lovers a Religion of Valor, which promises nothing but demands all, strikes a lofty chord in spite of its pagan ring. To call this a religion may yet seem a travesty of sacred things, but is the organ peal of the Christian Church more thrilling than its exultant trumpetcall?

Long since the prophet of our American generation declared that war would not be suffered to go unless we found some moral equivalent to take its place. Dare we not add that Christianity itself must go unless some spiritual equivalent of war lend it new edge and weight and power? The passing centuries have bestowed on man's existence nothing which can overbalance the monstrous growth of materialism. If life means anything, it means a struggle to make the spiritual more real than the actual; to-day the very stuff of life is actuality. Only some huge catastrophe like war makes the world about us seem unreal. Then as in a vision the solid earth dissolves. Beyond it we catch some glimpse of what is and must be permanent.

The truth is that modern life and modern thought have compassed an unnatural evolution. We have sought to invert ancient ideals, and the minds of men revolt. Look freshly at the contrast. Peace calls men to comfort and refreshment, to freedom from danger, and rest from fear. War points the way to toil and suffering, to strange new gropings in the mysterious paths of pain, to struggle, and victory, and death. The more toilsome the way, the more difficult the goal, the stronger the lure must be to ardent spirits. It is the desperate alternative which grips mind and heart and spirit.

Must it be ever so? Are our civilization and our religion, bound inextricably as they are with all the things which make life dear to us, to be deprived forever of life's last incentive? Christianity may so believe to-day, but Christ did not. Violence He hated. It is transitory and must fail, but the passive unresistance of the body, while the emancipated mind and spirit pursue their undeviating course, against this He knew no earthly power can prevail; and his chiefest saints, St. Francis, George Fox, and their unconquerable train, have never ceased to preach and to believe it. Complete self-sacrifice has been their perfect victory.

But turn to the complete example. How supreme the contrast between his bodily meekness and the triumphing valor of his martial spirit. For Christ, the war of the soul was no figure of speech. Agony and bloody sweat came over Him, not because He feared Gethsemane, but because He wrestled with temptation. No virile feeling which ever roused warrior or patriot was absent from his soul. He fought, and He died fighting. When the street preacher of the Salvation Army calls up the Devil, horned and hoofed, into his presence, and then attacks him with clenched fists and shouts of battle, he is making to his audience the supreme appeal. Cannot we, to whom such illusion is but childishness, spiritualize that recourse, and, when need calls, spend, like the race of conquerors, the last reserve of our soul's energy? Only thus can we meet the final argument of war. Only thus can we win the last desire of the brave and good - Peace with Honor.

E. S.

I

When, at the request of President Wilson, the first Sunday of October was set aside as a day of prayer for peace, a day of many sermons and of many speeches, prayers and sermons and speeches all alluded to the war as though it were the cholera or the plague, something simple of issue, the abatement of which would mean people getting better, the cure of which would mean people getting well. The possibility of a peace shameful to justice and disastrous to civilization was carefully ignored. The truth that death is better than a surrender of all that makes life morally worth the living was never spoken. This may be what neutrality implies. We address the Almighty in guarded language lest He should misunderstand our position. We listen respectfully when Secretary Bryan tells us that 'our first duty is to use what influence we may have to hasten the return of peace,' without asking him to be more explicit, to say what on earth he would have us do, 6

Meanwhile, men of little faith are sighing that religion is eclipsed, that Gospel law lacks the substance of a dream, that Christian principles are bankrupt in the hour of need, that the only God now worshiped in Europe is the tribal God who fights for his own people, and that the structure of love and duty reared by centuries of Christianity has toppled into ruin. To quote Professor Cramb's classic phrase, 'Corsica has conquered Galilee.' Some of these sad-minded prophets had fathers or grandfathers who fought in the Civil War, and they seem in no wise troubled by this distressful fact. Some of them had great-grandfathers who fought in the Revolutionary War, and they join high-sounding societies out of unjustifiable pride. Yet the colonists who defended their freedom and their newborn national life were not more justified in shedding blood than are the French and Belgians fighting for their invaded countries and their shattered homes.

When Mr. Carnegie landed in New York some months ago, he thanked God piously that he lived in a brotherhood of nations, - 'forty-eight nations in one Union.' But these forty-eight nations, or at least thirty-eight of them, were not always a brotherhood. Nor was the family tie preserved by moral suasion. What we of the North did was to beat our brothers over the head until they consented to be brotherly. And some three hundred thousand of them

died of grievous wounds and fevers rather than love us as they should.

