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THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
THE 
 
 CHRISTIAN ETHIC 
 OF WAR 
 
 BY 
 
 P. T. FORSYTH, M.A., D.D. 
 
 * Righteousness is applied holiness 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK 
 
 BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS 
 
 I916 
 
 All rights reserved 
 

PREFACE 
 
 This book turns on the centrality of a real Atonement 
 for the Christian Revelation of moral Redemption 
 and public Regeneration. The Grace of God in 
 Christ's Cross is not a forensic device, but the moral 
 focus of the Universe — if all centre in the conscience, 
 and morality is the nature of things. By a real 
 Atonement I mean one not shown but done on 
 the Cross, as the consummation of Christ's holy 
 personality and its work. I do not aim here at ex- 
 pounding that Atonement, but at working out some 
 of its moral implicates and results on the public and 
 national side — a side on which a Christianity based 
 only on Christ's teaching has been criticised as defec- 
 tive. An antithesis is discussed between the teach- 
 ing of Jesus and the work of Christ which is none of 
 my making. Is it necessary to say that the stress 
 I place on the latter is not at the cost of the former, 
 but only against the value given it by some (as others 
 treat the Sacraments) as the thing most precious in the 
 Grand Legacy. None ever spoke like Christ. There 
 are no words so authoritative, so profound, so lovely. 
 But the power, depth, and beauty of such words is 
 ultimately due to their place in the perspective of the 
 supreme and complete Word of Grace; which lifts 
 
 348468 
 
VI 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 them, fixes and eternalises them all in the Cross and 
 what was done by the Holy there, when all saying or 
 showing (even His) was in vain. The Kingdom of God 
 is the great moral International. And it was set up 
 in the Cross with the only Omnipotence — that of 
 His Grace 'Who showeth His Almighty power 
 most chiefly in showing mercy and pity.' His 
 public judgments, from the Cross downwards, are 
 gifts and blessings unto public salvation. By terrible 
 things in righteousness are we answered by the God 
 of our salvation. Also He is merciful, who giveth 
 to every one according to his works — to every soul, 
 society, and civilisation, always in mercy, entire and 
 judicious. 
 
 At the same time I am not indisposed to find 
 some help in a difficult situation from the notion of a 
 standing ideal but of an Interims-ethik for the use of 
 the community while it awaited the consummation 
 of the age. That consummation, however, turned 
 out to be the Cross ; and the community became the 
 Church that the Cross founded — with an ethic drawn 
 (as the Apostles drew it) not from Christ's early 
 teaching but from the more world-compelling crisis 
 of the Saviour's ' finished work ' for the Kingdom 
 and its righteousness. 
 
 P. T. FORSYTH. 
 Hampstead, 
 June 1 91 6. 
 
 [I have to thank my former pupil. Rev. F. W. 
 Camford, M.A., B.D., for valuable help with 
 proofs.] 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER; I 3 
 
 KILLING NO MURDER pages 
 
 Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism — Humanity and the 
 peoples — War but a ' dangerous operation ' for justice — 
 Killing not of its essence — Divine Love as the passion 
 for righteousness at any price — And the desire to secure 
 full life and liberty to all — Our service to Germany — 
 The ultimate meaning of the Golden Rule . . . 1-16 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE JUDGMENT OF CRIME BY CRIME 
 
 Our choice is mostly not between good and evil but between 
 a less and a greater evil, when we are dealing with 
 afiairs— The Sermon on the Mount non-national and 
 non-economic — ^The impossibility of the plain black 
 and white treatment of life or duty — The first- rateness 
 of the second best — It is in religion, not ethic, that 
 we touch the absolute — God in history and its evolu- 
 tion — His use of crime to destroy crime — Dividing 
 Satan against himself — To abjure national morality is 
 to take up arms against the Kingdom of God . 17-36 
 
 CHAPTER III ' 
 
 WAR AND LOVE 
 
 Afiectional theology at the cost of moral — Love divorced 
 from holiness — The excision of the Cross — The sup- 
 pression of the note of judgment in religion — The 
 neglect of righteousness — Interrogate phrases — Bring 
 ideahsm to book with Faith .... 37-47 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 JUDGMENT BY THE SAINTS 
 
 Why drag the Cross into ethic ? — The fatal severance of 
 religion and morals — The Cross much more than a 
 
 vii 
 
X CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 CHRISTIAN ETHIC HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 
 
 PAGB8 
 
 The source of Christian ethic the same as the source of 
 Christian Hfe — ^The Cross not incidentally ethical, but the 
 action fount and norm of all final ethic — ^The teaching of 
 Jesus is but detailed application of the principle given in 
 the Cross — The Cross not priestly only but kingly — ^The 
 ethic of nationality is given in the Kingdom of God, and 
 the Kingdom is set up in the Cross — ^The work of Christ 
 was the crisis of a nation's history, and therefore organic 
 with universal history^ — National ethic not precept but 
 action — Rome and Israel — Salvation and judgment — 
 The present conflict integral with the world-conflict of 
 the Cross ....... 133-164 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 JUSTIFICATION AND JUDGMENT 
 
 The doctrine of Justification the meeting-place of religion 
 and ethic — History the working-out of a world- 
 righteousness secured in the heavenly places — There- 
 fore world-righteousness the first charge on men of 
 faith — Cosmic righteousness not an ideal but a foregone 
 achievement — Organic connection between creation 
 and redemption — ^The objection that the doctrine of 
 Justification is morally unreal — Justification a matter 
 not of God's verdict but of His treatment — Faith a 
 righteousness answering the revealed righteousness of 
 God as personal and not formal . . . 1 65-1 81 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE JUDGMENT ON THE CROSS AND IN THE FIELD 
 
 Judgment implicit in justification — Love and judgment not 
 contraries — The nature of Christian love revealed and 
 inspired by justifying faith — ^The holiness of love — ^The 
 Incarnation not the mere assumption of humanity but 
 the active moral conquest of history — Human history 
 transpires within Christ's foregone moral conquest — 
 A new moral world possible only as the judgment of the 
 Cross is positively understood as the establishment of 
 righteousness and worked out in concrete conditions 
 of history — Note on the conscientious objector — The 
 war as an issue of world-righteousness and the Kingdom 
 of God — ^The coming repentance — The contribution of 
 intercession to the conflict . . . . 182-196 
 
THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 KILLING NO MURDER 
 
 Can a patriotism which does not stop short of killing 
 men on due occasion be compatible with the idea of 
 humanity and the love of mankind ? 
 
 This is a question to which common sense promptly 
 answers, No. But the reply is so obvious that it is 
 suspicious. It was the answer given in the age of 
 common sense and palpable logic, the non-ethical, 
 non-historical age of the eighteenth century. The 
 question arose with the rise of the enthusiasm of 
 humanity amid an Illumination ruled by rationalism 
 and sentiment. But the theoretical answer was 
 very different from the practical. It was in France 
 that this cosmopolitanism worked out to a practical 
 conclusion, where it appeared with that fine tender- 
 ness to life marking the Revolution. A cosmopoli-l 
 tanism which dissolved nationality, and flouted 
 historical tradition or obligation, revealed its true 
 moral quality there, and the sentimentalism of the 
 age followed its usual course, and ended in heart- 1 
 lessness. Humanity fell to be a mere abstract 
 idea, which is morally lower than a true and free 
 
2 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 national life. ' Very few men are able to grasp the 
 common interests of man as man. And tliese few 
 have weakened their effectiveness by neglecting 
 other and simpler bonds.' The cosmopolite idea 
 is also much more powerless than a sound national 
 life ; for it soon passed under Napoleon into a pas- 
 sionate French nationalism which turned its master 
 into its tool. The ejffect of this was to call out in 
 other peoples also, and especially in Germany's 
 war of liberation, a national reaction and revival 
 whose effects have been very great. They have 
 been so great there, indeed, that nationalism has 
 swept into a fatal extreme of its own, and has dis- 
 carded the idea of humanity entirely, whether as 
 an idea or as a moral control. The egoism of the 
 German nation has now shown itself to be no nobler 
 than the egoism of humanity proved itself in the 
 French Revolution, and it is equally deadly to 
 mankind. The cosmopolite idea is vicious at either 
 extreme. A cosmopolitan nationalism is morally 
 ■as sterile as a cosmopolitan humanitarianism. The 
 passion of world-empire by a nation is no less crush- 
 / ing than the regime of a denationalised humanity. 
 "The Kaiser shows the upshot of the one, as Napoleon 
 did that of the other. And the two are one in spirit, 
 and one in enmity to the race, its liberty and its 
 life. 
 
 The great need of the hour is an effective inter- 
 
 j national, which, of course, the Church should provide, 
 
 isjput cannot. And amid the quarrels of nations it is 
 
 not wonderful that many minds, untutored either 
 
 in history or in ethic, should seek to find it in some 
 
 form, like Socialism, which is indifferent to nationality 
 
KILLING NO MURDER 3 
 
 and which overrides the concrete divisions of man- 
 kind by abstract ideas and artificial associations ; 
 while others, only too historic, find it in a Church 
 unity over their heads. Of the former kind is the 
 international of labour, or of democratic religion, and 
 especially of cultured and churchless pietism — pervad- 
 ing the nations as the roots of an exotic overrun a 
 garden ; of the latter kind is the Church of Rome, also 
 pervading the nations, but not out of relation to them — 
 only it is an ultramontane relation, a spiritual imperial- 
 ism rather than a Kingdom of God. We regard the ] 
 Roman form of internationalism as not only useless | 
 to humanity (which the present attitude of the Pope 
 to the war shows) but as mischievous to it. But 
 no more useful is the international of an abstract 
 spirituality, representing a humane fraternity, of 
 which Christ is rather the type or ' pictorial image,' 
 or, at most, the legislator, than its Creator and Bond.J 
 
 The difficulties in the way of a real international 
 are great, and they seem often insuperable, but they 
 cannot be got over by ignoring the nations. It is 
 more hopeful to think of federating them. The 
 divisions of the Churches can only be dealt with by 
 federation ; they are incurable on the line of absorp- 
 tion in one imperial Church, or by the erasure of 
 frontiers in an abstract and mystic fraternity. 
 And so also the only hope of nations is by way of/ 
 federation in a parity of common rights and reciprocal 
 respect. But we must federate also with the past ; 
 for the future cannot jump into being except by 
 violence ; and then it is insecure. Humanity can be-^ 
 enriched only by a duly original use of history, and a 
 development of its gifts in a creative continuity. 
 
 B 2 
 
4 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 * Historians are seldom revolutionaries/ On the re- 
 ligious side an abstract and individual spirituality, 
 wKich is mystic and no more, has in it the power 
 neither of universality, nor of continuity, nor of moral 
 wealth. It is not intelligent, for it dreads both analysis 
 and order of thought. And it is not moral, because 
 it is not social in its nature, it has not a Church 
 in it. It runs but to groups. It has also the fatal 
 fallacy of aiming at peace before righteousness, of 
 treating love in another form than righteousness 
 as the bond of nations^ and of pursuing the sympa- 
 thetic fraternity of man without first securing the 
 righteous Kingdom of God. The race can be en- 
 riched only by that development of national spirit, 
 culture, and conscience which, by a divine Kingdom, 
 gives each people its divine and concrete place in 
 humanity — neither over it in empire, nor outside 
 j it in quietism. The real wealth of mankind lies 
 I in a variety of free and living peoples, who will stop 
 \at nothing to assert and secure the right to exercise 
 '^^ la common trust, right, and duty, and to live in the 
 /service of God's Kingdom. ' Without a country you 
 are the bastards of humanity.' ' Without country 
 you have neither name, token, voice, nor rights, no 
 admission as brothers into the fellowship of the 
 /peoples' (Mazzini). And a great portion of this 
 trust and duty is the care and development of the 
 nationalities more weak or backward — such a function 
 as England inherits in respect of the minor peoples 
 of Europe, and has more recently assumed in respect 
 _of the peoples of India. It is an index of moral 
 failure to care more for a religious society than for the 
 Church, more for a trades union than for the nation. 
 
KILLING NO MURDER 5 
 
 We are to live for humanity. But humanity 
 is real and rich, not as a chaotic sum of individuals 
 that cohere, if at all, only in a unity so vast, remote, 
 and feeble for them as the race, but as a federation] 
 of free nations, small enough for their members t( 
 love each other, and not large enough to lord th( 
 world. Only in the form of such a nation does th( 
 supernational unity of man come near enough to fori 
 a real nidus and a real loyalty for the individual. 
 The first contribution on a social scale to the develop- 
 ment of the race is not economic programmes or 
 ideals, but national conscience and human duty — even 
 if the room for it has to be won and held by war. 
 Only, the war shall be under moral conditions ; it 
 shall not affront the conscience of mankind ; it shall 
 be war for righteousness, against the aggression of 
 those nations that publicly discard moral or humane 
 control. To discard that is to disown any national 
 duty to the Kingdom of God and its Christian type 
 of righteousness, and to revive the old pagan notion of 
 a ruling race with the prerogative of power alone. 
 And such a war shall also be without hate, with how- 
 ever much anger. A war for such an end is no mere 
 tussle of rival peoples or of jealous dynasties. The 
 express repudiation of national morality by one nation 
 changed the whole complexion of the present war for 
 Christian men, and raised its moral significance. It 
 enlisted that nation in the service of the kingdom of 
 spiritual evil under the prince of this world. And it 
 converted the chastisement of that nation into a 
 service of the Prince of Peace. It made it an obedience 
 to the will of God, and a loyalty to that Kingdom 
 of righteousness which it was the first charge of an 
 
6 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 atoning Christ to meet. He was a Christ actively 
 atoning and not passively enduring, a Christ at once 
 the victim and, by His active obedience, the agent 
 of the judgment of God on earth. He so took the 
 judgment that He exercised a greater judgment — 
 as we hope by our obedient suffering in this war to be 
 the agents, not wholly unworthy, of the judgment 
 upon unrighteousness among nations. We shall 
 see later that the religion of the situation turns on 
 the question whether Christ's death was only an 
 
 ><\expedient of fatherly love or the act of a judgment 
 constituent of divine fatherhood as holy. It turns on 
 a collision of mere spirituality with a moral atone- 
 ment in blood, of cultured piety with faith in public 
 righteousness. The question whether we are morally 
 bound as patriots to resist by arms national destruc- 
 tion is not the question for us as Christians in the 
 present juncture (though no doubt destruction is the 
 alternative). It takes the wider range and deeper 
 note of the Kingdom of God. We stand for the Chris- 
 tian future of the world. It is whether a Christian 
 
 - nation is at liberty to fail among men the Kingdom 
 of a holy God and its public righteousness of brotherly 
 love. It was in a great act of national judgment for 
 this Kingdom that Christ publicly died, and He com- 
 mitted us to the fellowship of such a death. Love 
 and righteousness kiss each other in Him. But the 
 form of that twofold unity between nations is not 
 
 ^' affectional love, but the moral righteousness which 
 turns humanity to the Kingdom of God. Christian 
 love in international form means the desire and 
 purpose to see each man and people enjoy the free 
 and humane life they have a right to. Twice already 
 
KILLING NO MURDER 7 
 
 England has (we believe in God's name) saved this"^^ 
 liberty and justice for the world — once from the 
 Armada, and once from Napoleon. She did it also in • 
 the founding of America. She is called to do it once 
 more — to serve God's Kingdom in history, as she has 
 the light to call each citizen to serve her. God has 
 of late years set the world in our heart. The idea of 
 the world possesses us now as in no former war. 
 Humanity transcends patriotism. The very mother 
 may say, as her son or her husband never returns, ' I 
 have given his life, not for his country only (do not ..^ / 
 also the heathen likewise ?) but for the life of the s 
 
 world.' For the world's life lies not in civilisation 
 spread by the force of a ' superethical' power, but 
 in mutual respect, consideration, contribution, and 
 liberty. 
 
 It should be remembered that the object of war 
 is not to kill but to bind the strong superman. And^ 
 if he is so strong, infatuate, and criminal that 
 nothing will stop him in his unrighteousness but 
 honest and judicial killing, such killing is not murder 
 nor is it hate. A disabling wound would really serve 
 the purpose as well as death, if we could inflict the 
 one without the other, and make it last long enough 
 for the purpose. Such war is not ' multitudinous I 
 murder.' It is a form of judgment. If it violate ^ 
 the right to live and be free, it does so as capital 
 punishment does, or indeed any punishment. If 
 killing is murder here, no Christian could be a judge, j 
 and certainly not a sheriff charged with the execution. 
 The Jews, who had in their sacred law the precept, 
 ' Thou shalt not kill,' killed their enemies freely 
 
8 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 iii war, and stoned their citizens to death by law. 
 
 \ The killing in war is not, like murder, a matter of 
 personal passion, or for private ends. Nor is personal 
 revenge for it cherished. The soldier does not act 
 in a private capacity but in an official. He acts 
 
 «jinder trust. He is the mandatory and representative 
 of his people. He is not his own but a member and 
 organ of his nation. Considering what his nation 
 has done for him in God's great grace and His long, 
 historic providence, it has a divine claim both on 
 his life and conscience (to say nothing of his affec- 
 tion) — a claim which, short of being absolute, is 
 yet very high, and in a crisis extremely high. He is 
 a kind of magistrate for his people. He has the 
 benefit of Rom. xiii. 4. He administers justice 
 in a way of duty. If a minister as a soldier shot 
 a German, it would not affect his clerical vocation. 
 No man can be a worse minister for having done his 
 duty. He is not striving against individual foes, 
 but, in the Lord's controversy, he wars against lives 
 and consciences which have committed themselves 
 as servants to unrighteousness. Their honour as 
 patriots stands rooted in dishonour. And they 
 have ceased, in their allegiance to a non-moral 
 government, to be private individuals whose death 
 on the field would be murder. We war in the service 
 of the love of mankind taken as an ethos and not as 
 a pathos, as a moral principle and not as an affection. 
 It is quite inept to say that the loyalty of the German 
 to his nation is as respectable as our own. That is 
 one of the futilities that beset the moral amateur, 
 for whom self-sacrifice has a moral value in itself 
 whatever be the object. It has no such value, and 
 
KILLING NO MURDER 9 
 
 to think it has is one of the debasements of an age 
 whose ethic has largely fallen into an aesthetic, 
 and become more valuable for literary and histrionic 
 purposes than for life and duty. The moral value 
 of sacrifice is determined entirely by the object of 
 it. The most admiring devotion of fallen spirits to 
 Satan in Milton's splendid Pandemonium has no 
 moral worth but only deepens the perdition. 
 
