The War and the Churches
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THE WAR AND THE CHURCHES
by
JOSEPH McCABE
[Issued for the Rationalist Press Association, Limited]
London: Watts & Co. 17 Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, E.C.
1915
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PREFACE
The searching crisis through which the nation is passing must have the
effect of securing grave consideration for many aspects of our life and
institutions. We have already traversed the acute stage of suspense, and
are gradually becoming sensible of these wider considerations. It was
natural that for a prolonged period the disturbance of our economic
conditions, the anxiety for the safety of our nation in face of an
appalling menace, the personal concern of millions about the lives of
sons or brothers who have bravely responded to the call, should keep our
thoughts enchained to the daily or hourly fortunes of the field of
battle. Now that the initial disorder has been allayed and we have
attained a quiet and reasonable confidence in the issue, we turn to
other and broader aspects of this mighty event of our generation. How
comes it that the most enlightened century the world has yet seen should
be thus darkened by one of the bloodiest and most calamitous wars that
have ever spread their awful wings over the life of man? Where is all
the optimism of yesterday? Must we reconsider our reasoned boast that
our civilisation has lifted the life of man to a level hitherto
unattained? Is there something entirely and most mischievously wrong
with the foundations of modern civilisation?
A dozen such questions will press for an answer, but it will be granted
that one of the most urgent and most interesting of the many grave
considerations which the war suggests is its relation to the prevailing
creeds and standards of conduct. The war coincides with an advanced
stage of what is called the spread of unbelief. In each of the nations
of Europe which are engaged in this awful struggle complaints have been
made every year for the last two or three generations that Christianity
is losing its moral control of the white race. In the cities, especially
in the capitals, of Europe there has been a proved and acknowledged
decay of church-going; and, however much we may be disposed to think
that these millions who no longer attend church retain in their minds
the beliefs of their fathers, the slender circulation of religious
literature makes it plain that the vast majority of them do not, in
point of fact, receive either the spoken or written message of the
Christian Church. In the great cities--and it is undoubted that the life
of a nation is mainly controlled by its cities--there has been an
increasing reluctance to listen to the authoritative exponents of the
Christian gospel.
A number of the clergy have very naturally noticed and stressed this
coincidence. Prelates of high authority have, as we shall see, even
declared that the war is a scourge deliberately laid on the back of
mankind by the Almighty on account of this spreading infidelity. As a
rule, the clergy shrink from advocating a theory which has such grave
implications as this has, and they are content to submit the more
plausible suggestion, that the decay of the Christian standard of
conduct in the mind of a large proportion of our generation accounts for
this tragic combat of nations. A distinguished Positivist writer, Mr. J.
Cotter Morison, commenting in the last generation on the decay of
Christian belief, expressed some such concern in the following terms:
"It would be rash to expect that a transition, unprecedented for
its width and difficulty, from theology to positivism, from the
service of God to the service of Man, could be accomplished without
jeopardy. Signs are not wanting that the prevalent anarchy in
thought is leading to anarchy in morals. Numbers who have put off
belief in God have not put on belief in Humanity. A common and
lofty standard of duty is being trampled down in the fierce battle
of incompatible principles."[1]
It is true that in the work from which I quote[1] the learned, if
somewhat nervous, Positivist does not, by his masterly survey of the
moral history of Europe, afford us the least reason to think that we
have really deteriorated from the standard of conduct set us by earlier
generations, but his words do tend to press on our notice the claim of
many writers, clerical and non-clerical, that we are returning from
Christianity to Paganism, from a settled moral discipline to an
unhealthy moral scepticism. Can one entirely and safely reconstruct the
bases of personal and national conduct in one or two generations?
This very plain and plausible theory is, however, exposed to criticism
from other points of view. The clergy as a body are not at all willing
to concede that the decay of belief has spread as far as the theory
would suggest. In order to suppose that the life of Europe has, in a
matter of the gravest importance, been directed by a non-Christian
spirit, one must assume that at least the majority in each nation have
deserted the traditional creed. It is by no means conceded or
established that the fighting nations have ceased to be predominantly
Christian. Indeed, if we confine the awful responsibility for this
tragedy, as the evidence compels us, to Germany and Austria-Hungary, we
are casting it upon the two nations which have been the chief
representatives in Europe of the two leading branches of the Church.
Most assuredly no prelate of either country would admit that his nation
has ceased to be Christian or surrendered its life to non-Christian
impulses; and in our own country we have frequently been assured of late
years that the real power of Christianity was never greater.
