The Church-not the world only, but the Church and Christian society—seems to have disappointed the hopes of Apostles, seems to have persisted in the path which the Prince of Peace came to lead it from.. The ancient world looked upon War and conflict as the natural field for the highest virtues. It had no misgivings about strife and war: they were what men were born to by the law of their existence; conditions which none could alter; which none with honour could escape from. It was a great reversal of all accepted moral judgment, and of all popular traditions, when the teaching of the Gospel put in the forefront of its message God's value for Peace, and His blessing upon it; when it placed Peace as a divine and magnificent object, to be aimed at with the earnestness with which men aimed at glory.. Thus the Gospel raised the imperfect moral standard of men to a divinely-sanctioned height; and, however in practice Christians have fallen short of it, this standard of what is true and right never has been and never can be lowered. Do not let any one cheat us out of our inheritance of Peace by saying that God means it for Heaven, not for earth. He means it for Time as well as for Eternity. Let us in the name of God defy the mocking voices which appeal to experience to prove that the world can be but a great scene of strife; that none but enthusiasts can dream of peace here. That will be according to our Faith. That will be according as we master the powers of Evil which are the enemies of Peace.1 1 R. W. CHURCH (sometime Dean of St. Paul's). For Zion's sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest until her Righteousness go forth as brightness and her Salvation as a lamp that burneth.1 They misunderstand the doctrine of Evolution who believe that the world is improved by some mystic and self-acting social discipline, which dispenses with the necessity of pertinacious attack upon institutions that have outlived their time.2 I feel convinced that as civilisation advances, the influence of Christian Teaching will tend increasingly to inculcate the love of Peace, upon which the health, the happiness, and the progress of all nations depend.3 Bishop Butler has warned us, in his fine phrase, against the danger of "shortness of thought "-thought which covers only what we see at the moment. "Where there is no Vision the people perish." 4 Let your reach be beyond your grasp, Even if our hopes may not be realised in our time, that is no reason why we should not press forward in the direction in which we see a possible means of relief. What is impossible in one generation may become possible in another. It is made more possible in another by the fact that one generation presses in that direction, even though it fails to attain the goal.6 1 ISAIAH. 2 LORD MORLEY. 3 KING EDWARD VII. 6 SIR EDWARD Grey. 4 ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. CHAPTER IX AWAKENING INTEREST THE preceding chapter aimed at establishing two things. First, that the Call of Religion in regard to War's passing is imperative and clear; next, that this clear and imperative call has been habitually made to sound indefinite and doubtful, by being qualified unduly. The writer's conviction is that one great reason why Religion, in so long a time, has effected so little toward the attainment of the Gospel's goal-“ Peace on Earth"-lies in the frequent practice of religious teachers, either to boycott the subject, or to state Religion's claim with ambiguity. He would venture a protest against the still common attitude which Newman pilloried in the famous passage which begins, "Mistiness is the mother of wisdom," and ends with the picture of "sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging" pilots, steering carefully "through the channel of no-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No." 1 What could be more likely to hinder the growth of a decided judgment among the very people who ought naturally to be most eager for a reformation of wrong opinion, than a doubtful attitude, reflected in halting language, on the part of accredited religious teachers? 1 J. H. Newman, Essays Critical and Historical, vol. i. p. 301. Such hindrance would be only the more serious for its chiefly weighing with those from whom most help was to be looked for those, namely, who really wish to maintain a genuine connection between the sanctions of religion and the conduct of human affairs. The struggle to break the criminal habit of resort to Violence in settling international disputes, and to substitute the resort to Justice, is one which preeminently needs to be "pursued intrepidly, with a sense of its size and amplitude"; and not "with creeping foot and blinking eye.” All history and experience join Archbishop Whately in the warning: "It makes all the difference in the world whether we put Truth in the first or in the second place." Pontius Pilate wrote that, once and for ever, on the imperishable walls of Time, in characters which Christendom at least should find indelible. The Roman Governor incarnated the political spirit, then, as now, "the great force in throwing the love of Truth and accurate reasoning into a secondary place." It was precisely to bear an everlasting witness against this spirit of expediency, that the Church of Christ was founded. Those, therefore, who speak in the name of Religion have no share in Pilate's excuse for compromise, nor in any like excuse which may serve to exonerate the statecraft of to-day. Any possible duty of compromise, owing to intractable circumstances, belongs to a field wholly foreign to that of the Ideal in which the commissioned teacher of Religion is called and sent to work. It would, therefore, appear to be one of the many ironies of ecclesiastical history that, in the plain duty of upholding the standard of the Gospel in the matter now under review, orthodoxy has so commonlyfrom the age of Tertullian to that of Tolstoi-left it to the heretic and the nonconformist to be in labours more abundant, and in appeals more trenchant, for the preservation in anything like pristine purity of the ideal of Christ. Parts of their witness no doubt have been marred by extravagance, since few mortals escape the defects of their qualities. One Idealist alone had the gift of "sweet-reasonableness " to perfection. In the grace of that celestial element only one Teacher's words were wholly steeped, whether He winningly unfolded His "secret" to the timid, or hammered home His "method" on the dull. Nevertheless, to the splendid fidelity of those followers who tried unflinchingly to tread in what seemed to them to be the very footprints of their Lord, inexpressible homage is due. A man like Tertullian may be tainted with Montanist revivalism if you will: he may have little else but logic with him when he says: "No son of peace should engage in battle when it is unseemly for him even to take part in litigation ";1 and he may lack logic when he affirms: "Christ by disarming Peter disarmed every soldier afterwards"; yet in a rude age this great Father of the early Church made magnificently clear the contrast between "the standard of Christ and the standard of the devil, the camp of light and the camp of darkness." And his example may teach us, who live in a less trying time, to eschew that moral twilight which affects all ages, 1 1 Cor. vi. 7. 1 |