 There are nations we must love as Jesus loved 
 the Pharisees. War with them need not have malice 
 in it, nor the desire to rob or destroy for destruction's 
 sake, which is barbarism pure. The object of right- ' 
 eous war is not to kill, but to secure law and justice / 
 * by a dangerous operation.' It is to enter the terri- I 
 tory of the aggressor, and so to deal with his resources 
 for mischief as to restore the course of things and the 
 relations of peoples to those great supernationals, 
 the reign of law, the control of right, and the enjoy- 
 ment of freedom. Is it the Christian thing to repudi- 
 ate our trusteeship of these things in the world, refuse 
 to be fellow-workers with their God, and consent to 
 be walked over with all our responsibilities ? What 
 are we to do when it is clear that our non-resistance 
 to evil (even to our death) becomes the provocation 
 of evil, offers it impunity, fosters its increase, and 
 gives up the world to the scoundrels ? How escape 
 from the strange result of such an absolute principle, 
 when applied to states, that only offensive wars are 
 Christian ? Christ certainly did resist evil, resisted y 
 it actively to its destruction. He resisted it, even to 
 death in the act of doing so, and not in taking it 
 passively. And He resisted it to the entailing of 
 death on His many martyrs ; nay, even to the in- 
 
10 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 fliction of death — unless we think that the destruction 
 of Jerusalem had nothing to do with the crime of the 
 Cross or the Judge of history. A nation which, 
 in a race for power, disowns ethic at a national 
 crisis (itself being judge of the occasion) cuts itself 
 j off from humanity (whose real unity and bond is 
 in the conscience and its righteousness). And it 
 
 V^ cannot be treated except as an alien, not to say 
 vermin, to the race, whatever goodwill may keep 
 us ready to recognise sound repentance. Love is a 
 relation, and its mode of action depends not on one 
 of the parties but on both. However much we love, 
 we cannot treat the mocker of our love as we do its 
 respondent. The love remains constant, but the 
 treatment does not. The father, heart-broken over 
 his blackguard son, cannot, on an expression of 
 penitence, take him back into the home where there 
 are half a dozen young boys. The first charge on 
 divine love as holy love is the practical honouring of 
 universal righteousness. This is the profound principle 
 lost from a religion that founds Christian ethic in the 
 teaching of Christ and not in His death, and that 
 cherishes love at the cost of all atonement. The end 
 is the debasement of love. 
 
 A war like the present is not inconsistent with 
 that grateful love of the German people which 
 many cherish. It is a service to that people (though 
 that is not why we do it), and its effect should be to 
 liberate them from the hardest of taskmasters who have 
 made the kindly German name to be a moral offence 
 and an inhuman scandal in all the world. Public 
 love is the desire to see all men in the enjoyment of 
 
KILLING NO MURDER ii 
 
 free and righteous life. To punish the Germany 
 that now is is to return good for evil. It is a part 
 of the pain and conflict of the historic Redemption. 
 By a public and negligent submissiveness that too 
 tractable people has allowed those roughriders to get 
 into che saddle ; whose idea is not nationalism 
 founded on law and moving in freedom to inter- 
 national respect, but it is empire ; and it is world- 
 empire, not simply using force but founded on force, 
 brutal or scientific, and defying all that a humane 
 and especially a Christian conscience calls God. It 
 is one of their own prophets who has written — 
 
 Next to the degree of wickedness which we call devilish 
 is selfish and insolent imperiousness, proud and astute 
 indifference to common moral ends, and lastly self-seeking 
 forms of patriotism, pride of rank, and family ambition ; 
 which indeed are based on particular moral goods, but pursue 
 them in a way which comes into collision with universal 
 morality. All these grades of habitual sin we include in 
 the vast complexity of sinful action when we form the idea 
 of a kingdom of sin.^ 
 
 Public opinion in Germany has never insisted on 
 control, and never been allowed to get up its head 
 and make an effectual protest for good and all, 
 either socialist or democratic, as our English Puritan- 
 ism did, even at a regicide cost. If the extravagance 
 were allowed, it has been one of the misfortunes of 
 Lutheranism never to have executed a king, as 
 France and England both did to be free. And for 
 this public crime of docility on its part the 
 whole nation and the whole solidary world must suffer 
 one of the most awful judgments of all history. It 
 
 ^ Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, p. 338, English 
 edition ; p. 320, 2nd German edition. 
 
12 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 is not a task unworthy of love to deliver the German 
 people from its political impotence before this caste, to 
 help its old humanity and Gemiltlichkeit to practical 
 freedom, and to cut out its military cancer by a very 
 costly operation. It is in soul a people worthy for 
 whom this should be done. And the more they may 
 scorn such service in the moment of passion, the 
 more needful and humane it is that for the world's 
 sake the infatuation should be cured. To extinguish 
 in hate the great German people, even were it possible, 
 would be no worthy object for a people of Christian 
 culture, but it is worthy to reclaim nationality 
 there from its crude and barbaric phase of relapse. 
 The task may help us to work out our own salvation 
 from such dangers. For our own freedom is not yet 
 complete. War springs not (as Green well says) from 
 nationality but from an incomplete nationality, a 
 nationality that trusts to force of arms, and not to 
 law, justice, and liberty, which are the public forms 
 of Christian love. The best Christian thing we can 
 give our neighbour is the Kingdom of God and its 
 righteousness. 
 
 War is not essentially killing, and killing is here 
 no murder. And no recusancy to bear arms can 
 here justify itself on the plea that Christianity forbids 
 all bloodshed or even violence. Did Christ's scourge 
 of small cords (in the temple too) mean no more 
 than Burke's dagger ? The individual in war is the 
 organ of a moral State ; and the State does not order 
 him to kill but to occupy territory by a process in 
 which the risk to life is great. And each foe takes 
 equal risks, which in murder is not the case. But 
 
KILLING NO MURDER 13 
 
 an exaggerated value put upon life in comparison 
 with the righteousness of God is an unchristian feature 
 in much Christianity, demoralised as it is by a long 
 insular peace and a popular religion with more senti- 
 ment than conscience. It is a feature which would 
 have prevented the exploration of the world, the first 
 efforts in navigation, and most of the early stages 
 of the subjugation of nature. We are to love our 
 neighbour as ourself. But loving one's self does not 
 mean sparing one's self. It does not mean cosseting 
 our own life. The Christian man loves himself 
 as the agent and servant in the world of God's / 
 righteous and historic Kingdom established in' 
 Christ's death. Christ died not for a scattered elect 
 but for the conversion of history, by making the 
 kingdoms of this world the provinces of another. 
 The Christian man loves himself for the sake of that 
 Christ ; for Whom, and for the purposes of His death, 
 he dies daily in whatever form duty prescribes, 
 whether public or private. ' Godly men have a 
 public spirit,' says Goodwin. The Christian risks 
 his life in this interest. If he love his neighbour 
 as himself, his Christian self, that means that it is 
 for the same sake and for the same service. And, 
 if he spare not his own life for the Kingdom, he must 
 not shrink from risking his fellow-citizen's in stopping 
 the enemy of that Kingdom when duty takes that 
 public form. Christ ruined many careers, and X 
 brought sorrow and death to many a soul. Is 
 there no such thing lawful to a Christian as a war 
 of chastisement on due cause ? May the nations not 
 be the agent of God's judgment on a nation, as on 
 a criminal ? Would it be an unchristian thing for 
 
14 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 a nation to be the agent of God's judgment on the 
 Turk for the massacres of millions of Armenians 
 in circumstances of horror which as yet we but 
 poorly know. And, if a nation may serve God at 
 all in a way so solemn, is it superior Christianity 
 for individuals in it to hang back, to live on a sacrifice 
 of others which they contemn ? 
 
 We may be told that no Christian can take part 
 in any action which transgresses the Golden Rule, 
 that we should do unto others as we would that they 
 should do unto us. I will not go into the severe 
 change that this would bring into the lives of many 
 who hold that view and press that rule, and who 
 yet are remarkable successes in our radically egoist, 
 keenly competitive war of business. But I will take 
 the precept, and take it on the highest, and therefore 
 the truest and most decisive, level of its application. I 
 will take it as a great saint might take it, not according 
 to the wishes and woulds of the average man. What 
 form would the saint's obedience here take ? If he 
 spoke from his saintly height, would he not say this, 
 ^ I would above all things be kept in holiness, and 
 be kept from sin. Holiness is more than life, and 
 sin is worse than death. I would that I might 
 die rather than sin. And, if you are sure, by any 
 message from God which has not reached me, that 
 I am going in a measurable time to commit a deadly 
 sin, I will not blame you for killing me if that be 
 the only way to prevent it. And, if I have deserved 
 death, I wish to give myself up to die.' The true 
 penitent, as Luther says — Cupit justitiam laesam 
 ulcisci — * I will bear the indignation of the Lord.' 
 If such a man is to do to others as he would that 
 
KILLING NO MURDER 15 
 
 others do to him, is he wrong by Christian ethic, when 
 he perceives a deadly sin begin in his fallen brother, 
 in treating him as he desires to be treated himself, 
 and at least risking his brother's life in the process 
 of averting his sin or its effects ? The precepts of 
 Christ have not a national application, as some say 
 they have ; but, if they had, and with those who 
 say they have, it does seem as if that were not an 
 unfair use to make of the Golden Rule in relation 
 to the killing in war. 
 
 It is often pointed out that if there be not the 
 right of war upon due cause on the part of a State, 
 the refusal of taxes is entailed, not only in war-time 
 but also in time of peace, since a huge part of the 
 national resources is spent on an army and navy. 
 The holder of that view is able to earn his living in 
 comfort in a State which can keep its order and 
 existence at a crisis only on the war principle — by 
 police or soldiers. His livelihood is possible only on 
 immoral conditions. To pay taxes, then, without 
 being able to earmark them, is to^be as much a partner 
 in the war as fighting would be — with the added 
 enormity of paying others to do an immoral thing 
 which the protester evades by buying himself off. 
 In so denying national brotherhood he renounces the 
 actual, concrete, providential brotherhood, and does 
 it through a dreamy, ideal, and self-willed one. 
 Those who take the line I describe are art and part 
 in the nation's war if they do not leave the country 
 for one whose Government is pledged never to fight 
 — whether as too good or too proud. Yet we 
 even heal the wounded to send them back to fight 
 again. If the purist ethic is to be thorough, its 
 
1 6 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 advocates could perhaps only be quite faithful by 
 setting up a community in some vast wilderness 
 entirely detached from history or society and their 
 obligations. The experiment has been tried often, 
 and it has always gone to pieces as ethical sectarian- 
 ism run wild. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE JUDGMENT OF CRIME BY CRIME 
 
 It used to be said of Lord John Russell that he 
 was prepared at any moment to take command of 
 the Channel fleet. And such is the self-confidence 
 of some homespun moralists and the gay demo- 
 cracy. There is no national question too great, too 
 old, or too complex to be handled on the principles 
 which guide a home. The foreign policy of some 
 especially would apply to the intricacy of modern 
 problems and the relations with military or back- 
 ward nations the mild methods of a mass meeting. 
 For others, historic legacies and delicate situations 
 make a jungle through which a straight path can 
 just be hewn. The world would be worked on the lines 
 of a trades-union whose ultima ratio is the war of 
 classes and the battle of the strike. This is often 
 but another phase of that unschooled passion of im- 
 patience and that faith in force which mark the 
 idealist without experience in the actual handling of 
 affairs. It is another phase of that faith in force 
 which, before the war, had come to infect so many 
 sections of society — women, workmen, or aristocrats. 
 You must expect nothing by persuasion, only by 
 pressure. That is the war principle. It would make 
 law by force instead of handling force by law. It 
 
1 8 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 distrusts pacific methods, even with a pacifist pro- 
 gramme. There is a curious alliance between religious 
 pacifism and labour pacifism. Pacifism is a plank 
 in the programme of a section of Labour which would 
 y not object in principle to a general strike if it pro- 
 ♦ mised success in bringing society to its knees at the 
 cost especially of the women and children. That 
 is a policy of force not different in kind from the 
 Kaiser's, and it betrays the same habit of heart and 
 mind. But it is absolutely different from all that the 
 finer pacifism intends, which in public affairs trusts 
 in justice even more than love. There can be no 
 real co-operation between the two movements — 
 between any shade of Quakerism, for instance, and 
 the I.L.P. It is not possible, morally or economi- 
 cally, just to shear a path through the troubles of 
 the time. Before urging democratic control it would 
 give confidence if the democracy could show what 
 controlled it. 
 
 But even to the more ethical and persuasive 
 pacifism it may be respectfully suggested to be 
 more subtle in order to be more true and effectual. 
 The idealists should remember that the most incon- 
 venient facts are largely what the ideas of the past 
 have made them. No less than ideas they are locked 
 in the skein of the movement of thought. They 
 fashion the ideas of the future, even if they are not 
 their source. They shape the form which moral 
 action, however ideal, at any stage must take. 
 Besides the power of glowing to ideas there is the 
 faculty of gauging situations and weighing facts. 
 And without a somewhat careful culture the two 
 may be in an inverse ratio to each other ; whereof 
 
JUDGMENT OF CRIME BY CRIME 19 
 
 the practical end is madness and debacle, as Germany 
 shows. The sense of a situation is a very different 
 thing from the intuition of thought, and a more 
 precious. We have a dread of casuistry which is 
 not without ground, but, for all that, let us be alive 
 to the intricacy of moral situations, and especially 
 public situations, not to be seized by the thick finger 
 and thumb that serve the individual so well in his 
 daily job. Let us be more subtle, for it is to be more 
 sympathetic, more understanding. Let us recognise 
 the firstrateness of the second best. Idealism severed 
 from historic fact, positive faith, and moral sagacity 
 is one of the most destructive explosives known. 
 
 It seems absurd, for instance, to the very plain mind 
 that war should be admitted to be a crime on either 
 side, and yet recognised to be the only right course 
 to take. But so it is, and let us repress the jibe about 
 Jesuitry. Casuistry everyone has to practise ; the 
 question is whether we should use amateur or skilled. 
 The short, straight, and swift road to a given point is 
 the track of a shell, with the shell's effect. Life 
 would be much easier if our alternatives were always 
 a plain black or white, a sheer yes or no, a clear war 
 or peace. We should then need but little guidance 
 — only enough vitality to go through. But life is 
 not so. The moment we rise beyond its most naive 
 and natural levels, and begin to realise what choice 
 is in a complex civilisation, we discover that it is 
 otherwise. Our worst difficulty is not to do the clear 
 right ; we have the other strain on us — to discern it 
 as it rises dim from a troubled sea. And those who 
 possess that vision are our best guides. Moral flair 
 is often the most valuable kind of moral force, 
 
 c 2 
 
20 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 especially for those in any authority. We have 
 constantly to do with junctures where our only choice 
 is not between bald right and wrong, but between 
 two forms of wrong — a greater and a less. In such 
 cases an honest and experienced casuist may be of 
 more use to us than a heroic preceptualist or an exalte 
 martyr ; and moral sagacity stands us in better stead 
 than moral dictation. It is quite true, as Cardinal 
 de Retz said, that we never come into a fix like that 
 except as the result of some prior occasion where we 
 did have a choice between right and wrong. But 
 the past cannot be as if it had never been, and we 
 have to deal with an actual situation and its moral 
 exit. The moral exit is then a choice of evils. The 
 only right thing to do then is not to choose the pure 
 right but only the less wrong. And not to choose the 
 less wrong is to choose wrongly — unless we refuse to 
 choose at all, but stand aside and shirk the issue ; which 
 is the worst of all, and makes us accessories of un- 
 righteousness. We then fall from being moral persons 
 to mere animate things, and we drift along, or are 
 swept along, on a current, without helm or oar. It 
 may be wrong either to pay or not pay a gambling debt. 
 The moral is. Don't gamble. But the actual duty is 
 either the one or the other. It is un-Christian to have 
 more wives than one. But the missionary among 
 his converts is faced with a situation where the 
 relevant thing is not the abstract question of mono- 
 gamy but the concrete one, whether the convert 
 with half a dozen wives is to send five adrift with 
 their families, or to go on with his existing obligations 
 without adding more. It is a matter of choosing the 
 minor wrong. To take the stale case. If a bully 
 
JUDGMENT OF CRIME BY CRIME 21 
 
 meet you with your wife in a lonely road, it may be a 
 choice between sacrificing his life or the honour of one 
 to whom you are under the marriage oath of protection. 
 To say you must not kill him, if he so insist that there 
 is only killing for it, to say life is so sacred that 
 even his may not be taken at need in such a case, 
 but you must stand by and trust God to strike the 
 man helpless before his crime — to say that is simply 
 to discard morals and trust miracles. It is throwing 
 on God the dirty work you were called to do. It 
 is to step out of the category of moral beings. It 
 is to tempt God and force His hand. We could not 
 continue to make much of human life unless we 
 loved honour more than that. 
 
 The only course left at a given juncture may be 
 the violent solution of war. It is pedantic at such 
 a time to talk about two blacks not making a white. 
 Brown may be practically better than either, and the 
 only possibility. It is pedantic also to talk of war 
 being no solution. Of course it is no rational solution. 
 And, were mankind chiefly rational, the remark! 
 would have its effect. But mankind is not. And 
 it would not be entirely admirable if it were. The 
 solution of life and the world is not chiefly rational. 
 If war is to be abolished it must be by other than 
 rational means. It must be by means which change 
 the man much more than his conclusions or even 
 convictions. It is beside the mark also to say that 
 war settles nothing except who is best equipped and 
 endowed for it. That is not the case. It settles 
 the past at least. It is the end of an age. This 
 war definitely ends the Victorian age. The issue 
 
22 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 behind all war may be much vaster than the clash of 
 rival nations, and in this case it certainly is. What 
 we might think the juster of the two sides might lose, 
 but the conflict is not therefore futile for the large 
 course either of the world or of the Kingdom of God. 
 
 \ Evidently God has another purpose with history 
 than just to reward the good and punish the bad in 
 a distributive way. He is working out a purpose of 
 \ Redemption whose goal in a Kingdom is sure to our 
 faith but His method is hidden to our sight. It is 
 more didactic than useful also to tell us that war is 
 the renunciation of Christian ethic. Of course it is. 
 But that would be a good consideration to offer only 
 if mankind were Christian. It would then be to the 
 point to tell them that they were renouncing their 
 own moral principles. As a matter of fact men 
 are mostly not Christian. Their ethic is not 
 Christian even when their creed is. And to offer 
 
 ^ the esoteric Christian ethic for public use when 
 national passion is rising or loose is to stroke a 
 crocodile or tickle a tiger. The right and fit thing 
 to do then is to fall back on an inferior ethic and 
 make the best of it. Christ was not among the 
 
 ^ ineffectual doctrinaires. His Sermon on the Mount 
 had not the nations of the^ earth in view, deeply 
 national as His work and crisis were. It contemplated 
 the social ethic of individuals, and of regenerate 
 
 I individuals. In so far as it thought of relations with 
 
 j the world, it was the relations of Christian individuals 
 to pagans, not of State to State. Also it concerned 
 Christian relations not to sympathetic pagans, but to 
 pagans who persecuted the Christian ; and who perse- 
 cuted him because of his Christianity, and not because 
 
JUDGMENT OF CRIME BY CRIME 23 
 
 he was a disagreeable Christian. Until men become 
 Christian indeed, junctures will arise in which, when 
 everything has been done, nothing is left for it but 
 war — unless we are prepared to give everything up to 
 the devil, and see the world overrun by his angels ; 
 unless, that is, there is no alternative for a con- 
 science between the highest Christian ethic and moral ^ 
 anarchy. If the Christian man live in society, it is ] 
 quite impossible for him to live upon the precepts \ 
 of the Sermon on the Mount. But also it is not! 
 possible at a half-developed stage to live in actual 
 relations of life and duty on its principle except as an 
 ideal, (We shall see later what the practical principle 
 is in contact with a semi-pagan society.) Those 
 who have been very urgent about Christ's precepts 
 have yet, in many cases, made great fortunes by a 
 skilful and earnest use of the commercial and com- 
 petitive conditions on which society works, and which 
 represent the peaceful form of the war principle. 
 That form may be thrown off at any moment. Ger- 
 man commercialism has revealed its true nature and 
 ambition in its militarism at the select hour. But 
 even the peace form does not set forth the principle of 
 the Sermon, and the successful Quaker must bow 
 in the House of Rimmon, and enjoy all the securities 
 of a society on the natural level, protected in the 
 egoism of business by police and soldiers. He must 
 do so even in the pushing of his principles. He 
 uses the facilities and practices of an alien and 
 unchristian social order to do so. He is not to be 
 blamed. He is honestly trying to convert business. 
 Only as he uses business in a way to transcend its 
 egoist principles so let him consent to use war. 
 
u 
 
 24 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 So let him not think that he is profiting nothing 
 by the worldly and the war idea, and lending no 
 countenance to it. He is. He profits much. 
 