Clearly these conflicting claims and this contrast of profession and
practice suggest a problem that deserves consideration. The problem
becomes the more interesting, and the plausible theory of non-Christian
responsibility is even more severely shaken, when we reflect that war is
not an innovation of this unbelieving age, but a legacy from the earlier
and more thoroughly Christian period. Had mankind departed from some
admirable practice of submitting its international quarrels to a
religious arbitrator, and in our own times devised this horrible
arbitrament of the sword, we should be more disposed to seek the cause
in a contemporary enfeeblement of moral standards. This is notoriously
not the case. Men have warred, and priests have blessed the banners
which were to wave over fields of blood, from the very beginning of
Christian influence, not to speak of earlier religious epochs. There is
assuredly a ghastly magnitude about modern war which almost lends it an
element of novelty, but the appearance is illusory. That intense
employment of resources which makes modern war so sanguinary tends also
to shorten its duration. No military struggle could now be prolonged
into the period of the Napoleonic wars; to say nothing of the Thirty
Years War, which involved the death, with every circumstance of
ferocity, of immensely larger numbers than could be affected by any
modern war. Nor may we forget that it is the modern spirit which has
claimed some alleviation of the horrors of the field, and that the
majority of the nations engaged in the present struggle have observed
the new rules.
These considerations show that the problem is less simple and more
serious than is often supposed, and I set out to discuss each of them
with some fullness. That the war has _no_ relation to the Churches will
hardly be claimed by anybody. Such a claim would mean that they were
indifferent to one of the very gravest phases of human conduct, or
wholly unable to influence it. Nor can we avoid the issue by pleading
that Christianity approves and blesses a just defensive war, and that,
since the share of this country in the war is entirely just and
defensive, we have no moral problem to consider. I have assuredly no
intention of questioning either the justice of Britain's conduct or the
prudence of the Churches in adapting the maxims of the Sermon on the
Mount to the practical needs of life. If and when a nation sees its life
and prosperity threatened by an ambitious or a jealous neighbour, one
cannot but admire its clergy for joining in the advocacy of an efficient
and triumphant defence. But this is merely a superficial and proximate
consideration. Not the actual war only, but the military system of which
it is the occasional outcome, has a very pertinent relation to religion;
the maintenance of this machinery for settling international quarrels in
an age in which applied science makes it so formidable is a very grave
moral issue. It turns our thoughts at once to those branches of the
Christian Church which claim the predominant share in the moulding of
the conduct of Europe.
But these questions of the efficacy of Christian teaching or the
influence of Christian ministers are not the only or the most
interesting questions suggested by the relation of the war to the
prevailing religion. The great tragedy which darkens the earth to-day
raises again in its most acute form the problem of evil and Providence.
More than two thousand years ago, as _Job_ reminds us, some difficulty
was experienced in justifying the ways of God to men. The most
penetrating thinker of the early Church, St. Augustine, wrestled once
more with the problem, as if no word had been written on it; and he
wrestled in vain. A century and a half ago, when the Lisbon earthquake
destroyed forty thousand Portuguese, Voltaire attempted, with equal
unsuccess, to vindicate Providence with the faint hope of the Deist.
Modern science, prolonging the sufferings of living things over earlier
millions of years, has made that problem one of the great issues of our
age, and this dread spectacle of _human_ nature red in tooth and claw
brings it impressively before us. Is the work of God restricted to
counting the hairs of the head, and not enlarged to check the murderous
thoughts in the human brain? Nay, when we survey those horrid stretches
of desolation in Belgium and Poland and Serbia, where the mutilated
bodies of the innocent, of women and children, lie amidst the ashes of
their homes; when we think of those peaceful sailors of our mercantile
marine at the bottom of the deep, those unoffending civilians whose
flesh was torn by shells, those hundreds of thousands whom patriotic
feeling alone has summoned to the vast tombs of Europe, those millions
of homes that have been darkened by suspense and loss--how can we repeat
the ancient assurance that God _does_ count the hairs of the head and
mark the fall of even the sparrows? Does God move the insensate stars
only, and leave to the less skilful guidance of man those momentous
little atoms which make up the brain of statesmen?
These are reflections which must occur to every thoughtful person in the
later and more meditative phases of a great war, when the eye has grown
somewhat weary of the glitter of steel and the colour of banners, when
the world mourns about us and the long lists of the dead and longer list
of the stupendous waste sober the mind. Something is gravely wrong with
our international life; and, plainly, it is not a question _whether_
that international life departs from the Christian standard, but _why_,
after fifteen hundred years of mighty Christian influence, it does so
depart. Is the moral machinery of Europe ineffective? One certainly
cannot say that it has not had a prolonged trial; yet here, in the
twentieth century, we have, in the most terrible form, one of the most
appalling evils which human agency ever brought upon human hearts. We
have to reconsider our religious and ethical position; to ask ourselves
whether, if the influence of religion has failed to direct men into
paths of wisdom and peace, some other influence may not be found which
will prove more persuasive and more beneficent.
