loody slaughter, this hellish torture, this
treacherous game of war can still secure ethical approval?"

Perhaps the great majority of the clergy deserve the indictment of
rationalists. Mr. McCabe can prove his case by citing the exceptions.
After all, the accusation is neither new nor original. Voltaire set the
tune. "Miserable physicians of souls," he exclaimed, "you declaim for
five quarters of an hour against the mere pricks of a pin, and say no
word on the curse which tears us into a thousand pieces."

Voltaire's powers of satire were roused by the spectacle of the
different factions of Christians praying to the same God to bless their
arms. The element of comicality in this aspect of war is greatly
outweighed by that of pathos. Those who earnestly pray to God to lead
them to victory must at any rate be firmly convinced that their cause is
one of which God can approve. No believer would dare to invoke the
blessing of God upon a cause which his conscience tells him is a mean
and sordid enterprise. Voltaire's quarrel was really with the faith in
war as a means of determining the intentions of the Divine Will. Success
in war has been held, and is held, by Christians to be a sign of the
favour of the Almighty. Bacon expounded this view to the satisfaction of
coming generations when he referred to wars as "the highest trials of
right" when princes and States "shall put themselves on the justice of
God for the deciding of their controversies, by such success as it shall
please Him to give on either side." The Germans have nauseated the world
by their incessant proclamations that they are the favoured and chosen
of God. The good old German God has vied with Jehovah of the Israelites
in stimulating and sustaining the will to war.

Those atheists to whom all war is an abomination and entirely
irreconcilable with the highest human attributes have found complete
unanimity in their repudiation of the idea of a presiding God of
Battles in the dissenting objections to war expressed by Quakers,
Christadelphians, Plymouth Brethren, and other sects of Christianity.
There can be no doubt that the faith in war, and in the Divine guidance
of war, is receding. The new conception of God, for which humanity is
struggling, will be one entirely different from the jealous and cruel
Master of Bloodshed to whom man has paid homage in the dark ages of the
past. The truth is that the spiritual objection to war, the realization
of its antisoci