 Of course war is far below the Christian level. 
 Society altogether is, and will long be. The fallacy is 
 to suppose that it is a Christian ethic or none with us, 
 that the only Christian ethic is preceptual, that a 
 man can live anywhere but in a prairie or a balloon 
 on a purist and unhistoric interpretation of the 
 Christian ideal. That ideal is not a matter of pre- 
 cept but of principle. And principle can only work 
 through personalities, which cannot be thoroughly 
 moralised till they are born again. Principle which 
 is to affect society works by permeation and not by 
 insulation, by inspiration and not injunction. 
 
 We have another example of the literal, purist, 
 and doctrinaire fallacy offered in connection with 
 the ideal of Christian perfection and sinlessness. 
 The perfect thing is really perfect growth. It is 
 doing the very best for Christ with the actual situa- 
 tion, and preparing a better, with which again the 
 same must be done. It is not retiring from it. It is 
 making the most of it for the final consummation. 
 It is leavening time with Eternity. ' As many of you 
 as are perfect do so and so.' Yet, in the next breath, 
 ' Not as though we were already perfect, but we press 
 on.' The state of sinlessness has been regarded 
 by many pietists as the total, not to say sudden, 
 extinction of sin from a certain point of life onward. 
 But such is not the New Testament view. There 
 it is enough, for earthly life at least, that sin should 
 not have dominion. It may recur, but always with 
 
JUDGMENT OF CRIME BY CRIME 25 
 
 diminishing frequency. The other principle is all 
 the time gaining ground. Battles are lost, but the 
 campaign is being won. The converted drunkard 
 may relapse more than once without losing faith 
 or hope. The falls grow fewer and fewer. If other- 
 wise conceived, sinlessness is abstract, and may be- 
 come puerile. It is a question of our real lord before 
 it becomes a question of our actual habit, of what 
 commands us and not of our degree of success with 
 the new obedience. Christ is our perfection, not we 
 ourselves, so long as His dominion grows in us and 
 over us. 
 
 The fact is that there is a whole moral tract of 
 progress between egoist anarchy and Christian ethic i 
 over which the world is making its painful and > 
 dreadful way ; that this tract of moral growth is 
 not without God or the action of His righteousness ; y 
 that God, with Christ in final view, God in Christ, has ' 
 His ways of dealing actively with evil on that plane, 
 and requires our help and service there ; that we 
 may so stand aloof in an idealist excellence that our 
 faith fails Him in His hour of need and agony. We 
 may desert our Lord while we follow a dream of good 
 in which we slip out of the providential order where He 
 has set us and our task. We have to do our Christian 
 part in a moral region which is below the level of 
 Christian ethic but not of Christian duty, and which is 
 not detached from our righteousness, nor unhallowed 
 by conscience. The natural conscience can never 
 replace the supernatural, but it can never be detached 
 from it. It is its fore-court, its prelude, its minority, 
 its schoolmaster. The stage of moral growth which 
 
26 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 
 / 
 
 is below the Christian ethic is still within the world- 
 righteousness, the world-rule, and the historic move- 
 ment of the Christian God, and it has its divine 
 lien upon the conscience of the Christian man even 
 when the Christian height cannot be attained. The 
 economy of the God of Redemption is still latent 
 in the Judaist and legalist stage of every people; 
 and the righteousness of that stage is still in the 
 scheme and movement of the Kingdom of God, 
 however inchoate. Our final Christian Redemption 
 is to our present Christianity what that was to 
 Judaism, but our present stage is not therefore 
 unchristian. In adjusting our moral methods from 
 our height to the crudity of those below, in doing 
 to the least of these, Christ's brethren, the kind of 
 righteousness that fits and raises their moral stage 
 (as when we teach children to do the right thing by 
 bribes or prizes, or when we take a business case 
 to law) we do it unto Him. This is not mere 
 naturalism, for we do not rest there. We do not 
 canonise that stage, we only tolerate it and improve 
 it out of existence. There are concessions for hard- 
 ness of heart, like the State law of divorce. An eye 
 for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is not now Christian, 
 but it was the Christianity of its time. It was a great 
 advance and curb in its time on the mad and 
 indiscriminate revenge where penalty had no propor- 
 tion to crime, where Lamech boasted of killing a 
 young man for merely hurting him. And in such a 
 stage it had its divine right and obligation. The 
 elements of this world are not all undivine. And if 
 we can replace them by no higher principle at any 
 juncture it is wrong to deny their right. Without 
 
JUDGMENT OF CRIME BY CRIME 27 
 
 them the better cannot come, but the worse may come 
 easily enough. The consecrated life (in the pietist sense 
 of the word) is not always the moral life. It is often 
 but individualist, sometimes egoist, and occasionally 
 unpleasant. And it is on the wrong moral track 
 when it sees no divine value or duty in any conduct 
 except what is inspired by a frame of feeling dis- 
 tinctly Christian. Action without Christian ideas 
 may yet be in the Christian interest and service. 
 The unconverted man who makes righteousness the v^^ 
 first thing is higher than the converted who makes ^ * 
 it but second or third by a false notion of charity. ' 
 The unregenerate are not morally worthless, however 
 helpless, before Christ's God. 
 
 A Christian nation like our own, that was growing . -^ 
 rapidly more Christian in its social sympathy and • » 
 action, may yet have, in a fight for its life, to defer 
 some of these ideals, and turn aside, and go down \ | 
 from the new transfiguration into the valley to deal • • 
 in Christ's name with the lunatics there, lest all divine 
 righteousness be lost for the world. What is quite 
 intolerable is that a Christian nation should sacrifice 
 everything for generations to its army, and spend its 
 supreme force in cultivating a militarist policy for the 
 conquest of the world, and in preparing deliberately, 
 and wdth the support of its Church, a situation in which 
 a Christian ethic can have no place or possibility. 
 That is casting off the Kingdom of God with ostenta- 
 tion. To make such a policy impossible is a Christian 
 duty, even if it mean some considerable postponement 
 of the Christian ideal, and a temporary reversion 
 to that stage of ethic which God did employ, but 
 which He was labouring to leave behind. The old 
 
28 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 is better for the moment, and for the purpose forced 
 
 upon us by contact with peoples as yet in the stage 
 
 we had hoped we were leaving behind. It is not 
 
 always reactionary to go back or go slow. The 
 
 brake is a real instrument of progress. Unless we 
 
 are to deny all providential care by God of inferior 
 
 civilisations, He Himself goes back from the final ethic 
 
 of His Son to grasp and guide up to it the more natural 
 
 and barbaric stage. God Himself, who has all the 
 
 stages of discipline in His service, has to go back 
 
 on occasion to one mainly outgrown. Every time He 
 
 uses disease to punish sin or calamity as the end of 
 
 crime He goes back to the use of force. He has His 
 
 divine opportunisms and compromises, which are so 
 
 far from being surrenders that they are disciplines. 
 
 They are not concessions for peace but strategies for 
 
 a purpose, not arrangements for safety but policies 
 
 of salvation. The better day is dawning on the 
 
 whole. We can mark its growth. We can sometimes 
 
 tra(::e the way in which He is forwarding the better 
 
 stage by action relevant to the inferior conditions. 
 
 He does not do evil that good may come ; but, 
 
 evil being there. He uses it to its own destruction, 
 
 and He uses us in such action. He directs the minor 
 
 crime so as to be a judgment on the greater. A 
 
 r Christian might make his public protest against 
 
 \ war, and then go and take his part in the Lord's 
 
 I controversy on the battlefield as a second best. A 
 
 I Christian might work with all his might against 
 
 \ the outbreak of a revolution, but, failing there, he 
 
 \ might take his place on one or other side of the 
 
 \ Qxvil war. He might even obey the new government 
 
 as an accomplished fact, of which he had to make 
 
JUDGMENT OF CRIME BY CRIME 29 
 
 the Christian best, and turn it to the most account 
 for the Kingdom of God, which uses many forms of 
 government, and even exploits war, though it must 
 not provoke it or cultivate it as a policy. Man's 
 eruptions are always being used as God's corrections, 
 and his wrath can work the righteousness of God. 
 The crime, or the crimes, of a French Revolution 
 may be the only means of abolishing the prior and 
 Satanic situation. 
 
 Often it has been pointed out how sin is punished 
 with sin. The penalty of sin is more sin, and more 
 complicated sin, as murder needs not only more 
 murder, but also lying, and always cleverer lying, to 
 cover it up. But does this mean the consolida- 
 tion of the realm of sin, and the gradual matting 
 up of the world in its tissue ? It cannot mean that. 
 For, while the growth of good consolidates good, 
 the growth of sin is really solvent in its effect. The 
 more sin, the more distrust and the less solidarity. 
 It dissolves the personality, and it dissolves the 
 society; while goodness unites both the heart and 
 the people. So God, moving in His mysterious way, 
 and mocking by His ironic subtlety both the clever 
 deviJry of the wicked and the merely stalwart ethic 
 of pedantic impossibles, sets sin against sin, plays one 
 sin off against another, and by one brings another 
 to naught. God's will is done when sin with the 
 sin uppermost is destroyed by sin with the sin in 
 hand. He accepts war to destroy war. If in any 
 juncture the exit is but by the minor wrong, it is 
 less sin to use t^e minor evil than it would be to 
 stand aside, however devoutly, and let God's enemy 
 
30 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 have free course and be glorified. And there are 
 such junctures for all but quietists, who can be 
 used by the devil with more effect than they let 
 themselves be used by God. God is not the less holy 
 because in His government of the world He employs 
 sin against sin, and sides with the minor ill to bring 
 the mightier to nought. He accepts a situation He 
 did not create ; but He accepts in a very concrete 
 way — to create the new situation out of it. In a 
 concrete, historic way, I say. The crude notion is that 
 God should by His holy and uncompromising power 
 override and bear down human sin, dropping fire 
 from heaven on it, but not working through it in a 
 strategy. That is an outcrop of the immoral passion 
 for miracle in morals. ' I will not attack the bully 
 who attacks my wife. If God wills that she shall 
 escape He will smite him to the ground.' That is 
 tempting the Lord our God. It is putting life before 
 honour. God does not act so. He uses men. He 
 ( comes to judgment with His saints. It is by a way 
 of history that God deals with human evil. He did 
 
 v/ so conclusively in the historic Cross of His Son ; 
 
 ^ who was not crucified in the sky as a spectacle, but 
 * as the result of a very concrete national situation, 
 which He did not shirk and did much to create. He 
 might conceivably have shirked it, and wandered 
 humbly and piously about the world, giving the 
 public no offence, holding conferences of the mystic- 
 minded, and * deepening the spiritual life.' But 
 He forced a national issue, and brought it to a head 
 ^ which shortly meant the devastation of Judea, the 
 destruction of Jerusalem, volumes of misery, and 
 torrents of blood. He knew it involved this. He 
 
JUDGMENT OF CRIME BY CRIME 31 
 
 meant that judgment on Israel. And, if all this 
 be dismissed as Jesuitic subtlety and casuistry, it 
 can only be by discharging God from the strategy 
 of history, or reducing His Providence to be a mere 
 spectator of the game of peoples, with an occasional 
 blow when it broke bounds. But His way of recon- 
 ciliation comes closer to things than that. He takes 
 a hand in the game. His method reflects the com- 
 bination of wrath and mercy, of Judgment and 
 Grace. These are one, for they are both harmonious , 
 in Himself, and they are directed on the same object ( 
 with the world. I should go a long way to hear a 
 discourse by a competent person with the views I am 
 rejecting if he would let me suggest his text. It would 
 be Romans xi. 28. ' As touching the Gospel they 
 are enemies for your sake ; but, as touching the -^ 
 election they are beloved for the Father's sake.' 
 God both hates and loves the same object, slays him 
 and makes him alive, makes war, and through it ^ 
 judgment, and thereby peace. In the present situa- 
 tion such a principle means among other things that 
 we may hate the German State of to-day in the name 
 of the same God as teaches us to love the German 
 people for the sake of a past generation of culture 
 and world-service, and for a present remnant of 
 those who would rather continue that note than 
 sink to the ' high politics ' of the hour, only they 
 are overborne. This seems a silly subtlety to a 
 certain blunt or slashing type of mind — that God 
 should hate and love the same object. But then 
 St. Paul was such a Jesuit. He actually thought 
 that men as they are were hateful to God, Who 
 loved them for what they might be if He had His 
 
32 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 way with them as He took it in Christ. They incur 
 the hostility of God and His judgment as they defy 
 His Gospel and Kingdom, yet He loves them into 
 the service of both by His very judgments. We 
 love Germany as Christ did the Pharisees to whom 
 He gave no quarter. And it were better that very 
 many of these our brethren should be killed, and 
 their nation paralysed (as with old Israel) than that 
 their policy should destroy the world's righteousness 
 and the humanity of the Kingdom of God among 
 men. For if Germany won it is the moral order of 
 the universe that would be confounded. Christ 
 loved Israel to its destruction for the sake of that 
 Kingdom of God which He loved more, and for 
 which He counted His life not dear and His blood 
 well shed — more precious blood than man's. One of 
 the boons of the war may be to lift the pietist type 
 of faith to a more cosmic and moral note. 
 
 War is the greatest of all the awful and com- 
 plex moral situations of the world — second only to 
 the final judgment day. It is a moral monstrosity 
 if only because it is purely destructive. It is moral 
 pestilence. It is a wrong on both sides. But it 
 may be the only moral choice left. It may be the 
 less of two immoralities, and, in so far at least, a 
 negative contribution to righteousness. It is the 
 course more promising morally at the particular 
 juncture. For peace at any price can be the abnega- 
 tion of morality entirely, the refusal of even a 
 negative contribution to righteousness. After all 
 we have done to set India on its feet and keep it in 
 trust till its population is of political age, it would 
 
JUDGMENT OF CRIME BY CRIME 33 
 
 be a greater crime than war to leave it as a promenade 
 for such a Germany as has now been revealed. At 
 the present time it was a choice for us between war 
 and allowing the world to be overrun by a power whose 
 avowed programme is to sacrifice everything to power, 
 and to abjure national morality whenever it thought 
 that its own interests demanded it. This policy is 
 to attack humanity, to declare war on righteousness, 
 and to kill the very Kingdom of God in the eye. 
 And to arrest it is the duty of those who believe in 
 that Kingdom if it is still conceived as a Kingdom 
 of world-righteousness in a moral Redeemer unto 
 blood, and not merely as a sect of the gentle way 
 in a blessed saint. Christ's world salvation hung 
 on an act of saving judgment, and judgment is still 
 a factor of the saving sum. And if you say man 
 may not be the agent of God's judgment you simply 
 rule Providence out of the interior of history. 
 
 What religion most needs is moralising especially 
 on the social scale. But it has become demoralised 
 by a sentiment which kills moral sympathy when, 
 in the name of superior religion, people can stand 
 by in a pious paralysis, and see a whole nation and 
 its Church confessing in public and responsible words 
 the moral repudiation I have named, exalting cruelty 
 to be a line of policy, and pursuing an education 
 which gives its children a holiday to rejoice and play 
 because of the * Lusitania.' And can it be said that it 
 is a moralised religion that encourages men to sit at 
 home making money and feeling good within a ring 
 of safety and comfort made by the corpses of our 
 best — to sit at home inditing peace, and write oif 
 their sacrifice as an inferior morality ? If that be 
 
34 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 Christ, conscience has outgrown Him. It may or 
 
 may not be the priggery some call it, but it is losing 
 
 Christ's eternal Cross in His occasional precepts. It 
 
 is severing the sacrificial instinct of love from its 
 
 moral tonic and saving element of holy judgment, 
 
 ~y even to blood. It is only a proletarian ethic, which 
 
 I ^r, loses moral passion in ready sentiment, is indifferent 
 
 V *- 'A. , to moral appeal if only there is tangible kindness, 
 
 ■^^ f^ » ) ^^^ welcomes the almoner with his doles while it 
 
 ^ h"^* stones the prophet with his call. There is now, 
 
 indeed, no chosen nation as nation, no nation with 
 
 a divine reversion of the world. God does not thus 
 
 prefer one people to another. But still a nation 
 
 ~7 is elect to service and sacrifice for the righteousness 
 
 * of the divine Kingdom. It owes to that service its 
 
 real and final right to exist. And the present issue 
 
 has long ceased to be — ever since Belgium it has ceased 
 
 to be — 2i struggle between peoples equally egoist and 
 
 ambitious, to whom the Christian moralist could say, 
 
 ' A plague on both your houses.' It has become a con- 
 
 7 test for the righteousness of the New Humanity in the 
 
 ' Kingdom of God now by one side openly disavowed. 
 
 We are free to believe that this is the act of the German 
 
 State rather than of the German people. But till the 
 
 nobler people deal with this ignoble State, and free 
 
 themselves from it, they must share the responsibility. 
 
 In the German view a nation at a crisis must be 
 
 absolutely egoistic. It has no morality. It founds 
 
 the State on force. It disowns humanity. It 
 
 rejects the idea of a Kingdom of God. It feels 
 
 entitled to sacrifice the whole of humanity to its 
 
 own safety and monopoly. It is a member of no 
 
 greater society. There is no power above the State. 
 
JUDGMENT OF CRIME BY CRIME 35 
 
 In a word it is not a moral entity. This is not even 
 Hebraic. It is purely pagan. It is worse. It is 
 Satanic. It fears no God and regards no man. 
 
