e than one-third, and we must
remember that up to the Reformation both countries were under the
direct guidance, one might almost say the exclusive inspiration, of the
Catholic Christianity of the day. But where does history record the
act of any religious leaders of those times denouncing war as contrary
to the gospel of Christ and of reason alike? We are able to quote
numbers of despised heretics who had grasped the truth and emphatically
condemned the brutal institution. Thus Erasmus: "They who defend war
must defend the dispositions which lead to war, and these dispositions
are absolutely forbidden by the gospel". Wickliffe, "the morning star
of the Reformation in England," thought it "utterly unlawful,"
according to Priestley; and as Southey writes in his _History of
Brazil_: "There is but one community of Christians in the world, and
that unhappily of all communities one of the smallest, enlightened
enough to understand the prohibition of war by the Divine Master in its
plain literal and undeniable sense and conscientious enough to obey it,
subduing the very instinct of nature to obedience".

These facts are noteworthy because they show that had the official
churches--the Roman, Greek and Anglican--been true to their charge and
commission from their founder; had they been unworldly enough to defy
the world and denounce its barbarous practices, we might have been far
nearer Kant's "sweet dream" of universal peace. But the churches, _as
churches_, have done very little for the cause of the "Prince of
peace," and now the world itself has outgrown their moral standard and
looks to them for guidance and inspiration no more. By the light of
reason alone, by the inspiration we gather from the _grands esprits_ of
the race, above all by the teaching of Immanuel Kant in his beautiful
treatise on "Perpetual Peace," we intend to do what in us lies to put
down this surviving, crowning infamy of war, the very thought of which
brutalises the mind, outrages its humanitarian instincts, and degrades
the ideals whereby we desire to live.

But, surely, it will be urged, we cannot refuse to acknowledge
undoubted benefits, both public and individual, which war has conferred
in the past. It has welded nomad peoples into nations, bred courage,
devotion, loyalty, unselfishness, self-sacrifice even to death in the
hearts of those who have nobly borne their part therein. Is not the
soldier hero, the military chieftain, the idol of