J. M.
_Easter, 1915._
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CHURCHES 1
II. CHRISTIANITY AND WAR 25
III. THE APOLOGIES OF THE CLERGY 48
IV. THE WAR AND THEISM 70
V. THE HUMAN ALTERNATIVE 95
THE WAR AND THE CHURCHES
CHAPTER I
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CHURCHES
The first question which the unprejudiced inquirer will seek to answer
is: How far were the Churches able to prevent, yet remiss in using their
influence to prevent, the present war? There is, unhappily, in these
matters no such thing as an entirely unprejudiced inquirer. Our
preconceived ideas act like magnets on the material of evidence which is
submitted to us, instinctively selecting what bears in their favour and
declining to receive what they cannot utilise. Nowhere is this more
conspicuous than in the field of religious inquiry, nor is it confined
to either believers or unbelievers. There has been too much mutual
abuse, and too little attention to the fact that the mind no less than
the mouth has its palate, its impulsive selections and rejections. One
can meet the difficulty only by a patient and full examination of the
pleas of both parties to a controversy.
And the first plea which it is material to examine is that, since it is
claimed that all the nations engaged in the war are Christian nations,
one may accuse them collectively of moral failure. From the earliest
days of the Christian religion it was the boast of those who accepted
it that it abolished all distinctions of caste and race. In the little
community which gathered round the cross there was neither bond nor
free, neither Greek nor Roman. This cosmopolitanism was, in fact, a
natural feature of religious movements at the time, and was due not so
much to their intrinsic development as to the political circumstances of
the world in which they spread. All round the eastern and northern
shores of the Mediterranean a great variety of races mingled in every
port and every commercial town, and it was the policy of the powerful
Empire which extended its sway over them all to overrule their national
antagonisms. When, in the earlier period, Jew and Greek and Egyptian had
maintained their separate nationalities, hostility to other races had
been a very natural social quality, an inevitable part of the spirit of
self-preservation in a race. When the great Empires had conquered the
smaller nationalities or the decaying older Empires, this mutual
hostility was moderated, and, as the vast movements of population which
marked the end of the old and the beginning of the new era filled the
Mediterranean cities with extraordinarily mixed crowds, mutual
friendship became the more fitting and more useful social virtue. A good
deal of the old narrow patriotism had been due to the fact that each
nation had its own god. In the new Roman world this theological
exclusivism broke down, and the priests of a particular god, scattered
like their followers among the cities of the eastern world, began to
seek a cosmopolitan rather than a nationalist following. In the temple
of each of the leading gods of the time--Jahveh, Serapis, Mithra, and so
on--people of all races and classes were received on a footing of
equality. The doctrine of the brotherhood of man spread all over that
cosmopolitan world.
When the old world, to the south and east of the Mediterranean, was
blotted out of history, and Europe in turn became a group of conflicting
nationalities, racial hatred was revived and in its political and social
aspects the doctrine of the brotherhood of man was virtually forgotten.
But the Christian Church had embodied that doctrine in its sacred
writing, and was bound to maintain it. In its ambition of a universal
dominion it was the direct successor of the Roman Empire. All the races
of Europe were to meet as brothers under the one God of the new world
and under the direction of his representatives on earth. It was this
change in the features of the world which gave a certain air of
insincerity to the Christian gospel. In the older days there had been
political unity with a great diversity of religions; now there was
religious unity spread over a great diversity of antagonistic political
bodies. Men were brothers from the religious point of view and, only too
frequently, deadly enemies from the political point of view. The discord
was made worse by the feudal system which was adopted. Even within the
same race there was no brotherhood. In effect the clergy as a body did
not insist that the noble was a brother of the serf, and did not exact
fraternal treatment of the serf. Thus the phrase, "the brotherhood of
man," which had been a most prominent and active principle of early
Christianity, became little more than a useless theological thesis.
The solution of the difficulty would, of course, have been for the
clergy, as the supreme representatives of the doctrine of brotherhood,
to apply that doctrine boldly to every part of man's conduct; to
pronounce that all violence and bloodshed were immoral, and to devise a
humane means of settling international quarrels. I will consider in the
next chapter why the Christian leaders failed even to attempt this great
reform. For the moment it is enough to observe that the conditions of
modern times favoured a fresh assertion of the doctrine of brotherhood.