 This is a monstrosity greater to moral insight 
 than the war it causes. If an individual spoke like 
 that we should call him devilish, and rally our 
 Christian effort to destroy the works of such a Satan 
 and save the public from him. The enormity is even 
 greater when a body like a nation does it, which 
 can only cohere in the principle of membership and '^ 
 sacrifice. We all unite to reject such a worse than 
 pagan view. A nation is a moral entity in the grand 
 style. It has creative traditions and corporate duties. 
 It has moral entails transmitted through ages, moral 
 judgments pursuing it through centuries, and moral 
 glories fertile for centuries yet to be. It has world 
 duties as surely as souls have, though their form may 
 not be the same. A soul is saved by the righteous- 
 ness of faith which may lead to the suffering gladly ^ 
 of wrong, but a nation is saved by the righteousness ^ 
 of the Kingdom's works and the public judgments 
 of God. It has outward duties prescribed by its 
 place in the fellowship of nations as truly as those of 
 individuals are prescribed outwardly by their place 
 in the living society in which they are held. They 
 are positive, national responsibilities to God's King- 
 dom in the world, according to the quasi-person- 
 ality that belongs to the nation as a moral unit no 
 less necessary or sacred for humanity than the 
 family. Righteousness is the public form of love. ^ 
 
 And yet pacifism disowns one of the first of these 
 duties ; which is not to make war, but to see that 
 public righteousness is done, even at the cost of war 
 
36 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 with the nation that lives for making war, and 
 whose whole organisation is entirely subordinate 
 to that end. To renounce that responsibility is to 
 disown a national morality when a great crisis of 
 public righteousness comes. It is to accept the 
 German ethic. It is to say that the nation in a 
 world crisis has no ethic, no positive duty as a nation 
 to God's Kingdom, that individuals may take up 
 certain forms of philanthropy and religious culture, 
 but they may not abet a positive ethic in the nation, 
 or a duty to its past and its place — only the negative 
 ethic of keeping out of things (and coining money). 
 It repudiates in practice the principle of active, 
 concrete, national duty both to our people and to 
 the world, and especially to the weak peoples. The 
 nation, in a struggle for existence to serve universal 
 justice, liberty, and chivalry against an immoral 
 power which expressly repudiates all three, has no 
 moral call, and has no right to require the help of 
 K its members to do its public duty to God's Kingdom 
 on earth. Extremes meet. That is in principle the 
 German position — no national obligation to God's 
 Kingdom on earth. The one puts peace before right- 
 eousness as the other puts war. But the principle 
 is the same — abstract and non-political piety (in 
 which Germany abounds) at the cost of historic and 
 public righteousness — sentimental religion of a pietist 
 cast, which must not meddle with drastic politics 
 — only, * business as usual.' Yet a world righteous- 
 ness is the one purpose of Him Who in His Cross has 
 a property in every soul, and a lien on every con- 
 science. The mightiest of the world forces is the 
 historic purpose of a righteous God. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 WAR AND LOVE 
 
 There came into my hands recently the prospectus 
 of a society for the promotion of a pacifist programme 
 on religious lines. It may be useful to take this 
 programme as one disquieting symptom of a tendency 
 in recent religion which takes many other forms, 
 all indicating the impotence of a type of religion 
 which preaches love without judgment either in the 
 Cross, or history, or life, a love which seems wholly 
 sympathetic, and if righteous at all only on the 
 individual scale which takes saintliness for salvation. 
 The document runs as follows : — 
 
 I. That Love, as revealed and interpreted in the life 
 and death of Christ, involves more than we have yet seen, 
 that it is the only power by which evil can be overcome, and 
 the only sufficient basis of human society. 
 
 One seems to have heard this note before, with 
 its winsome ideal and its moral inadequacy. Cer- 
 tainly Christian Love involves more than we have 
 yet seen. There is nothing so luminous to whose 
 deep nature we are so dull. But are our friends 
 going to deepen our vision ? I wish they could. But 
 it can only be done by a Cross they do not seem to 
 grasp, whose first loving concern with an evil world 
 is, for both John and Paul, righteousness at any price 
 
 37 
 
X 
 
 38 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 (Rom. i. 17). Love has its place rather within 
 the Church than between societies like nation and 
 nation, where it reigns as righteousness. There is 
 no suggestion that the Love canonised in this pro- 
 gramme is more than sympathy at Christian pitch, 
 or that Christian truth is more than the inner light 
 turned full on. There is no suggestion that the 
 New Testament has to deal with something a world 
 more than love as the instinctive heart understands 
 it, namely holy love, love as the moral absolute, 
 with a heart of grace and a method of judgment ; 
 that the prime note of the Cross of Christ and of the 
 love there is the note of God's righteousness in a 
 universal and eternal Kingdom, a righteousness that 
 did not spare His only Son ; that this righteousness 
 was by that Cross much more than revealed and 
 interpreted ; that it took action there once for all 
 as the crisis in the one historic conflict of the whole 
 moral universe ; and there set up the principle that 
 makes the kingdoms of the world, by a holy war, 
 but provinces of the Kingdom of God. There is no 
 sign of a suspicion that the chief source of recent 
 religious degeneration is the abuse of love by its 
 severance from this righteousness ; or that the great 
 International we weary for is something much more 
 virile, searching, and effective than Love as here put. 
 There is no wisdom offered for our guidance in that 
 hardest of questions — how to adjust an abstract 
 ideal to the duties of our relative and actual situa- 
 tion. Any amateur can put up a non possumus. 
 The project betrays a somewhat cloistered idea of 
 life and the world in its sanguine conviction that 
 Love, reiniorccd by Christ, is going to end evil and 
 
WAR AND LOVE 39 
 
 establish society. But the one thing needful is 
 neither to love nor to perceive the excellency of 
 love, but it is the certainty that at the long last this 
 blessed power is going to win. The Christian gift to 
 us is not Love but Love's final and eternal mastery. 
 And we can be sure of that (i.e. love is worth while 
 for life, and is a foundation for religion) only if in 
 principle it has won. And that is secured in the 
 Act of Christ's Cross for ever. But it is so secured 
 only through the final conquest of evil there, its last 
 judgment by the holy, and the practical hallowing 
 there of the righteousness eternal. It is secured by 
 something there which is not even remotely sug- 
 gested by the type of religion and reconciliation 
 represented by the programme under notice. What 
 that offers us is but the religious counterpart of the 
 literary sect of a generation ago whose motto was 
 ' Love is enough.' 
 
 And, generally, the religious basis of this sym- 
 pathetic but too facile idealism misses what has 
 been called the moral cruciality of the Cross for the 
 world — the utter perdition from sin in society, and 
 the final tragedy of salvation by its judgment. A 
 covering statement says that our only hope is a 
 change of heart. ' And this is the change of heart — to 
 renounce selfishness and to live in love.' It is the 
 note of the mystic group with a faith non-positive and 
 churchless, a saving faith in spiritual works. It is 
 the climax of a generation of genial and gentle religion 
 with the nerve of the Cross cut; which, therefore, 
 breaks in our hand at a great historic crisis for lack of 
 the moral note, tonic, radical, and redemptive. A 
 loving heart and selfless life not only cannot save a 
 
40 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 world that beards the holy but it cannot come by 
 volition. It could not come even by our being 
 shown what Love is in an exemplary or inspiring 
 Christ. And do we think of Christ as unselfish ? 
 It is like calling Miirren pretty. 
 
 ' There is but one thing — that men shall live by the law 
 of love. What love is we know from the life, the teaching, 
 the death of Jesus Christ. [Is the death of Christ but a 
 source of knowledge ?] He bade us love God and our neigh- 
 bour as ourselves ; [and He might have bidden us till dooms- 
 day, even with the emphasis of death, and to little purpose, if 
 He did no more than turn on this inner Hght]. In His life 
 He showed us His love in practice ; [And nothing but this 
 love ? Toward the Pharisees, for instance (" You vipers "), 
 or Herod (*' You fox ") ?], and in the hour of death He 
 faced evil with love — entering the conflict with no other arm, 
 showing [still but expository preaching on His part— not 
 overcoming the world for us but showing us how to do it] 
 the world once for all that the one sure way of overcoming 
 evil is not to oppose it with violence but to confront it with 
 an unfailing love [still but showing it, as if a wounded saint 
 should make the soldiers fall back by holding up the crucifix 
 with a heavenly smile. Nothing about the creation there 
 of a redeemed world].' 
 
 Was there no awful judgment in that death ? 
 Did it not doom evil once for all, and, in Christ's 
 own view, destroy the vast and regnant personality 
 of Satan ? Did it not mean, did Jesus not know it 
 meant, the destruction of Jerusalem and of Israel in 
 blood, the ruin of city and nation in war ? Did the 
 God reconciling in Christ not inflict that doom ? Is 
 war never His judgment, never His instrument ? 
 Could the damnability of sin as man's most anti-godly 
 act be met by the mere exhibition or even exercise 
 of a pity or affection^ which, in its inadequacy to the 
 

 WAR AND LOVE 41 
 
 moral situation, can only be called sympathetic ? 
 There is no recognition in this religious type of the 
 saving love as holy love — saving and eternal only 
 as holy. The entire idea of a righteousness holy in 
 God is absent from such a conception of Christ — 
 the whole idea of moral action, crucially and finally 
 holy, as the crown of Christ's personality, the idea of 
 divine judgment as the historic agent of salvation. 
 Of Christian faith as the New Testament means it, as 
 psychologically the creator of Christian love and the 
 justification of Christian life, as its ethical principle , ^ 
 
 and moral standard, there is no word ; nor of the ) J 
 
 conscience and its redemption ; nor of God's judging 
 grace at all as the world's hope. It is not a creed 
 that is missing here, nor even a theology, but a power 
 — the principle that makes Christianity an ethical 
 religion by the holy nature of its creative Act. The 
 creative source of Christian ethic as of Christian life 
 is the Cross of Christ ; it is not the Sermon on the 
 Mount, which is largely directions for certain situations, 
 or guiding illustrations of the action of the Christian 
 righteousness in given circumstances ; at any rate it 
 must be interpreted by the Cross. But what we have 
 in the document I discuss is a salvation by spiritual 
 work, by moral or religious accomplishment, as if we ^ 
 were saved by virtue of our faith instead of by its 
 means. And the effort is on an individual and philan- 
 thropic scale, not on a world scale, an evangelical 
 scale, the scale of the conscience. It is unequal to 
 world-crises. It is the note of a remote, inexperi- 
 enced, and cloistered Catholicism, carrying in it not 
 a superior ethic but a decadence of the Gospel, a 
 salvation of the world by charity, not by faith. On 
 
42 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 another side the plea is the recrudescence of the old 
 Quaker dislike for the idea of a real atonement and 
 the judgment therein. It is a defect in Barclay's fine 
 apology. (How striking, and at bottom very instruc- 
 tive, is this elusion by such a people of the conscience 
 of the supreme crisis of the conscience in the world !) 
 There is no suspicion shown that the reconciling of 
 the world was more than kind service to man, more 
 than a making it up between God and man at Christ's 
 plea to us, more than the clearing up of our distrust 
 and an affectional rehabilitation ; there is no sign 
 that it involved the whole issue of cosmic righteous- 
 ness. There is no notice of the fact that, just to 
 protect the idea of reconciliation (2 Cor. v. 20) 
 from this merely sympathetic view of it, and to give 
 it its fundamental moral note, Paul follows the word 
 of reconciliation at once with the intrinsic ground 
 and ethic of it (ver. 21) as founded on an offering 
 first made to God and His judgment, and resting on 
 a righteousness made ours by Christ's being made sin 
 for us, and not a mere suffering Lover. Whatever 
 that abysmal phrase means it means much more than 
 the lovely eyes of kindly love can see in reconciliation 
 and its world fellowship. Where that communion is 
 taken quite seriously, as in a Church, it is held that 
 the God of holy love has power to make even hate 
 serve reconciliation in righteousness. He can make 
 it not only change into love, but, while acting as 
 hate, yet be working out the purpose of love by the 
 greatest irony in the Universe. He can force His 
 royal judgment into the realm of evil, harness Satan 
 himself, and divide his empire in civil war. In 
 so acting He does not do evil that good may come. 
 
WAR AND LOVE 
 
 43 
 
 but He sets one existing evil against another, using 
 man's lesser crime to destroy his greater, wielding 
 evil against evil, waging just war to defeat unjust,^ 
 and by sin judging sin unto salvation. Reconcilia- 
 tion can only come by righteousness even in blood, 
 by a tragedy of righteousness in the Cross more awful 
 than war ; it does aot come by mere conciliation ; 
 and God, Who can make man's wrath His praise, 
 Himself takes the tragedy and makes the righteous- 
 ness. By His holy wisdom and moral majesty He 
 used the crime of Israel on Christ to destroy crime, 
 and to be, in the region where the goal is already 
 won and where a thousand years are but as one day, 
 the violence that ends violence, and the war that ends 
 war. But the reconciliation this programme means 
 is not the Christian Reconciliation. And this war is 
 not a tussle of Chauvinist patriotisms but an issue of 
 the world-righteousness at strife with a nation that 
 publicly and expressly treats morality as non-existent 
 for a nation at its choice. That is war declared on 
 the Kingdom of God. 
 
 The programme proceeds — 
 
 2. That in order t© establish a world order based on love, 
 it is incumbent on those who believe in this principle to 
 accept it fully, both for themselves and in their relation to 
 others, and to take the risks involved in doing so in a world 
 which does not yet accept it. 
 
 3. Therefore as Christians we are forbidden to wage war 
 . . . and are called instead to a life service for the enthrone- 
 ment of Love in personal, social, commercial, and national 
 life. [Called to let the war-makers capture the world for 
 their ethic meanwhile ? ] 
 
 1 See T. H. Green's Principles of Political Obligation, Works, 
 II. 466. 
 
44 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 It is all very amiable, and ideal, and inert — 
 
 all like the pictures of a seraphic Saint John, when 
 
 the beloved disciple should have a face graved and 
 
 , ^ lined with the furrows of the wrath of the Lamb. 
 
 There is no conception here of the Cross of Love 
 
 ^ as the great Day of Judgment. There is no allusion 
 
 ( to the Christian faith of the Kingdom of Love as 
 
 ^ ^ K already won for good and all, and already established 
 
 \ in Christ's final overcoming of the world in His blood. 
 
 All is to be due to our effort (inspired or consecrated, 
 
 but tentative, and therefore problematic, always) to 
 
 establish a reign of Love, to serve man in a spirit of 
 
 I Love ideal but not positive. It is not due to our 
 
 ' ^ witness by action to God's act of gracious war, 
 
 which did not shrink from blood to put His holy 
 
 Love, in a righteous Kingdom, beyond all that is 
 
 tentative into the region of accomplished things. 
 
 The movers in this enterprise are clearly people 
 whom it must be pleasant to have anything to do 
 with, but are they not offering sugar-coated pills for 
 an earthquake ? Are they not stroking the crocodile ? 
 ^-^ Such a religion cannot make its way in the world. 
 That is, it cannot bring God's Kingdom in. It is 
 too soft to keep a cutting edge, and it is not soft 
 enough to meet the passion of men for a soft reli- 
 gion. Far from reading the meaning of events, the 
 authors do not seem to know the meaning of words. 
 The covering address says — 
 
 He who accepts this way of life [by the bye, Christianity 
 % is not in the first instance a way of life] cannot, even for 
 what may seem a noble and worthy end, injure the bodies 
 and souls of other men. 
 
 What does injure mean ? Inflict injustice or 
 
WAR AND LOVE 
 
 45 
 
 inflict pain ? If the former, it begs the question (as 
 if all infliction were injury), or it utters a truism. 
 We all agree (except the German Chancellor) that we 
 must not treat people unjustly in soul or body. On 
 the other hand, if it mean that no man's skin may 
 be hurt or pained for a worthy object, it is absurd ; 
 and it would have deprived many of the discipline 
 which was such a means of grace to their earliest 
 years. Of course, it unlocks all the jails, and takes 
 out of Christ's hand the whip of small cords. It is 
 Tolstoyism. It is a useful protest but a useless policy. 
 
 Christian love is not first the form of love which 
 Christ prescribed to those already His own in certain 
 situations, but the love in God which Christ's whole 
 life and death exert and reveal. That love in God 
 so dealt with the whole moral situation of the race, 
 its holy righteousness so dealt with a grand world- 
 unrighteousness, as to inflict the violence of the 
 Cross, sparing not even His Son. That is the Gospel 
 light in which to read the Gospels. God so loved, on 
 such a principle, so unsparingly, as to do that Son's 
 body and soul the * injury ' of the Cross. That is the 
 principle on which God's love dealt with the vast evil of 
 the world. He reserved for Himself what He forbade 
 Abraham to do. He took His Son's willing life. That 
 is the principle of God's redeeming action in history. 
 And it keeps war still within His providence. 
 
 The address goes on — 
 
 But— and this is the point — he must accept this obedi- 
 ence [to the supposed example and law of Christ] absolutely. 
 [Italics not mine.] He will be unable to consent or to 
 participate in methods, and customs, and industry which 
 exploit his fellov/-men. 
 
46 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 Has the writer any idea of what language means 
 here — absolute refusal to profit by the methods of 
 either war or commerce, of exploitation or compe- 
 tition in any way. We could understand a protest, 
 and a submission under protest, to the egoist or the 
 capitalist stage of society, a bowing in the House 
 of Rimmon, a compliance so far as enabled the pro- 
 tester to convert commerce from within, and to 
 work at the education of society for a stage higher 
 still. But absolute refusal to benefit thereby means 
 action far more serious than the founding of a new 
 league — a step which is an infliction on the public 
 rather than on its promoters. It means entire 
 separation from current civilisation. It means a 
 monastery in a prairie. It means a refusal of the 
 comfort and safety provided for the denouncer of 
 war by the immoral and loveless work of the trenches. 
 It means abstinence from the food which is brought 
 to his door by the aid of a navy which protects these 
 methods of competition and exploitation. It means 
 that any of this society who, at the Universities and 
 elsewhere, live upon scholarships, or any form of 
 charitable foundation and bequest, should renounce 
 them forthwith, not to say repay them. For that 
 money was acquired by those who left it through 
 methods which would not for a moment bear the 
 light of this programme. And it is quite possible 
 that, in the old foundations, some of it came from 
 the slave trade, or from commerce to which the 
 door was opened only by war, and war not always 
 so scrupulous as it is now made (out of Germany). 
 It means that the abettors of this programme should 
 refuse (unless they are to live upon the immorality 
 
WAR AND LOVE 47 
 
 of others) all the benefits they enjoy from the history 
 they inherit and the society in which they move. 
 It means that they should turn monks in a Thebaid, 
 embark for some lone island, or squat on any wild -*V 
 space they may find left in tracts yet unexplored. 
 They could not from there even work their propa- 
 ganda, as they must not use the post. Of course, 
 the thing has been tried, at Oneida Creek and else- 
 where, and come to grief every time. The love 
 lacked the grace, the ' bite,' the conscience more 
 concerned for God's holiness than for itself, the >C 
 diamond edge which alone can master human nature. 
 And this is but another of the idealisms, symptomatic 
 of a capacious unfamiliarity with history and inexperi- 
 ence in affairs, and dowered with a plentiful lack of 
 moral insight, both into the nature of evil, and, by 
 consequence, into the nature of redemptive good. It 
 is a reductio ad absurdum of certain tendencies which 
 have captured a whole side of Christianity, and which 
 the present crisis reveals as charming in a calm but 
 futile for a storm. Did Lincoln not tell of the boy 
 that got at the captain conning his steamer through 
 the rapids, and begged him to stop the ship as his 
 sweetest and rosiest apple had gone over the side ? We 
 are enabled to see where these drifts were leading us, 
 not only in respect of trivialising our social life and 
 sapping our national manhood but also in respect to the 
 Gospel itself; whose message is blanched, its historic 
 verve erased, its majesty of righteousness belied, its 
 tragedy glozed, and its love made less than the costliest 
 thing in all the world. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 JUDGMENT BY THE SAINTS 
 
 The programme that I have just been discussing 
 will seem to many people whose company one would 
 like to have an engaging one ; and they wonder 
 that exception should be taken to it by any but 
 captious polemists. Nor could exception be taken, 
 if a New Testament revelation did not exist to trouble 
 Israel. Its stumbling-block is one over which we 
 are constantly falling. It is the Cross of Christ, as 
 the apostles understood it and their writings 
 preach it. 
 