This was termed preserving the Union. The abiding gain is visible to all men, and it is not our habit to question the methods employed for its preservation. No one called or calls the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' a cry to a tribal God, although it very plainly tells the Lord that his place is with the Federal, and not with the Confederate lines. And when the unhappy Belgians crowded the Cathedral of St. Gudule, asking Heaven's help for defenseless Brussels, imploring the intercession of our Lady of Deliverance (pitiful words that wring the heart!), was this a cry to a tribal God, or the natural appeal of humanity to a power higher and more merciful than man? Americans returning from Europe in the autumn spoke unctuously of their country as 'God's own land,' by which they meant a land where their luggage was unmolested. But it is possible that nations fighting with their backs to the wall for all they hold sacred and dear are as justified in the sight of God as a nation smugly content with its own safety, dividing its interest between the carnage in Europe and the baseball season at home, and balancing its financial annoyances with the possibilities of increasing trade.

What influence has been at work since the close of the Franco-Prussian War, shutting our eyes to the certainty of that war's final issue, and debauching our minds with sentiment which had no truth to rest on? We knew that the taxes of Europe were spent on armaments, and we talked about International Arbitration. We knew that science was devotedly creating ruthless instruments of destruction, and we turned our pleased attention to the beautiful ceremonies with which the Peace Palace at The Hague-now for was dedicated. We knew, or we

rent

might have known, that the strategic railway built by Germany to carry troops to the Belgian frontier was commenced in 1904, and that the memorandum of General Schlieffen was sanctioned by the Emperor (there was no pretense of secrecy) in 1909. Yet we thought-in common with the rest of the world that a 'scrap of paper' and a plighted word would constitute protection. We knew that Germany's repeated answer to England's proposals for a mutual reduction of navies was an increase of estimates, and a double number of dreadnoughts. Did we suppose these dreadnoughts were playthings for the Imperial nurseries? 'A pretty toy,' quoth she, the Thunderer's bolt! My urchins play with it.'

When in 1911 President Taft's 'message' was hailed as a prophecy of peace, Germany's reply was spoken by Bethmann-Hollweg: 'The vital strength of a nation is the only measure of a nation's armaments.'

And now the good people who have been saying that war is archaic, are reproaching Christianity for not making it impossible. Did not the 'American Association for International Conciliation' issue comforting pamphlets entitled "The Irrationality of War,' and 'War Practically Preventable'? That ought to have settled the matter forever. Did we not appoint a 'Peace Day' for our schools, and a 'Peace Sunday' for churches and Sunday schools? Did not Mr. Carnegie pay ten millions down for international peace, - and get a very poor article for his money? There were some beautiful papers read to the Peace Congress at The Hague, just twelve months before Europe was in flames, and there is the report of a commission of inquiry which the 'World Peace Foundation,' formerly the 'International School of Peace,' informed us only a year ago was 'a great

advance toward assured peaceful relations between nations.'

With this sea of sentiment billowing about us, and with Nobel prizes dropping like gentle rain from Heaven upon thirsty peace-lovers, how should we read the signs of war, written in the language of artillery? It is true that President Nicholas Murray Butler, speaking in behalf of the Carnegie Peace Foundation, observed musingly in November, 1913, that there was no visible interest displayed by any foreign government, or by any responsible foreign statesman, in the preparations for the Third Hague Conference, scheduled for 1915; but this was not a matter for concern. It was more interesting to read about the photographs of educated and humane men and women,' which the 'World Conferences for Promoting Concord between all Divisions of Mankind' (a title that leaves nothing, save grammar, to be desired) proposed collecting in a vast and honored album for the edification of the peaceful earth.