Great as the power of sincere moral idealism has always been, the
historian must recognise that economic changes have had a most important
influence upon the development or acceptance of moral ideas. Just as in
earlier ages the development of forms of life was conditioned by changes
in their material surroundings, so man's moral development has been
profoundly influenced by industrial, commercial, and political changes.
The destruction of feudalism and the development of the modern worker
were notoriously not due to religious influence, yet they had an
important relation to religious doctrines. Once the new spirit had
asserted its right, the clergy recollected that all men are brothers
from the social as well as the religious point of view. Many of them,
and even some social writers of Christian views, maintain that the new
social order is itself based on or inspired by the religious doctrine of
brotherhood. This speculation is entirely opposed to the historical
facts, but it will easily be realised that when the workers had, in
their own interest, asserted afresh the doctrine of human brotherhood,
the Churches had a new occasion to preach it. How timid and tentative
that preaching was, and even is, we have not to consider here. On the
whole the brotherhood of men was re-affirmed by the Churches both in the
social and religious sense.
This situation makes more violent than ever the contrast between the
political and religious relations of men, and gives a strong _prima
facie_ case to the charge against the Churches which I am considering.
It is wholly artificial and insincere to say that men are brothers
socially and religiously, yet are justified in marching out in millions,
with the most murderous apparatus science can devise, to meet each other
on the field of battle. We condemn crime for social reasons. We have
relegated to the Middle Ages, to which it belongs, the notion that the
criminal is a man who has affronted society, and that society may take a
revenge on him. In the sane conception of our time the criminal is a
mischievous element disturbing the social order, and, in the interest of
that order, he must be isolated or put out of existence. It is not the
_guilt_, but the _social effect_, which we regard. And from this point
of view a single great war is far more calamitous than all the crime in
Europe during whole decades. It is estimated by high authorities that if
the present war lasts only twelve months it will cost Europe, directly
and indirectly, including the destruction of property and the loss to
industry and commerce, no less a sum than L9,000,000,000; and it will
certainly cost more than a million, if not more than two million, lives,
besides the incalculable amount of suffering from wounds, loss of
relatives, outrages, and the incidental damage of warfare. The time will
come when historians will study with amazement the wonderful system we
have devised in Europe for the suppression of breaches of the social
order at a time when we complacently suffer these appalling periodical
destructions of the entire social order of nations.
It is quite natural to arraign the Christian Churches in connection
with this disastrous outbreak. Unless they discharge the high task of
the moral direction of men, in international as well as in personal
conduct, they have no _raison d'etre_. Few of them to-day will plead
that their function is merely to interpret to their fellows what they
regard as the revealed word of God. In face of the challenging spirit of
our time they maintain that they discharge a moral mission of such
importance that society is likely to go to pieces if Christianity is
abandoned. We therefore ask very pertinently where they were, and what
they were doing, during the months when the nations of Europe were
slowly advancing toward a declaration of war.
In examining the charge that, for some reason or other, they neglected
their mission at a crisis of supreme importance, we must recall that few
of us believed that a great war would occur until we actually heard the
declaration. No indictment of the clergy is valid which presupposes that
they are more sagacious or far-seeing than the rest of us. Yet, however
much we may have doubted the actual occurrence of war, we have known for
years, and have quite complacently commented upon, the danger that half
of Europe would sooner or later be involved in the horrors of the
greatest war in history. Now it is notorious that the Christian Churches
have done little or nothing, in proportion to their mighty resources and
influence, to avert this danger. No collective action has been taken,
and relatively few individuals have used their influence to moderate or
obviate the danger. The supreme head of the most powerfully organised
and most cosmopolitan religious body in the world, an institution which
has its thousands of ministers among each of the antagonistic peoples--I
mean the Church of Rome--gave his attention to minute questions of
doctrine and administration, and bemoaned repeatedly the evil spirit of
our age, but issued not one single syllable of precise and useful
direction to the various national regiments of his clergy in connection
with this terrible impending danger. The heads or Councils of the
various Protestant bodies were equally remiss. Here and there individual
clergymen joined associations, founded by laymen, which endeavoured to
maintain peace and to secure arbitration upon quarrels, and one Sunday
in the year was set aside by the pulpits for the vague gospel of peace.
But in almost all cases these movements were purely secular in origin,
and the few movements of a religious nature have been obviously founded
only to keep the idealism linked with a particular Church, have had no
great influence, and have been too vague in their principles to have had
any effect upon the growing chances of a European war. There is no doubt
that the Churches have remained almost dumb while Europe was preparing
for its Armageddon.