 But, we are answered here, why drag in the Cross ? 
 This is not a matter of theology but of ethic. For 
 the theology of our salvation the Cross may have 
 supreme value, but this concerns the manner of 
 our sanctification, the conduct of the saved ; and 
 our guide there is not the Cross of Christ but His 
 teaching. The teaching of Christ is the foundation 
 of Christian ethic. If we are asking, ' What must 
 I do to be saved ? ' the reference to the Cross may 
 be in place, but it is to the teaching of Christ we 
 must go when we ask, * What should I do when I am 
 saved ? ' 
 
 To which the reply is manifold. The first is 
 
 48 
 
JUDGMENT BY THE SAINTS 49 
 
 that this is not what the Epistles fall back on as the 
 source of their moral precepts. The writers make 
 their own precepts in the main, out of the faith 
 which the Cross created in them. Again, a religion 
 whose moral foundation is precept cannot be a 
 universal or eternal religion. For precepts, to be 
 of any use, must apply first to a particular set of 
 circumstances and a particular stage of development. 
 They have no meaning otherwise. But, in the 
 growth of the soul or of society, they become obsolete, 
 and, being made for one age, they cannot be a guide 
 for all. Even if the principle be distilled out of the 
 precept its strength and imperative is apt to evaporate 
 in the process. But, putting aside other objections to 
 the position I name, there is this. The severance of 
 the Cross as the centre of salvation from the teaching 
 as the centre of ethic seems to canonise a distinction 
 most fatal to the soul, and especially the social 
 soul — the separation of religion from morality, with 
 all its peril of a double life. The unity of Christ's 
 mind and person forbids us to disparage His teaching 
 in contrast with His Cross ; it only drives us to 
 interpret the teaching by the Cross where His whole 
 person and purpose was gathered up in a final way. 
 For a religion like Christianity, also, which unites 
 the whole man in a reconciliation with God, there 
 must be but one centre — the conscience, now no 
 more divided and rent ; and for that moral soul, in 
 a religion of moral redemption, the centre can be but 
 Christ crucified. In a religion moral above all else 
 the centre of salvation must be the moral centre. 
 But the centre of salvation is the Cross. The teaching 
 therefore of Christ Himself must be interpreted by 
 
so THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 the Cross and not the Cross by the teaching. Finis 
 coronal opus,^ 
 
 The most common form of the displacement I 
 name is not a flat choice between Word and Cross, 
 but a reduction of the Cross to be but the chief teaching 
 of Christ on the love of God, and no more. To rest 
 our religion on the teaching of Christ is to reduce 
 His Cross to a part (though the most impressive 
 part) of that teaching. It becomes the grand exhor- 
 tation or invitation uttered from God, instead of His 
 one Redemption done. It is presented as the great 
 object-lesson of love by sacrifice, at the cost of the 
 achievement of the Holy One for righteousness. 
 About the moral quality of the love or the sacrifice 
 less is said. It is taken for granted that love, as the 
 heart kindles to it, is the supreme good, and that 
 sacrifice is a precious and ethical thing in itself, whose 
 greatness is to be measured by its success in carrying 
 home love, and giving it a moral quality which 
 raises it above mere enjoyment. It is supposed that 
 love is good if it is intense enough to produce sacri- 
 fice ; and sacrifice is good if it is powerful enough 
 to impress us with love. But of the moral quality 
 intrinsic to love, as holy, apart from its form as 
 sacrifice, and distinct from its mere quantity or in- 
 tensity, little is said. As if sacrifice were the moral 
 
 >, iV^ ^,v y interior of love, and not sanctity, not righteous- 
 
 ^ '^*' f^ ness, not holiness. But in itself sacrifice does not 
 t/^J^^,l%T^'^^ love its moral quality. In itself it is morally 
 
 \M^%^^^^ neuter. It can also be the servant of unrighteousness. 
 /^i\^^V We may but sacrifice a less egoism to a greater. 
 
 V X '. *^.. Every value in life may be sacrificed to acquisition. 
 ^ See Addendum at the close of this chapter. 
 
JUDGMENT BY THE SAINTS 51 
 
 A passionate though illicit love is capable of sacrifice 
 which gives up both life, ease, and honour — capable 
 in this of a greater amount of sacrifice than many 
 make who are good and decent Christians. We 
 have not in a sacrificial exhibition of love any- 
 necessary revelation of its moral quality as holy love, 
 and therefore of its eternity. We must know to 
 whom or to what the sacrifice is made. We have 
 not through sacrifice alone holy love. And it was 
 holy love that Christ came to reveal. We need 
 the note of righteousness, and, in the case of religion, 
 righteousness able to establish itself for ever on the 
 universal scale. 
 
 With a revelation which did not go beyond 
 sacrificial love we could not be sure that it was God's 
 love or that it was eternal. We could not be sure 
 that love was the last reality, with the reversion 
 and dominion of all things for ever. For that we 
 need something done and not merely shown, not 
 merely taught. The last enemy must be destroyed, "? 
 which is Love's death. Sin is action, and the con- . 
 fidence which it destroys only action can repair, i 
 Reality is action and not essence. It is energy and 
 not mere disposition. It is righteousness and not 
 piety. If it be love it is a love that does something, 
 and does it on the eternal scale. It not only gives 
 up something but gives it up for a holy purpose. It 
 sets up an everlasting kingdom, it does not simply 
 produce a boundless devotion. For the Kingdom 
 of God, which was the first interest even in Christ's 
 teaching, something must be done and not merely 
 said. It was not a school, nor a group, nor a 
 
 B 2 
 
52 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 -^ synagogue, but a matter of public affairs. And the 
 supreme work of Christ for it was in kind. It was 
 redemptive action, and not impressive instruction 
 or edification. 
 
 The Cross, if Christ was perfected in it, must 
 
 have consummated an element so prime and vital 
 
 to Christ's teaching as the Kingdom. The very 
 
 , darkness that gathered round it turned it from light 
 
 to power. The ruling idea of the Bible in Christ's 
 
 hands had been righteousness, and not religious 
 
 y knowledge ; and righteousness is something done. 
 
 Now in the teaching of Christ nothing was done, 
 
 in the strict sense of that word. The greatest of 
 
 guides is not yet the King of kings. And if the Cross 
 
 but continued the teaching in another and enacted 
 
 ^ form there is still nothing done. But that is not 
 
 f ^ *^9<. enough, we have seen, for a moral religion. Its 
 
 ^ A ^^ I v^'^ creative revelation must be an achievement. To 
 
 ^*^ |V»^ )ft^ create is the greatest of all achievements. In the 
 
 ^ A/'^f'^y^ Cross, therefore, there must be more than the most 
 
 ^ <,V*^| impressive object-lesson ; there must be the great 
 
 'Vr «^»\ stroke and final victory. There must be done the 
 
 ^ one thing needful for God's righteousness. In course 
 
 of which judgment must be done on evil, in the 
 
 course of the new creation of good. And it must be 
 
 done in history, in the context and manner of history. 
 
 Christianity, taken with final seriousness, is a 
 
 new creation. It is a new moral creation, whose 
 
 historic obverse is judgment, or the reaction of 
 
 X holiness upon evil in the course of establishing itself 
 
 in positive goodness. Divine sacrifice is not, then, 
 
 sacrifice for its own sake, for morally sacrifice is 
 
 nor is it just to show how great the love 
 
JUDGMENT BY THE SAINTS 53 
 
 is, for no mere intensity makes love divine. Nor 
 is sacrifice divine even when it meets the desires, 
 or even the needs, of the loved. But divine sacrifice 
 is that which considers righteousness, and meets 
 first of all the need and nature of God's holiness 
 in His love. It is that which meets first His holy- 
 purpose in the situation created for that love by 
 man's sin, and in so doing inflicts historic judgment 
 on the evil power and its agents. It is sacrifice made 
 to God before it is offered to man. We have recently 
 done much that was overdue to connect love with 
 sacrifice. I will not say we have done too much of 
 that ; but we have done too little to connect it with 
 judgment, with righteousness, with holiness. And in 
 consequence the idea has sunk and softened — both of 
 sacrifice and of love. Sacrifice, when it would reveal 
 holy love, has more to do than declare it. It must 
 meet its active demand at any cost — first by right- 
 eousness, then, in course thereof, by judgment. For 
 all righteousness done is also a judgment on the world 
 or the devil that resists it. Christ, in honouring the 
 judgment of God by bearing it with its own holiness, 
 passed judgment on Satan and on the world. Right- 
 eous sacrifice, therefore, must both atone and 
 judge. It must hasten to hallow the holy name 
 in action and not simply in word — in giving judg- 
 ment effect and not simply expression. At any 
 cost this must be done, unless this holiness be but 
 a negotiable thing, and salvation a mere compromise. 
 It must be done at the cost even of the Cross of the 
 Son of God, Who is more than all man's life and 
 happiness, and Who came to justify not only the 
 conscience of man but the conscience of God, 
 
54 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 establishing love's judging and saving righteousness 
 on the earth. 
 
 Therefore if Christian ethic deals with Christian 
 action, and teaching is not action in the final sense, 
 the root of Christian ethic is identical with the active, 
 creative root of Christian faith and life. It is centred 
 in the Cross of Christ as the eternal principle and 
 
 ^ "■ authority for all occasional precept. And not only so. 
 From its intrinsically holy nature, its note of right- 
 eousness, the Cross of Christ contains and deifies the 
 
 x*^ element of judgment. Righteousness is its first 
 
 charge — and God's righteousness, holy righteousness. 
 
 It was above all else something done in love for the 
 
 holiness of God, both positively in setting up His 
 
 y Kingdom in Christ's holy soul triumphant and uni- 
 
 i^"^*^^ . ^ersal, and negatively in destroying the Kingdom of 
 
 . '^ ^,£^^^. evil. So for Christian ethic, for a life of communion 
 with God active and not only sympathetic, the element 
 
 ;. of judgment is at least as cardinal as the element of 
 
 >^ service, and it may prescribe the form of service ; 
 
 we may serve Christ as the whip in His hand. It 
 is judgment working also in the long course of 
 history, with human agents and human conditions, 
 since the redemptive compendium of judgment on 
 the Cross was on the Cross of the Incarnate. It was 
 the work of God in a true and real and historic 
 humanity. 
 
 It is worth while to reflect on this. For one of 
 the chief pleas of the pacifist bystanders of history 
 is that, while judgment is not denied to work in the 
 course of history, it can be inflicted by God alone, 
 and man has no right to assume this tremendous 
 function, even in God's name and service. But if 
 
JUDGMENT BY THE SAINTS 55 
 
 Christ may, and if Christ's Incarnation in man was 
 real and thorough then man may and must. It is 
 quite true man may not asume it. No man may 
 take this office to himself, only those who are 
 appointed thereto. But if judgment be recognised 
 as a vital function of God's love with men, and if it 
 is further recognised that in the Cross of Christ God's 
 holy judgment of man fell on a consenting Christ as the *> 
 chastisement of our peace, then Christ became thereby 
 the judge of all men. And in proportion as mankind 
 becomes the New Humanity, in proportion as Christ 
 has His way with it, in proportion as it changes from 
 egoism to the principle of public righteousness, in pro- 
 portion as Christ thus indwells in the New Humanity 
 and the true Church — then, in that proportion such 
 humanity becomes the agent of His function and pur- 
 pose. For, if that be not so, then the Incarnation was -r; ^^^ 
 incomplete, and Christ cannot find or expect in human 
 nature, however moral, a body or organ for His will. 
 The human nature He took was then something 
 quite different from anything possible in historic ^' ' 
 humanity, something it can never grow to. But /V 
 
 that cannot be so. If He fully entered, and enters, 
 a real historic humanity, the judgment right of 
 Christ may be carried out by a solemn function of 
 man in proportion as man is identified with His 
 principles of society. For it is not man that then 
 works but Christ that dwelleth in him, wherever a 
 soul or a people seeks to moral liberty, justice, and 
 fraternity. If man may not execute God's judgments 
 there is an end of a moral providence in history, 
 which can then work but by earthquake, pestilence, 
 or famine, which are non-moral. 
 
S6 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 And if objection be raised at a point further back, 
 where it was said that Christ, by accepting the judg- 
 ment of the Cross, became the judge of all men, this 
 is to be added to what I said a little ago about 
 the judging action of all goodness upon the world. 
 That action is the greater if the goodness be so good 
 that it is crucified. If Christ bore all judgment, He 
 became the judge of all. It was the judgment of 
 all that He bore. If the phrase were allowed, He 
 became our sole creditor. He bought up (if again 
 such a phrase were permitted) all our debts, bought 
 I out every other claim, and with Him alone we have 
 
 V '^"l X to do. To have borne our judgment gave him the 
 %^ sole judgment right over us. He became our Judge 
 
 Who is our King. But then His Kingdom must 
 •y be His agent. It must carry out His purpose. Do 
 not let the devotional idea of sanctity exhaust the 
 meaning of the word ; as if holiness were but prayer to 
 God and not action for Him on men. As entire Saints 
 men would be fully indwelt by the Judge of the earth. 
 And in the degree in which they are the servants of 
 His order of righteousness and stand for His righteous 
 purpose and procedure, they are His agents in affairs 
 — if the world's history is the world's judgment at 
 ,|v) . all. This is irrespective of their complete attainment 
 in the way of sanctity. The ' Saints ' in the New 
 Testament are not the holy, but those who have 
 been chosen by the Holy, and ear-marked for His 
 purpose. Were it quite certain that a particular 
 course for one nation against another was part of the 
 righteousness of Christ in His historic Kingdom, there 
 could be no doubt that that nation's chastisement 
 of the other was the judgment of God on it. But 
 
JUDGMENT BY THE SAINTS 57 
 
 can that ever be certain ? What sceptical humility ! 
 If we can never be sure that a nation's particular 
 action in history is the exercise of Christ's righteous- 
 ness, what is the worth of a nation's conscience or 
 of its Christian name ? And if there be no national 
 conscience, then Christianity is but a private affair ; 
 there is no national righteousness, and we are where 
 the Germans are. The German Socialists were quite 
 German in this. Religion, they said, is Privatsache, 
 The Kaiser only takes that principle in world earnest. 
 And German Socialism, by its irreligion, is the 
 broken reed it has shown itself to be. It is much 
 more German than Christian or humane. (America 
 it were wiser perhaps not to discuss.) But to 
 exercise the judgment of Christ is part of the Chris- 
 tianity of the New Humanity, which is much more 
 than a mere waiter upon Providence. It is a com- 
 missioner of the Kingdom of God, if that Kingdom 
 rise above an individual pietism and its combinations. 
 If a society is necessary for the moral existence of 
 the individual, then to question the power of that 
 society to discern God's will for it in His service is 
 to go on to doubt the same power for the individual 
 faith and for the concrete world. 
 
 I am bound to admit that all I have just been 
 saying falls to the ground as a piece of speculative 
 fantasy except on one condition. It all goes down 
 at a breath unless it is founded on one rock. And 
 that rock is the historic Cross as a real atonement, 
 a real bearing of God's judgment on sin. Apart 
 from that Christianity abjures moral history and 
 sinks into the sand as a benevolent but ineffectual 
 
58 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 pacifism. All turns on the Cross as offered in history 
 to God before man, offered to God's holiness more 
 even than to man's need. It means the Cross 
 viewed as above all else the self-hallowing of God's 
 holy name of Love by Grace to sin under the con- 
 ditions of judgment, and not merely as Love's 
 manifestation to move men, to melt them to repent- 
 ance, and infect them with sacrifice. It is the Cross 
 as Love in judgment and not in sacrifice alone, as 
 the acme not of the intensest Love but of the holiest, 
 as the supreme Act of righteousness by the King- 
 dom's King (the crucial Act of His Reign), and not 
 simply an act of kindness by the Head of the human 
 family. If such a view of the Cross be but a theologi- 
 cal figment, planted by the Apostles on a crude and 
 uncritical Church, and hung round its neck for now 
 two thousand years ; if such a Christ of gracious 
 judgment do not indwell in the Church, in the world 
 as it takes the ethic of the Church's Gospel, and in 
 a nation as it turns from the bad old buccaneering 
 way to the way of help, service, and justice ; then all 
 I say is but that figment elaborated, that figment 
 in filigree. But if the Apostles were right, if they 
 were for the revelation of Chtist what He was for 
 the revelation of God, if they not only showed Him 
 but gave Him effect in the preached prolongation of 
 this supreme deed, then the place of a theology of 
 righteous judgment in a moral world and in a religion 
 of its redemption is fundamental. Such a theology 
 moulds ethic for Christian thought and life. Such a 
 Cross as I press is the genetic centre of a universal ethic. 
 And the larger life is, the Cross claims it the more. 
 Thus the right of a Christian nation to be God's 
 
JUDGMENT BY THE SAINTS 59 
 
 judgment on another rests on a certain view of the 
 Atonement as the moral key and principle of the 
 Incarnation, of the deep action of Christ in human 
 nature, and His conquest of its history for the K 
 Kingdom of God. The resentment against the claim 
 of theology is really against a metaphysical theology 
 forced on the general public. But for the general 
 soul morality is everything, and theology is the 
 exposition of the morality of the Holy. And the 
 sounder complaint is, not that religion should be 
 theological, but that its theology has lost the moral 
 note which alone gives it power for the conscience, 
 and so command in affairs. The complaint is not 
 without justice that some theology, and some devout 
 theology, has done more to cosset conscience than 
 to hallow righteousness, and to deify Love as a sub- 
 jectivity than to magnify it as the sanctity eternal. 
 
 ADDENDUM ON RELIGION AND ETHIC. 
 
 We do not now speak of justification and sanctification. 
 But that is only because we are word-shy. We do talk of 
 the things, only in a mqfe superficial way. We speak of 
 religion and ethic. People will read about religion and 
 morality who will not look at anything under the title 
 of justification and sanctification. They believe they are 
 modern, and they are but meagre. 
 
 But now that we have called them names in a healthy, 
 brotherly way, let us be meagre too, and talk small. We 
 won't speak of redemption (though it is the only kind of 
 religion of any moral use for the inner failures we really 
 know ourselves to be when we are chez nous). And we 
 won't talk of sanctification (though it is the only thing for 
 people who are sick of their efforts at improvement). Let 
 
6o THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 US tune down. Let us not seem Olympian. Let us speak 
 of religion. 
 
 How are they related ? Mostly we think of them as 
 two different things, which we have to co-ordinate somehow 
 (though there are some who identify them). We treat them 
 as having a different object, or as being different functions 
 of the soul. Religion is thought of as passive, as receptive 
 to God, ethic as active and effective on the world. But 
 how then about the unity of the soul, which means its peace 
 on the one hand and its full effect on the other ? There 
 seems to be suggested a dichotomy of the person, which, in 
 risking its unity, endangers both the ethic and the religion. 
 