II

And all this time England - England, with her life at stake shared our serene composure. Lord Salisbury, indeed, and Lord Roberts cherished no illusions concerning Germany's growing power and ultimate intentions. But then, Lord Roberts was a soldier; and Lord Salisbury, though outwitted in the matter of Heligoland, had that quality of mistrust which is always so painful in a statesman. The English press preferred, on the whole, to reflect the opinions of Lord Haldane. They were amiable and soothing. Lord Haldane knew the Kaiser, and deemed him a friendly man. Had he not cried harder than anybody else at Queen Victoria's funeral? Lord Haldane had translated Schopenhauer, and could afford

to ignore Treitschke. None of the German professors with whom he was on familiar terms were of the Treitschke mind. They were all friendly men. It is true that Germany, far from talking platitudes about peace, has for years past defined with amazing lucidity and candor her doctrine that might is right. She is strong, brave, needy, she has what is called in urbane language 'the instinct for empire,' and she follows implicitly

The good old rule, the simple plan, That they should take, who have the power, And they should keep, who can. It was forlornly amusing to see a month or two ago our book-shops filled with cheap copies of General von Bernhardi's war-inspiring volume; to open a newspaper, and find column upon column of quotation from it; to read a magazine, and hear all the critics discussing it. That book was published in 1911, and the world (outside of Germany, which took its text to heart) remained 'more than usual calm.' Its forcible and closely knit argument is defined and condensed in one pregnant sentence: "The notion that a weak nation has the same right to live as a powerful nation is a presumptuous encroachment on the natural law of development.'

This is something different from the babbling of peace-day orators; and being now on the safe side of prophecy we wag our heads over the amazing exactitude with which General von Bernhardi outlined Germany's impending war. But there was at least one English student and observer, Professor J. A. Cramb of Queen's College, London, who gave clear and unheeded warning of the fast-deepening peril, and of the life-or-death struggle which England would be compelled to face. Step by step he traced the expansion of German nationalism, which since 1870 has never swerved from its stern mili

not one

tary ideals. A reading people, the Germans. Yes, and in a single year they published seven hundred books dealing with war as a science, of them written for a prize! If the weakness of Germany lies in her assumption that there is no such thing as honor or integrity in international relations, her strength lies in her reliance on her own unaided and carefully measured efficiency. Her contempt for other nations has kept pace with the distrust she inspires.

The graceful remark of a Prussian official to Matthew Arnold, 'It is not so much that we dislike England, as that we think little of her,' was the expression of a genuine Teutonic sentiment. So, too, is General von Bernhardi's characteristic sneer at the childlike' confidence reposed by Mr. Elihu Root and his friends in the Hague High Court of International Justice, with public opinion at its back. Of what worth, he asks, is law that cannot be converted by force into government? What is the weight of opinion, unsupported by the glint of arms? Professor Cramb, seeing in Bernhardi, and in his great master, Treitschke, the inspiration of their country's high ambition, told England in the plainest words he could command that just as the old German Imperialism began with the destruction of Rome, so would the new German Imperialism begin with the destruction of England; and that if Englishmen dreamed of security from attack, they were destined to a terrible and bloody awakening. Happily for himself, since he was a man too old and ill to fight, he died nine months before the fulfillment of his prophecy.

Now that the inevitable has come to pass, now that the armaments are being put to the use for which they were always intended, and the tale of battle is too terrible to be told, press and pul

pit are calling Christianity to account for its failure to preserve peace. Ethical societies are reminding us, with something which sounds like elation, that they have long pointed out 'the relaxed hold of doctrine on the minds of the educated classes.' How they love that phrase, 'educated classes,' and what, one wonders, do they mean by it? A Jewish rabbi, speaking in Carnegie hall, laments, or rejoices, it is hard to tell which, that Christian Churches are not taken, and do not take themselves, seriously. Able editors comment in military language upon the inability of religious forces to 'mobilize' rapidly and effectively in the interests of peace; and turn out neat phrases like 'anti-Christian Christendom,' which are very effective in editorials. Popular preachers, too broadminded to submit to clerical authority, deliver 'syndicated sermons,' denouncing the creeds of the Dark Ages,' which still, in these electricity-lighted days, pander to war. Worse than all, troubled men, seeing the world suddenly bereft of justice and of mercy, lose courage, and whisper in the silence of their own sad hearts, "There is no God.'

Meanwhile, the assaulted churches take, as is natural, somewhat conflicting views of the situation. Roman Catholics seem disposed to think that the persecutions of the Church in France are bearing bitter fruit; and at least one American Cardinal has spoken of the war as God's punishment for this offence. But if the Almighty appointed Belgium to be the whipping boy for the sins of France, we shall have to revise our notions of divine justice and beneficence. Belgium is the most Catholic country in Europe. Hundreds of the priests and nuns expelled from France found shelter within its frontiers. But if it were as stoutly Lutheran or Calvinistic, it would be none the