions are so weak, it is not surprising that mere ethical
systems should prove unavailing. Nicolai shows us what a travesty Kant's
disciples have made of their master's teaching. Willy-nilly, the author
of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ has been compelled to put on the
field-grey uniform. Have not his German commentators insisted that the
Prussian army is the most perfect realisation of Kant's thought? For,
they tell us, in the Prussian army the sentiment of Kantian duty has
become a living reality.

Let us waste no more time over these inanities, which differ only in
shade from those made use of in every land by the national guard of the
intelligentsia, to exalt their cause and to glorify war. Enough to
recognise, with Nicolai,