 Take the case of prayer. That is our inmost and most 
 religious hour. But if we say it is only the action of the 
 alone with the Alone we rob it of some of its value. For it 
 is more than that. Even there we are not lifted clean out 
 of our moral context. Prayer is at the same moment one of 
 the forms of our constant warfare with a stifling world, of 
 our conquest of a crushing universe. Or, again, our daily 
 duty. Does that win in value and power if we cut it off 
 from every spiritual aspect, every mystic reference, and 
 treat it but as a piece of ethic, a fidelity to our vocation, a 
 due service of our station and calling in life ? Is our active 
 life not much coloured and shaped by our passive ? Are 
 there not certain active duties, otherwise optional, which 
 are prescribed by our receptive relation to God ? 
 
 There are three ways, I have hinted, of regarding these 
 co-relatives, religion and ethic. They may be treated as co- 
 ordinate, or as identical, or as reciprocal. 
 
 Take the co-ordination first. Are they but parallel ? 
 
 Suppose we say they are parallel. As they are co-relative, 
 that cannot mean that they are separable, and are neutral 
 to each other ; for it would destroy the unity of the person. 
 What, then, is the connection ? It may be causal — and causal 
 in either direction. Either the religion produces the ethic, 
 or the ethic the religion. 
 
 If we say that religion produces ethic, we mean that the 
 morality springs from our relation to God as mere power 
 
JUDGMENT BY THE SAINTS 6i 
 
 or mere love — only not as holy. For that would be 
 postulating morality in advance of its production, and the 
 religion would not be producing it but only conveying it. 
 Or else it would be making the morality less than pure by 
 introducing a pre-moral, a non-moral element (power or love). 
 It sets up in morals a heteronomy. Conscience is ruled by ^ 
 something other than conscience, something below it. 
 
 If we move in the other direction, and say that ethic 
 produces rehgion, is that quite fair to religion ? Does it 
 not make our sense of relation to God, our faith in God, an 
 inference from our moral achievement ? Does it not make 
 our religious certainty to rise from our moral success ? And 
 is that not a total subversion of the finest religion, certainly > 
 of our Christian religion. For such religion reveals our 
 relation to God to be fundamentally one of refuge and rescue 
 from our moral failure, of our need and His boon in our 
 moral extremity. Morality is something more than a sane 
 and Stoic life according to a moral order. It is more than 
 a life lived according to our true moral nature. It is life 
 where our moral nature has gone to pieces from neglect, 
 contempt, or violence. If we are to deal with man's actual 
 situation — the situation he admits when he is cornered, 
 candid, and confidential — the moral life is something with 
 a more tragic note than the Stoics feel or the young mystics 
 who go round as the soul's piano-tuners to the Infinite. The 
 centre, source, and standard of our morality is not a moral ^ 
 order but a moral crisis. It is not philosophic but historic. I 
 The actual conscience (in the individual at least), being so 
 near to the miracle of the will's freedom, has fundamentally 
 to do with a crisis in which it is saved, and not with a culture 
 in which it is schooled. I wish we had more moral schooling 
 in our culture. But the root matter is a regeneration and 
 not simply an ethical rehabilitation, nor even a moral 
 renaissance. 
 
 But if the one do not spring from the other in a way 
 exactly causal, if the morality is not just the effect of the 
 religion, is it this way ? Is the religion, the faith in God, 
 just a postulate of morality, a condition of ethic ? The defect 
 
62 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 in that view is that it makes us most sure of God when we 
 need Him least — at the height of our moral success and satis- 
 faction — as our Patron or our Rewarder. In the depth of 
 our failure and distress God as a moral postulate is neither 
 very apparent nor very useful. We need Him most as a 
 Saviour, not a Rewarder. And does this not affect the purity 
 of the ethic, and the love of good for its own sake — to say 
 nothing of its misreading of our actual moral position and 
 need. 
 
 Let us now suppose that religion and ethic are identical — 
 that they are not co-ordinated either as cause or postulate, 
 but are the same. This would lead some to think of a mystic 
 morality, and others to think of a legalist religion. We 
 have either a mystic morality leading to pride or slackness, 
 or we have an exigent religion leading to despair. On the 
 one hand the soul feels itself identical with the deity. That 
 means that everything that hampers the Ego is regarded 
 as an unworthy limitation of the Almighty of which the self 
 is a phase. Every such thing must be resented and over- 
 ridden. Or else the obstacle is a limitation in the Deity 
 Himself that cannot be removed ; it is a fate or process. 
 It is then a source of Oriental resignation and indifference. 
 On the other hand we have a legalist religion, a religion only 
 on terms of prescriptive ethic, which grows in complexity, 
 with the enlargement of life, to an intolerable burden ; or 
 where each crime severs from God, and the offender in one 
 point is exposed to all the * curse of the Law.' Whose end 
 in either case is despair. 
 
 As a matter of fact religion and ethic can be neither 
 severed nor identified any more than the two cusps of the 
 arch. Nor is the stability of the arch a matter of compromise. 
 There is both distinction and identity between them. They 
 balance and sustain each other. If they are not causal to 
 each other, nor the same, they are reciprocal. But what 
 does that mean ? Does it not mean that both arise from 
 a fact which contains both, requires both, creates both ? 
 Does it not mean that the source of both is at once moral 
 in nature and religious in power ? And is there any such 
 
JUDGMENT BY THE SAINTS 63 
 
 source known to us except the fact of Christ in His atoning 
 
 life and death, Christ Whose judgment grace is the crisis of -LJl-i*^ 
 
 the moral Universe, Who is at once the criterion of all ethic x' % C^ ^ 
 
 in His holy Act and in His love the Saviour from that curse ^ ^^ 
 
 of despair which waits upon our moral failure. He is our 
 
 righteousness and our Redeemer. In the same One Person 
 
 and Act we have the source of both ethic and religion. We 
 
 have the mystic Christ in us identical with the moral Christ 
 
 for us. ' I live, yet not I but Christ in me.' * Without Me 
 
 ye can do nothing.' His sacrifice was morally perfect else 
 
 it could not be atoning to a holy God, and it also stands over 
 
 us as a transcendent Redemption. With His moral perfection 
 
 He dwells in us sinners ; and in virtue of the same He is our 
 
 propitiation. His justification is also our sanctification. < 
 
 He is the object both of our religion (which is faith in Him) 
 
 and of our ethic (which is done to Him more even than to 
 
 the least of His whom we help and serve). 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 PASSIVE RESISTANCE 
 
 The question arises how far those are justified in 
 Christian ethic whose peace principles would lead 
 them to a passive resistance in the event of com- 
 pulsory service. Passive resistance is a dangerous 
 weapon, far too dangerous for the young and crude ; 
 and the more so that it is almost impossible to 
 prevent its use by improper persons. But these 
 considerations may not be without force. 
 
 Passive resistance to the State for Christian 
 reasons is less a matter of individual and private 
 conscience than of duty on the Church. But on the 
 Church the duty may lie on due occasion; let the 
 individual convert the Church to his view. ' The 
 supreme institution of political life, the State, is 
 not sovereign ; in the sense that, when a man's 
 allegiance is divided between what he owes to the 
 State and what he owes to some other social institu- 
 tion, it does not follow that State allegiance must 
 be recognised as supreme' (Delisle Burns). There 
 is a sovereign society above the State, though it 
 may be less obvious, and though it should be de- 
 scribed as an organism rather than an organisation. 
 And any Christian protest or refusal as against the 
 
 State should be in the name and service of this 
 
 64 
 
PASSIVE RESISTANCE 65 
 
 Church and its trust, and not merely on the ground 
 of natural ties or instincts (as in the revolt of 
 Antigone), nor on the plea of individual convictions 
 alone. I am not saying that refusal would never be 
 justified in such cases if they became extreme, only 
 that it would not then be religious, it would not be on 
 the ground and imperative of an ethic distinctively 
 Christian. But, on whatever ground, unlimited liberty 
 to any individualism that calls itself conscience, even 
 in a Christian man, is an impossible thing, because it 
 is sheer atomism, ending in self-will ; and it is ruinous 
 to a community — which, as the supremacy of the 
 Kingdom of God shows, is the first Christian considera- 
 tion. If the Christian is to resist the State in this 
 way it must be on the ground of some action by the 
 State which imperils or destroys the foundation of 
 the Church's life, and is by an autonomous Church 
 felt to do so. Loyalty to Church or State is the 
 form in which loyalty to conscience is most safe 
 and effective. The matter of our chief choice is 
 which is to be supreme. 
 
 What then is the foundation and principle of the 
 Church's life ? It is a religion and not an ethic. It 
 is the faith and worship of the Saviour ; it is not 
 obedience to a legislator, even were he the supreme 
 prophet. It is no matter of applied ethics, but the 
 soul's moral regeneration by a Redeemer. It is the 
 faith and worship of a Redeemer. His supreme 
 work was indeed the core, the crisis, and the crown 
 of all the moral spirit of the universe. The Cross 
 of Christ was the foundation not of a faith only but 
 of an ethic intrinsic to it, and not less than cosmic. 
 Only it was not the publication of an ethical code, 
 
66 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 and its note is not mere amendment. Its ethic was 
 creative of soul, it was not regulative of conduct. 
 It was evangelical and not legal. It was regenera- 
 tive and not prescriptive. It said, love with the new 
 love and do as you like. The prescriptive element in 
 Christianity belonged to the valuable rather than the 
 vital, and it might be but occasional and temporary 
 in its form. It was less grace than guidance. It 
 belonged to the bene esse of the Church and not its 
 esse. The Church is not an ethical society, therefore 
 an ethical issue should not rend it. The ethical form 
 is a real, but it is a derivative, feature in it. Its 
 faith and its works are inseparable, but they do not 
 rank alike. The faith produces the work, and not 
 the work the faith. The fixed faith produces variable 
 work according to time and place. The many works 
 reflect the one faith, they are not alternative to it, 
 they are not in a parity with it. The foundation 
 of the Church is the Gospel, as regenerative for the 
 soul, it is not the Sermon on the Mount, as directive 
 for conduct. The teaching was guidance for those 
 who already were new made by the Gospel, and it 
 is only practicable in any shape by those who 
 possess that supernatural power. It expresses the 
 principle between brothers and not mere neighbours, 
 between Christians ; it has not nations in view as 
 the Cross has ; and it can hold between nations only 
 in so far as they are composed of real Christians. 
 The practical forms of the Christian life vary from 
 time to time, and vary even from the precepts of 
 the Sermon. But the Gospel which makes the Church 
 a Church is changeless. It is the Gospel of the grace 
 of God, and the loving power of His saving righteous- 
 
PASSIVE RESISTANCE Sj 
 
 ness in the Cross of Christ. For the Church that 
 is central and constitutive, but the conduct of its 
 affairs, the fruits of the Spirit, are more peripheral 
 and regulative. The relation of the Church to its 
 Redeemer is fixed, but within that allegiance its 
 relations with men vary. The Gospel does not 
 vary, but its moral applications do. And, as a 
 matter of fact, we find within the Church catholic 
 much diversity of view, among people equally 
 entitled to an opinion, about applied Christianity, 
 but we have no diversity about the Gospel as fixing 
 the relation between God and man, the Saviour and 
 the soul. One Lord, one faith, but operations many. 
 One power and principle of the Spirit, but much flexi- 
 bility of precept according to occasion. So that the 
 Epistles do not use the code of Christ but make their 
 own injunctions — some of which need considerable 
 adjustment to Christ's, such as the deliverance of 
 So-and-so to Satan as a mode of loving him. To obey 
 Christ is an ambiguous phrase, and its obvious sense 
 is its inferior. It means first of all to obey Him as 
 Redeemer, to make the surrender a Redeemer calls 
 for, to take His forgiving and regenerating grace in 
 living faith more even than to toil after His manner 
 of conduct. It is [to submit to His sure salvation 
 more even than to comply with His palpable pre- 
 cepts. It is to worship the Saviour absolutely and 
 be ready to obey whatever He unmistakably enjoins 
 rather than to obey commands at their face value 
 while we keep back part of our soul from His 
 Redemption. The Church at least rests on His 
 Redemption and not His injunction. 
 
 The point is that for the Church (which, and not 
 
 F 2 
 
68 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 sporadic or atomic Christians, is here the main con- 
 cern) the central and creative thing is its Gospel, 
 relating it to Christ, and not its Ethic, relating it to 
 man. Its Ethic has a relation to the State, its Gospel 
 has none except through its Ethic. The public 'and 
 business form of love is righteousness. Thus if any- 
 thing so grave is to be undertaken by Christian 
 people as resistance to the State which they have a 
 free citizen's power to influence and alter, it can only 
 be justified as in the vital interest of something so 
 great as the Church, and not of the atomic conscience. 
 It should be an expression of the social conscience 
 of the Church concerning an invasion of that which 
 forms the very life and unity of the Church. And 
 what forms the Church's life is the Gospel, concerning 
 which we can be much more sure, and therefore 
 strong, than we can be concerning any one of its 
 ethical applications. For in the one case we have our 
 certainty direct from Christ in the Spirit, and in the 
 other we have it as an act of our Christian judgment, 
 more or less educated by the past, upon a situation — 
 unless of course we bring down Christ from a 
 Redeemer to a legislator, and reduce the report of 
 His precepts for His first group to cast-iron impera- 
 tives for all time. 
 
 The result of these considerations is that if the 
 State requires of us conduct incompatible with the 
 love and worship of Christ as Redeemer it strikes 
 at the existence of the Church and must be resisted. 
 Such an issue was presented to the early Church by 
 the demand from Christian soldiers of the military 
 oath, which was objected to less on the grounds of 
 the Sermon on the Mount than because it involved a 
 
PASSIVE RESISTANCE 69 
 
 confession of the Emperor's deity inconsistent with 
 the place of Christ in His Gospel. And in a free 
 State, where we have a free voice and action, the 
 resistance must be more than passive and private. 
 It should be active and concerted, for the Gospel, 
 as I say, is not a matter of the lone conscience 
 and the free lance. The resister should be the 
 Church, and not the individual except as a member 
 of the Church; who should feel that he had done 
 his duty in a protest as forcible as possible short 
 of rebellion when worship is not involved. 
 
 But when it is a question not of Christian Gospel 
 and worship but of Christian ethic, i.e. of the applica- 
 tion of the moral principle of the Christian Cross to 
 an actual and practical situation, then, since the 
 centrality and certainty are less in this region, since so 
 much depends on our facts and our judgment, there is 
 not the same right or duty to resist a discussed and 
 deliberate ordinance of the State concerning its life. 
 For the State is an ethical institute of God for us as 
 much as the family is, and it is in its way equally, 
 though less obviously, powerful for our moral 
 growth. In this regard it is inferior only to the 
 Church. ' In a list we might make of all human 
 beings the dead far outnumber the living ; and the 
 effects of their thought and action are much more 
 important politically than the thought and action of 
 all the living put together.' * More and more,' says 
 Comte, ' the dead rule us.' And the longer history 
 is the more weighty it is. Hence, from what was 
 said in the last paragraph, the Church's right to 
 resist the State in the ethical region would be in 
 proportion as its conviction on the point raised 
 
70 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 approached the unanimity of its worship of Christ. 
 For instance, there would be no doubt as to the 
 Church's unanimity, and the individual Christian's 
 right to resist, if the State commanded any of its 
 members to assassinate the Kaiser, or if it encour- 
 aged any in promiscuous intercourse for the purpose 
 of restocking the population. For these traverse the 
 very nature of right, which it is the real business of 
 war to restore. 
 
 The Christian duty to the State becomes doubly 
 and trebly urgent when that State is not only fight- 
 ing for its life, but stakes that life in the cause of a 
 world-righteousness and a national humanity which 
 are vital to the Kingdom of God. For if religion was 
 denationalised in the Cross human relations were not ; 
 and even religion was rather supernationalised. It is a 
 question worth asking ourselves whether the present 
 concern of the Founder of that Kingdom in His New 
 Covenant is exclusively with the lenitives of war, as if 
 He were the divinest of all Franciscans, and not, as 
 the Lord's Messiah, with the righteous issue joined 
 between peoples reckoned as something else than 
 crowds. It is a question whether He, Who is certainly 
 with the ambulance, is not with equal certainty in 
 the heart of the moral fray of nations, and the King, 
 Marshal, and Judge of His Kingdom there. Is Christ 
 but the King of saints and not the King of kings ? 
 
 If such considerations have any bearing on the 
 subjects of pacifist resistance, what are we to say as 
 to the action of the object of it, the Government ? 
 To many people such resisters will seem but cranks, 
 and it may be feared they find but short shrift 
 with some tribunals. No doubt also among the 
 
PASSIVE RESISTANCE 71 
 
 recalcitrants there may be several who are cranks — 
 which may be said of many causes that pass for more 
 respectable. But liberty is not a positive principle ; 
 nor is principle the clue it should be in perplexity, 
 if it do not give us room, and even some tenderness, 
 for those who tax it most. The honest exercise of 
 conscience is a thing so precious that we may well be 
 more willing that liberty should be strained by the 
 perverse amateur conscience than that even these 
 trying people should be repressed. We have reason 
 to be thankful for the very extravagances of our 
 freedom in this country, and reckon them cheap at 
 the price, when we see what the total absence of 
 political liberty, or free opinion, and the policing of 
 cranks has cost Germany, and, through her, the 
 world. Much consideration should be shown in any 
 legislation, or other action, towards those with whom 
 we have some ground to be impatient. We have 
 claimed just and considerate treatment from the State 
 when our Free Churches were outwardly but sects 
 like first century Christianity ; let us use the same 
 treatment towards those national sectaries — until 
 at least they propose, or promise, to take command 
 of the situation, and leave the national life to be 
 pulverised for good by an enemy who in his victory 
 would have no mercy. None can now doubt that 
 he would be merciless but a good nature too 
 credulous to discern spirits, or too limited to gauge 
 the actual situation. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE MORAL SANCTION OF FORCE 
 
 The question of Force and Morals is naturally one 
 that exercises more people than usual at a time like 
 the present. It is pressed upon every mind in the 
 crisis of a world war. But not only so. It is an 
 urgent aspect of the most vast and permanent conflict 
 of the whole world, of the issue of Nature and Grace. 
 In language still more theological (as all the final 
 issues tend to be) it is the question how a cosmic 
 Redemption subdues to its uses all the powers of 
 the world. It is not wonderful therefore that there 
 should be much difference of opinion, and much 
 perplexity that cannot settle to an opinion. What 
 is wonderful is the promptness and the confidence 
 with which so many settle problems of the kind by 
 a swift appeal to what they call the simplicities 
 of a young intuition or an ancient precept. 
 
 The question is not really one of the presence of 
 force in moral action but of its prevalence, its domina- 
 tion. Force is there, in the world where conscience 
 has to act. It must be reckoned with in life and 
 practice. We can retire to no region where it does 
 not work, either in us or through us. It must even 
 be used by us. The only question then is whether 
 it shall at last use the conscience or be used by it, 
 whether it shall dominate or serve moral ends. 
 
 72 
 
THE MORAL SANCTION OF FORCE 73 
 
 For religious people that question would seem 
 to be settled by the fact that God uses it. By 
 His ordinance we conquer nature and its forces by 
 obeying them. Coercion even is part of His method. 
 He compels the most unwilling by physical force to 
 quit life. His very Grace works by way of outward 
 judgment. Corporeal penalty is in His merciful pro- 
 vidence. Love chastises, and chastises with some- 
 thing else than the sting of conscience alone. Every 
 headache after a debauch is a divine use of force. 
 Every paralysis after years of debauch is but the 
 extension of the same principle. Every nation that 
 goes to hell in blood and flame for forgetting 
 God extends the application farther. The dreadful 
 power to take up weapons against the Kingdom 
 of God is yet from God. ' Thou couldest have no 
 power against me except it were given thee from 
 above.' 
 
 It is impossible to deny that the holy God, Who 
 means a Kingdom of righteousness, uses force for 
 the moral purposes of that holiness in its stages 
 among men. The only exit from this is to say that 
 God has not entrusted to men the agency of this 
 action. God (it is said) inflicts judgment but does 
 not allow weak and evil men to be His deputies in 
 the infliction. He is His own executioner. Natural 
 process may be His servant in this matter but not 
 civil. A fit might punish crime, but not a rope. 
 The murderer's gun might burst but we must not 
 shoot him. A convulsion of nature (where no nemesis 
 can be traced ) might serve God's moral will but 
 not a convulsion of nations (where it can). That 
 belongs to fallen nature which is no more God's 
 
174 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 minister. But such, a position goes farther than 
 even the thoroughgoing Reformers went when they 
 left the justitia civilis in corrupt man as still a relic 
 and monument of a divine humanity. It seems to 
 be part of the wide conspiracy to belittle man and 
 his moral trust, to take the greatness out of conscience 
 even in its ruins, and to give its finest conflicts no more 
 moral value than we might assign to an earthquake, 
 with no contribution to the coming of the Kingdom. 
 And that descends at last to a mere Naturalism. 
 It drives us to seek any revelation we may have 
 of the Great Power's intent only in the region of 
 Nature with its force and process, and not in the 
 conscience of history, of free man. To this result 
 comes the conscience amateur and scrupulous. That 
 is the end of a pedestrian, a burgher, ethic, without 
 the grand style but with the meddling habit. It is 
 a morality that cannot float. It destroys itself. It 
 works out to the denial of anything more than 
 natural process. Or, if it keep the idea of a revela- 
 tion, it is a revelation only in an antiquated sense 
 — by way of physical miracle. It does not give us 
 a true supernatural but only a preternatural, a 
 revelation which, by deposing conscience as the 
 agent of God, loses the moral in the miraculous. 
 
 That is what I do if I do not resist evil but leave 
 God to intervene if He wants it resisted. I leave Him 
 to take moral responsibility, I take none. Conscience 
 is not His vicar. He must strike the ravisher dead. 
 He must paralyse the murderer's arm. He must 
 send legions of angels if He wishes the invader 
 withstood. If He send no such reinforcements He 
 does not wish resistance. Satan, indeed, has no 
 
THE MORAL SANCTION OF FORCE 75 
 
 hesitation about force, nor have his earthly angels ; 
 but he may only be met by Michael, not by England. 
 It is really moral fatalism, or at best crude despotism. 
 It crushes moral action. As a matter of fact He 
 rarely so intervenes. Still He might. Thus the end 
 of this creed could only be to demoralise life in the 
 way gambling does — to destroy a faith in order or 
 in anything we could rely on, and to make life jumpy. 
 We look to the incalculable, and trust neuropathic 
 visions in the clouds more than serried conscience 
 on the field. And in the very last we should believe 
 not even in faith but in freak, and call it piety. The 
 expectation of miracle is really fatal to morale. We 
 may believe in miracles but we may not rely on them, 
 we may not expect them. They have a purpose, 
 but we are not to trade on them. They are gifts 
 in life but not guides — ^just as we welcome the genius 
 but do not wait for him. We are not to jump from 
 pinnacles in the faith that an unseen hand will arrest 
 us, buoy us, and make us float down through the air 
 upon the gaping crowd, to be hailed as the real 
 Messiah. It is all part of a wide scepticism and 
 impatience of law, in which the extreme pacifist and 
 the anarchist join hands. But we are to overcome 
 evil, and to do it with good, with positive good, 
 with moral good relevant to it, with the good it is 
 entitled to. We do not overcome it by simply 
 turning away to cultivate some good frame of mind, 
 or to do some good of a quite irrelevant kind, and 
 by taking our stab in the back. It is often thought 
 that by sacrifice we can evade duty ; but it is false 
 religion. It is corban. The patience of the saints 
 is not there to act simply as moral spectacle, a piece 
 
76 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 of impressionism melting the spectators, or making 
 the soldiers fall back. It is to have its perfect work; 
 it meets evil with judgment, not with mere retali- 
 ation ; it meets passion not with passion but law. 
 The patience of the saints is not melodramatic, 
 smiling down fear to show how a Christian can die. 
 It is the patience of power, co-operating with an 
 active God, and not lying down, nor turning aside 
 from an imperative conflict to a pious quietism or 
 an optional and self-chosen philanthropy. 
 
 r 
 
 So far as all experience goes, society is quite 
 necessary for morality, and force is quite necessary 
 I for society, if it be but to prepare its own disuse. 
 We must only see that it is a means and not a foun- 
 dation. It is a schoolmaster, a tutor, and not a 
 great teacher sent from God. Society must use 
 force but it does not rest on it. The basis of society 
 is law or right, whether formal or informal. Faith 
 in law is the great prophylactic of war. And the 
 only true object of war is to restore law to its place. 
 It is not really the policeman that keeps order ; 
 the law does, and the spirit of law which put him 
 there. If the policeman is not backed by the law 
 society turns on him, and by lawful force deposes 
 him. But if it could not put him there it would not 
 be law. Law would not be law if it could not use 
 force. It would be unable to make its authority 
 real. It would not have its home where Hooker 
 saw it — in the very bosom of the Holy and Almighty. 
 It would be authoritative only where its authority 
 was not needed, only with people already sympathetic, 
 already in tune with it. 
 
THE MORAL SANCTION OF FORCE ^'j 
 
 ' Yes,' it is said, * that is the true state of things. 
 Love can dispense with law.' Now it is not quite 
 easy to be patient with such dreamers — unless they 
 are very nice indeed, which many of them are, and 
 some are not superior at all and have no moral 
 ' side.' But, in the first place, love does not dispense 
 with law. The supreme revelation of love in Christ's 
 Cross came by the magnifying of law and its 
 honouring. Divine love is always holy love, and 
 for God there is a law of holiness, i.e. of absolute 
 righteousness, always tonic within the atmosphere 
 of love. Law is enthroned in the very heart of the 
 God of Love — if we have any faith left in a Revelation 
 by Atonement. Love without law (and law that 
 can make itself good) is but double-barrelled egoism. 
 Christianity is not the religion of Love but of holy 
 Love Omnipotent. For love, however ideal, might be 
 helpless in the face of its last defiance. Christianity 
 is the religion of the omnipotence of Love in forgiving 
 and reclaiming its last enemy. It is the religion of 
 that in love which insures its final and universal 
 reign. It is the religion of holy Love and of moral 
 Redemption. 
 
 For when the power of imparting good 
 Is equal to the will, the human soul 
 Requires no other heaven. 
 
 Christianity is a religion not of love only but of \ 
 power. Its cross is the world Act not of love alone \ 
 
 but of its moral conquest of all things. .. """^ 
 
 And, in the second place, it is not with heaven 
 that history has yet to do, or a historic God. It 
 is remarkable in such times as these how a taste for 
 grandiose ideas is combined with a total lack of any 
 
78 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 sense of actual situation. Love became incarnate, 
 and really, relevantly, organically so, among those 
 who were yet but the trivial and the evil. Christ 
 died dealing actively with an actual historic situation 
 and duty. We have in the name of duty to deal 
 with the actual, with love in a very imperfect state, 
 and with people who know nothing of it but as 
 egoist passion and instinctive self-will. Even where 
 it does not challenge law and defy it, love, as we 
 find it, is an unstable base for society. For, at 
 its present stage, it is too much a matter of mood. 
 At one time we are disposed in love to recognise 
 society and act on duty, at another to ignore it 
 and pursue our egoism. So, to protect us from that 
 uncertainty, moral civilisation, by a process which 
 sifts centuries, sets up laws in the interest of the 
 many (i.e. in the name of love). It sets up law 
 (which is right backed by might) coercing egoism, 
 directing duty, and punishing wrong. And a very 
 precious and costly product it has been. But that is 
 r^nbt to say that coercion is the foundation of law or 
 \ justice, nor is it the bond of society. It is a mere 
 \ clamp — a golden clamp, but still a clamp ; it is 
 \ not a cement. It is a clamp to act till the cement 
 Ireally set and the union is sound. Marriage is not 
 made without the contract, but it is not the contract 
 that makes the marriage. A bond of that outward 
 kind destroys society if we rest on it in chief. It 
 substitutes for a deep, immanent, and destined unity 
 a fundamental strife, repulsion, war. But that is not 
 our fundamental case. My metaphor of a clamp 
 limps. A clamp only holds two bodies that will not 
 cohere. But that is not the deep divine nature of 
 
THE MORAL SANCTION OF FORCE 79 
 
 man. So law is more even than a cement. It is a com- 
 missure. It is the medium of educative intercourse for 
 two or more beings that were meant to co-operate, 
 meant for each other, and are not in fundamental 
 antagonism. It is not the coercion for eternal strife, 
 but the discipline of eternal love. It is a tutor, 
 even if not a spirit of life. Right founded on might 
 is indeed no right. And in proportion as it is always 
 appealing to might, and always keeping might in 
 evidence, it can demoralise us. It can demoralise 
 us by reducing people to live only on the level of 
 the things they are compelled to do. But that is 
 not the fault of the law but of the people, of people 
 who love and trust nobody. Law is a fence round 
 the young plant of love to give it room to grow and 
 to keep the brutes off. Law as force is there to re- 
 pair love's weakness and not to replace its strength. 
 Conscience is therefore not against the use of force 
 but only against its dominion. God uses it Himself, 
 as I have said, and it cannot be forbidden to the 
 conscience which reflects and obeys Him, and is His 
 fellow worker. 
 
 What creates a State is in so far like what creates 
 a Church that it is a moral power. In the one case 
 it is the respect for law, in the other the faith in 
 Grace. But each is essentially a moral power (else 
 the Cross of Grace were not a real atonement but 
 only a piece of sacrifice ; and sacrifice, even for love, 
 may or may not be moral). The coercive power 
 is exercised under a certain moral principle and for^ 
 certain moral ends. It is hy law for righteousness. 
 There rests the coercive force of sovereignty — 
 force ancillary to ideal and moral realities called 
 
8o THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 rights. It is the State that makes the Sovereign 
 in a free community, not the Sovereign the State. 
 (In a Church it is otherwise. We do not choose our 
 soul's King ; He chooses us. But on that I cannot 
 enlarge here.) The Sovereign power does not create 
 /'^rights but expresses and insures them. It is moral 
 will and not force that is the basis of the State, and 
 of the family of States living in mutual respect. 
 
 The whole question is condensed in the right 
 of public punishment, the right of the magistrate. 
 No doubt every man has a right to a life as free and 
 full as by social help he can make it. And punish- 
 ment is an interference with that right of freedom. 
 But the man's right is one whose enjoyment is only 
 secured him by social recognition. And it is recog- 
 nised socially in this way in order that he may con- 
 tribute to the public good. He has the right also to 
 die on due cause ; he has the duty to accept death 
 for, and even from, his brethren who secure his life. 
 (We do not now believe practically that death inflicts 
 either extinction or hopeless hell, but only expulsion 
 from earthly society.) The public has the right to 
 prevent him at any cost from acts which interfere 
 with the public good, and the free action of others 
 for it. The public can withdraw its recognition of 
 his free life, and treat him as unfree and socially 
 dead. Society, as a moral being, must use force on 
 such a person to save others in their right and freedom 
 and richness of life. Force to this end is sanctioned, 
 and even sanctified, by morality. And the culprit, 
 as he became moral, would feel it his duty to die 
 under that force for the public good. A free and 
 
THE MORAL SANCTION OF FORCE 8i 
 
 moral life for all is the great object of society, whether 
 as Church or as State. But it has its conditions. 
 There are some that make it impossible. And these 
 must be arrested or destroyed that goodness may 
 live. If nothing else will do, such force must be 
 used — unless we recast our idea of goodness, and 
 call it yielding to wicked force in a piety ; which is 
 to strip religion of moral value. And that is religion's 
 chief bane. There are cases where even war (which 
 is force in excelsis) is the only means of defending 
 this liberty and fulness of life, not for a nation only 
 but for a world. There are cases where an inter- 
 national magistracy must be brought to bear, and 
 penalty inflicted in the name of all that God has 
 revealed as a divine humanity. Then ' the wrong 
 of destroying physical life and arresting individual 
 liberty disappears in the paramount right of pre- 
 serving the conditions under which moral life is 
 possessed.' Even John Bright thought there was no 
 means but the American war to destroy the worse 
 evil of slavery. ^^^ 
 
 The moral sanction of such magisterial force [ 
 should be in no lower hands than those of the nation 
 or the nations, of the nation as representing humanity 
 and not riding over it. In the hands of a class, 
 force which threatens a nation is immoral. I am 
 thinking of the general strike and its war on society. 
 The individual certainly cannot take such law into 
 his own hands. And the soldier does not, under his 
 strict oath and discipline. He is (as I have already 
 said) the agent and mandatory of his State, as that 
 State should be of humanity. He has its commission. 
 He is its sheriff, its executioner. This would extend 
 
82 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 even to a sharp crisis within civil and peaceful 
 society, as the law recognises in justifiable homicide. 
 In such a crisis the man who takes the life of the 
 would-be murderer or ravisher is acting as the agent 
 of the State, and is a magistrate ad hoc^ to maintain 
 the first condition of social life and right. He is 
 suddenly appointed by the situation as special con- 
 stable to disable the offender, but to stop him at any 
 cost, even of life if it must be so. He is then also, 
 for the Christian law, under cover of the principle of 
 Romans xiii. 4. He is a minister of God for good. 
 The life of the would-be murderer is forfeit. To 
 prefer that he should kill rather than that he should 
 die is immoral. We may not help the evil will to 
 effect. Not to resist is to be accessory. It is to 
 leave the door open for the robber. Passivity is 
 complicity. And it is profaning Christ to use His 
 precepts of love to erase the distinction between 
 good and evil, freedom and crime. 
 
 A historic crisis of the first order must carry us 
 onward not only to religion but to the very central 
 depths and creative source of our religion. If God 
 has committed all judgment to the incarnate Son 
 He has committed some to the men in whom the 
 Son works, and works more than even they know. 
 The total repudiation of force, and especially of man's 
 use of it, for any moral end is the mark of a wrong 
 standard of religion and the fruit of a perverse type. 
 It is the ethic of a religion which practically ignores 
 the wrath of God, and finds either no real place 
 in the Saviour for the Cross, or no place in the Cross 
 for more than sacrifice — none for the divine judgment. 
 
THE MORAL SANCTION OF FORCE 83 
 
 Such religion provides, therefore, no charter for the 
 saintship that should judge the world, except in the 
 poor sense of passing an opinion about it. The 
 Cross is not then the supreme judgment of God in 
 history, nor are the good ' in Christ ' equipped for 
 any such function. This creed destroys ethic because 
 it ousts an atoning Cross, meeting in love the reaction 
 of holy judgment, for one merely sacrificial or declara- 
 tory. It damages ethic because it worships a God 
 whose love is free enough to give everything in a 
 Saviour but not holy enough to require anything 
 from Him. What shocks a certain religious tempera- 
 ment (rather than devout faith) is the whole element 
 of judgment in history, whether in its course or at a 
 point on the Cross. What repels such people from a 
 real Atonement — which is man and God reciprocally 
 active in judgment — staggers them also in a moral 
 providence and their part in it. This is a religion in 
 which the sympathetic and mystical has dislodged the 
 ethical, and it tends to destroy Christianity as the 
 religion of moral redemption. The inner light deepens 
 the darkness without, and loses the signals lighted for 
 the conscience there. And by that I keep meaning 
 not that such a religion does not have an ethic for a 
 sequel, but that it has reduced it to be but a sequel, 
 and removed it from the inner nature and creative 
 Act of the religion, as distinct from its mere results. 
 The judgments of the holy, of the absolutely moral, 
 God did not then fall on Christ in His Cross ; nor did 
 Christ therein judge the world in blood. The holiness 
 which must react on sin as judgment is omitted from 
 that notion of love. The Sovereignty has gone out 
 of the Fatherhood. That is to say, judgment is but 
 
84 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 a device of fatherhood, it is not a positive and con- 
 stituent element in fatherhood. The conceptions of 
 love are those that come home to private, domestic, 
 and tender experience, not those that are active on 
 the public scale in history as righteousness. Ethic 
 (and religion with it) ceases to be impressive because 
 it loses the historic scale. It has personal sympathy 
 without moral insight. There is much fineness of 
 devout feeling and fancy, but a lack of imaginative 
 moral realism. There is much gentleness but no 
 sense of judgment, much simplicity and no subtle 
 sense of divine irony. There is a lack of moral 
 imagination of the kind that weighs the meaning of 
 guilt, and world guilt, the kind that perceives how 
 God used not only force but even man's abuse of 
 force for His Redemption. There is an absence of 
 the austere, eternal, and majestic mercy which laid 
 on Christ the iniquity of us all. Its Kingdom of 
 God is not first righteousness but devout affection 
 and fraternal piety. It is not indeed too much by 
 way of doing good, but it is too little by way of 
 doing right ; and if more people did right fewer would 
 need doing good. With such a cross the Church is 
 like a company in a room which groups itself about 
 the old hearth, but all that is there is a gas fire, or 
 a few electric bulbs tinted. 
 
 If the Cross was but suffering a martyrdom, and 
 the Soul of Christ was but enduring force instead 
 of mastering it and making it an offering to God, 
 then He neither felt nor wielded the judgment of 
 God. He did not perfectly confess that judgment 
 just which He took, and therefore He did not acquire 
 the right and power of judgment for the whole world. 
 
THE MORAL SANCTION OF FORCE 85 
 
 And if this element, this supremely moral element, 
 is removed from the spot which is the creative centre 
 of Christian religion, then the life that rises there is 
 severed from an intrinsic ethic, its saints cannot 
 judge the world, and the good cannot effect God's 
 judgment in history, but only follow certain disputed 
 precepts of a quietist kind. The men the Cross 
 makes cannot feel that they are called, by union 
 with such a Cross as is left, to be Christ's assessors 
 and agents in those judgments which distil the 
 Kingdom of God out of history. If Christ was but 
 passive to the will of God in His death then Christians 
 must be passive to God's judgments in life and the 
 world. Resignation takes the place of co-operation. 
 
 It may appear that, in the writer's view, the 
 source of Christian ethic, when we go to the very root 
 of the matter, is theological. That is so. In the last 
 radicalism it is the Cross of Christ. The deep, final, 
 and commanding ethic for the soul, the kind of ethic 
 that has its range, not in individual, domestic, or 
 dilettantist morality, but in the moral movement 
 providential for generations and for ever, is theo- 
 logical. And it will vary according to the nature 
 of that Act which Christian faith treats as the moral 
 centre of its universe — the Cross, which gathered 
 into one eternal and regenerative Act the whole and 
 holy person of Christ. It will vary according as we 
 recognise there the judgment of God's holy love in 
 creative action for history, or only a lesson in divine 
 love by a piece of sacrifice — a real Atonement, or a 
 deep impression. The Cross of Christ is the fountain 
 of Christian ethic, as it is of His Holy Spirit. The 
 
86 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 teaching of Christ, on which at present so much 
 stress is laid (especially the Sermon), is but a series 
 of illustrations of the power and principle of the Cross 
 occasioned by certain circumstances. To substitute 
 the teaching of Christ for His Cross as the ethical 
 source, instead of using it as illustration, is a very 
 wide and anti-evangelical error. It displaces our 
 centre of gravity, and therefore causes Christianity 
 to falter where it should firmly tread. It is an 
 error parallel, in the Gospels, to that which, in the 
 Epistles, makes the Sacraments instead of the Word 
 the chief legacy of Christ to the Church. The whole 
 Church needs a re-moralising, and it can only 
 acquire it by a return upon the source of its new 
 life as being, in the same act, its moral centre. It 
 must re-orient itself at its own pole. The source 
 of Christian ethic must surely be identical with the 
 source of Christian life. It has been the bane of 
 evangelical Christianity, and often its perdition, to 
 have severed justification in the cross (or religion) 
 from sanctification in the spirit (or ethic) ; as if each 
 had its own source, and one section (the orthodox) 
 took stand on the former, while another (the heretics) 
 took stand on the latter. Whereas ' all flows from the 
 cross and from our dying there' ('The Imitation'). 
 What the Church needs most for the service of a 
 world to which conscience at the long last means more 
 than even ' heart,' what religion most needs if it is to 
 go beyond mystic elation and be a control and guide 
 for life, is a recoupling with that one holy current, a 
 resettlement on that foundation of the Cross, in what- 
 ever modern terms. And there is no small hope that 
 the war may help us in that way, and put the colour 
 
THE MORAL SANCTION OF FORCE 87 
 
 back into the blood of Christ. It may restore to piety 
 a due sense of the element of judgment in history and 
 at the heart of grace — ^judgment in the divine course 
 of history because judgment at the divine point of 
 history. For what repels us from a real Atonement 
 in the blood of Christ the righteous also robs of its 
 sanctity the blood shed in every cause of historic 
 righteousness, and unnerves the conscience which 
 goes to pain and death as a fellow worker with the 
 historic judgment of God. 
 
 I am liable to be told that I may be proving too 
 much, and that if these things are so then we should 
 use force in aid of faith and pursue wars of religion. 
 That will not bear a moment's reflection. It is not 
 urged that war may be made in order to do good but 
 to prevent the prevention of good, to resist wrong, 
 and especially wrong to those who cannot resist for 
 themselves. May we not peck the cat for the chickens 
 under our wing ? If words cut deeper than wounds 
 Christ struck very fiercely at the foes of His brood. 
 It is very certain now that religion cannot be spread 
 by force (though it has taken the world a long time 
 to learn it) ; but is faith just irrelevant to force ? 
 God, indeed, did more than judge the world in 
 Christ's Cross ; but He did judge it. Did He not use 
 Assyria on Israel ? I have spoken of a.d. 70; did 
 He not use Rome against Jerusalem in a.d. 70 ? Was 
 there no connection between the rejection of Christ 
 and the destruction of Zion ? Did Christ, as the 
 providence of His own Kingdom, not summon then 
 the legions it did not suit Him to ask for to avert the 
 Cross ? And religion may sympathise with the power. 
 
88 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 however imperfect, that uses force to arrest wicked- 
 ness and defend liberty. The prophet who does not 
 go into the battle may yet mean much for the 
 soldiers and the victory. If religion forbid the fight 
 of a State for its life, and for the moral life of the 
 world, it is outlaw religion ; and it must take 
 the consequences of being inimica generis humanly 
 as the Jews were by the Roman declared to be. It 
 must lose not only the benefits but the confidence 
 of the society it will not serve. And it must incur 
 what we cannot help feeling for those who live in 
 comfort behind the bayonets they denounce, and 
 prosper much by a machinery defended by guns, in 
 a society only possible by fleet and camp. 
 
 There come times when we are thrown almost 
 into despair by the necessity of fighting over again 
 battles which we thought were won for good and 
 all, and on whose results we were basing our whole 
 mental and moral world. Many had that feeling 
 some years ago in the political world on the question 
 of Free Trade. And such is also the case, on a far 
 vaster scale, with the present war. We are called 
 upon by its developments to revise some of what we 
 thought the most settled principles of civilised society. 
 We seem to have to begin restoring society from its 
 moral foundations, and rebuilding humanity from 
 its base. By a long historic evolution, coming to a 
 head rapidly during the latter part of last century, 
 we thought we had secured another foundation and 
 another principle than force as the base of society. 
 We thought force had in the main been replaced by 
 ^fraternity, and that militarism had been taught its 
 
THE MORAL SANCTION OF FORCE 89 
 
 true place by law and justice. We had come to 
 think that commerce was to put round the world a 
 girdle of peace by reciprocal interests and mutual 
 respect. But on a sudden all is changed. All is put 
 on the hazard again. Force, enhanced with all the 
 resources of natural civilisation, and justified by 
 the repudiation of any moral obligation for States, 
 has broken loose on mankind. Militarism is again 
 desolating Europe. But it is not in the old form 
 which sought the glory of a soldier genius or of 
 a dynasty. There was a remnant of poetry and 
 chivalry in that, as such things go. The soldier 
 was more or less of a knight. But this is different. 
 The huckster has taken command even of the soldier 
 and debased him. Mammon is a more ignoble god 
 than Mars. The passion of greed is mean compared 
 with the passion for glory. The very commerce from 
 which so much was hoped has become the moving 
 source of this relapse and degradation. The creature 
 we petted has bitten us. The snake we warmed has 
 stung. To do the soldiers justice it is the traders^ 
 that have promoted this war — with the soldiers no 
 doubt as their willing tools. It is a war of industry. 
 It is an economic war — everything is said now to be 
 economic at last. It has been forced by a desperate 
 financial situation, caused by the sudden conversion 
 of an agricultural people to an industrial, and by the 
 passion of a too prosperous industrialism to capture 
 the markets of the earth for German products. The 
 new production was forced by the French milliards ; 
 and to effect the capture these products were sold 
 abroad at such a loss that the advertisement bill 
 meant impending bankruptcy ; and war is, among 
 
90 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 other things, a last gamble to avert it. The fate of 
 Socialism has shown how little humane righteousness 
 without a religion can resist mere racialism. Germany 
 has become since 1870 a nouveau riche, and it keeps 
 the parvenu's habit of mind and morals. The work- 
 man risen to be an employer is often said to be the 
 worst of employers, the most aggressive, provocative, 
 and brutal. He was brought up on blows, perhaps, 
 as an apprentice, and they remain his nature, how- 
 ever covered. So the capable, rapid, and materialist 
 prosperity of Germany, overleaping itself, falls on 
 the desperate venture of war to prevent the awful 
 collapse impending on its frenzied finance. Mere 
 finance, without moral restraint, ends in force without 
 methods even humane. As its field is the world it is 
 all society that is involved ; and what is at stake is 
 the moral principles that make society worthy, to say 
 nothing of Christian. War on a world scale is declared 
 on the Kingdom of God by Mammon, Mars, and 
 lying Mercury. And so society for its own safety, as 
 for God's Kingdom, has to engage with the primitive 
 man who neither fears God nor regards his kind. 
 We have to cope with an egoism not only colossal 
 but ignoble, with a passion not of ambition but 
 of mere coarse covetousness. Prosper© has to 
 take order with Caliban. (And I am forgetting 
 nothing of legitimate national ambitions or thorough 
 practical power.) We have to stop, turn back, and 
 lay again the foundations, when we should have 
 been going on to perfection. Force must be met 
 with force, for conscience sake, for the world's sake 
 and the Kingdom's. But it is a case of force which 
 repudiates moral control being met by force in the 
 
 I 
 
THE MORAL SANCTION OF FORCE 91 
 
 service of righteousness and humanity, by force 
 under the principle of the Kingdom of God which is, 
 by Germany openly disavowed. ''^^ 
 
 It is remarkable that a world revolution and 
 dissolution should come from the most conservative 
 of States. We are familiar with revolution as the 
 negative product of an unteachable Conservatism, 
 by way of reaction. But this is revolution led by 
 such Conservatism. It is an egoist, military and 
 militant, Conservatism. It is Feudalism in a long 
 belated survival (and this is the last struggle of 
 Feudalism). Its peace was only the equilibrium of a 
 high explosive, it was not the stability of righteous- 
 ness. Power, if morality do not wield it, only goes to 
 pieces, like an overdriven fly-wheel. Force, without 
 that sanction, dies of its own density, like an attack 
 in close formation. Yet to leave force to the non- 
 moral, to have all the moral people feeling too moral 
 to use it against its abuse, or too proud to fight, is to 
 make a present of it to Satan, and to leave the world 
 to him so far as any action of ours goes. It is to 
 become 'procuress to the Lords of Hell.' Progress 
 is not secured by civilisation nor culture but by living 
 and active faith in a holy God, whose judgments are 
 deeper than all devilry and whose servants are the 
 just and bold. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 CHRISTIAN LOVE AS PUBLIC RIGHTEOUSNESS 
 
 What one misses in certain lovable types of religion 
 is the historic sense, and an ethic upon that scale, 
 ethic in the grand style — the sense of a cosmic 
 righteousness and a historic continuity of public 
 regeneration, with duty accordingly. They have the 
 note of sympathy and the intuition of ideas, but no 
 sense of a situation. They can picture a destiny but 
 they cannot measure powers. They are moral artists. 
 They dwell on what ought to be, were the world 
 radically different from what it actually is. And 
 especially do they fail to realise the total moral 
 situation of the sinful world before a God of holy 
 love and saving judgment — its salvation by fire. 
 The war is a lightning flash which reveals the funda- 
 mental difference, slumbering unborn in the heart 
 of peace, between the twin types of religion — one 
 of the naive heart and one of the freed conscience ; 
 one Esau, one Jacob ; one genial, one holy ; one 
 lovable to his kind, one elect for the world ; one 
 (pious and sympathetic) dwelling on the blessing 
 of God's fatherly love, and the other (moral and 
 evangelical) living on the grace of justification by 
 faith ; one asking sweetly for ' Lead, kindly light,' 
 the other humbly for ' Rock of Ages ' ; one engrossed 
 
 92 
 
CHRISTIAN LOVE AS RIGHTEOUSNESS 93 
 
 with the mystic soul, the other with a mystic 
 righteousness ; one seeking union with God for his 
 soul's sake, the other how to be just with God for 
 His righteousness' sake. Both are divine, but one 
 has the calling and the entail and reversion of the 
 world. The 51st Psalm is worth more for the future 
 than the 23rd. If the centre of Christianity is still, 
 in whatever form, justification by faith, then the 
 former of the types contrasted is subordinate, or at 
 least sequential. The Cross is the centre, source, 
 and key of Christian ethic (which the Sermon on 
 the Mount but illustrates). And its first Christian 
 concern is a care that God should come by His own, 
 that He should be righteous and holy, whatever 
 become of man, or however He treat him — ^let God 
 be true if all men are liars. Peace at any price is 
 false Christianity, righteousness at any cost is true. 
 The faith that justifies, that puts man morally right 
 with God, is not simply a faith in free grace but 
 in holy — a faith in its full righteousness, its royal 
 right, and its final reign, a faith that the grace so 
 free is also in the Cross just and triumphant on a 
 scale universal and absolute. It is my faith that 
 the God of Grace has secured in Christ His eternal 
 righteousness, more even than that He has secured 
 me. Such is the faith of the great saints. And it is 
 not safe to differ with the great saints here. Their 
 faith is, and must be, therefore, faith in an Atone- 
 ment in which God's love first fully glorifies His 
 holiness, one that does thus fulfil all righteousness, 
 one that is, accordingly, the greatest moral Act of 
 the Universe. It is an offering, primarily, not of 
 pity but of sanctity, and neither by God to man 
 
94 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 nor by man to God but by God to God, the self- 
 sacrifice of the perfectly holy Son to the perfect 
 holiness of the Father. 
 
 The chief division between types of Christian 
 belief turns on this — on the hegemony for the soul 
 of conscience on a universal scale, on the primacy 
 of righteousness, on the authority of the holy. But 
 the sense of the holy (as beyond the merely reverend 
 or august) is passing out of current religion ; and 
 with serious moral results. The former of the two 
 types I named is anthropocentric religion. That is, 
 its prime interest is man with God to help him 
 (Ps. xxiii.) ; and it ends in subjective humanism, with 
 God squeezed out. The other is theocentric, i.e. its 
 prime interest is God, with man to worship and serve 
 Him absolutely (Ps. li.). Its mysticism is objective 
 and moral, and it ends in the Kingdom of God. The 
 one is concerned with the freedom of the loving soul, 
 which the other only finds in a prior and engrossing 
 concern for the kingship of a holy God. The more 
 subjective and humanist type must be second (how- 
 ever essential) in a historic religion whose first con- 
 cern is with the guilt of the race, i.e. with the 
 primacy of holiness. By itself it is individual or 
 sectional. It is not catholic. It fails in range, am- 
 plitude, subtlety, flexibility, reality, and command. 
 Like much sympathy it is liable to this-worldliness, 
 and tends to subside to the homelier uses and needs. 
 It represents the Local Government Board of the 
 divine Kingdom. It is strong on personal conduct 
 or kindness, but weak in moral range and insight. 
 It is poor in its conception of righteousness ; which 
 rises little above individual integrity or purity 
 
CHRISTIAN LOVE AS RIGHTEOUSNESS 95 
 
 within the minor social circles. Its uniting power 
 for the world is not righteousness but fraternity, 
 not conscience but kindness, not God but man. 
 It finds its bond of human union in the one touch 
 of nature, in men loving each other, instead of all 
 being loved by God. It believes in conquering the 
 position thus instead of being more than conquerors 
 — being redeemed ; in love as a work instead of love 
 as a faith, in the love we practise instead of the love 
 we trust. Consequently this type of mind has not 
 the instinct which feels God to be on the field when 
 He is most invisible. It finds Him in happy peace 
 but not in crucial judgment, which is apt to break 
 down its faith. Or, in respect of evil, it is pre- 
 occupied with the obvious anomalies of the day, but 
 has not the flair for the grand iniquities, the world 
 tragedies, for the deities and dominants of hell, for 
 vast impersonal evil, for spiritual wickedness in 
 high places. That means something graver than the 
 shortcomings of bishops, the sins of the smart set, 
 or the peccadilloes of Gaiety peers. The type of 
 religion in view is shocked by the sins of camps 
 but dull to the sins of thrones. It is horrified at 
 the sins of cities, but it is not equally sensitive to 
 the sins of earth's principalities and powers. Its 
 idealism is millennial happiness rather than moral 
 majesty. It lacks the sense of historic junctures, 
 and public justice, and cosmic, imaginative righteous- 
 ness. It has ethical interests but not moral insight. 
 It is harder on Judas than on Caiaphas. It does 
 not gauge sin on the demonic scale, nor an imperial 
 righteousness. It views neither good nor evil in 
 the historic dimensions of an actual Kingdom of 
 
96 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 God among the nations, but chiefly on provincial or 
 Socialist lines. Its very Church is * a pneumatic 
 democracy ' without the aristocratic note. It is the 
 Church catholic at the cost of the Church holy. In 
 the State it knows nothing of a collective personality 
 or a general will. It does not therefore realise 
 national sin, though it uses the phrase, nor the need 
 of a national righteousness to resist it. 
 
 National righteousness means much more than 
 the sum of individual excellence ; it means the 
 righteousness which belongs to the nation as a moral 
 unit, a moral personality, a moral subject on another 
 plane than the individual, with a far wiser history, 
 and a longer entail of responsibility. This, it should 
 be realised, was the scale of the sin that slew Christ 
 and doomed Israel. Israel did not fall by its indi- 
 vidual and obvious immorality, by drunkenness, 
 licentiousness, or worldliness among its common 
 population, which was certainly better than Rome. 
 It fell through a national choice made for God's honour 
 by its eminently able and respectable leaders, to whom 
 the people were sold and delivered. It was not the 
 accumulation of the common sins of the common man 
 that brought the doom, but State sin, high-placed sin, 
 the solidary sin of the distinguished and cultured. It 
 was sin on a scale imposing or dazzling, the illustrious 
 perdition of the moral soul, the sin of people more 
 religious than righteous, and hard on lapses but dull 
 to judgment, the sin of devoted moral dunces, sin 
 abetted by the Church of the land and its leaders, a 
 sin common to its politicians or its popular leaders 
 (who kept the commandments with Pharisaic severity), 
 and to deserting disciples and betrayers. It was 
 
CHRISTIAN LOVE AS RIGHTEOUSNESS 97 
 
 over the city that Christ wept. It was a national, a 
 spiritual, an ' eternal ' sin that slew Him, saturating 
 the very religion of decent Israel, unredeemed by 
 the purity, the wisdom, the kindness of a Hillel or 
 a Gamaliel, and ending in a national doom, to none 
 so surprising and crushing as to those who had 
 done most to earn it. It was the sin that only 
 religion can produce, the daintiest, may be, and 
 comeliest sin, in many clothed with a piety that 
 ruins moral judgment, takes the iron out of a man's 
 blood, prevents it entering into the blood of his 
 children, and finally turns pale the very blood of 
 Christ. It was the sin of the most earnest and 
 progressive of the people, people who believed in a 
 righteousness of severe duty that let them crucify 
 Heaven's Holy One and Just, the champions of the 
 best religion and culture of the land. It was sin 
 that found its apologists in all the professors and 
 rabbinists of the day, the kind of elegant sin in 
 which may be conjoined, at other junctures, religion 
 and cruelty (as the Italian Republics showed). It 
 was sin with a soft flesh, a fine hue, and a hard 
 stone, the public sin that abjures humanity, re- 
 pudiates humane morality, and yet sends people to 
 the churches to pray for the success of that policy 
 and the victory of such arms. It was the deep sin 
 of Pharisaism adopted as a national programme, a 
 moral vigour and rigour without moral insight or 
 sympathy, ethical interest blind to evangelical prin- 
 ciple, unlimited self-sacrifice for a damnable end of 
 pious egoism — 3. kind of sin so spiritually discerned 
 that none saw or felt it for what it was but its 
 Victim. The sting and woe to Him in Gethsemane 
 
98 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 was the infatuation of His misguided nation, the 
 godlessness of the good. What broke His heart 
 was His tragic sense that its supreme Lover should 
 be its fatal doom. There fell on Him the curse 
 of the mixed blindness and wickedness of a whole 
 humanity made concrete and historic in a nation. 
 The evil power was pointed in a national crisis 
 which held in it the salvation or the doom of a 
 world. It was not a vague and dreamed humanity 
 whose suffering lay on the Saviour's soul, nor was 
 it the failure of an ideal programme of social ethic. 
 His Cross was not chagrin at the collapse of a public 
 programme and the rejection of a moral code. The 
 wickedness of mankind was here concrete in a 
 nation's supreme crime, as the righteousness of a 
 loving God was gathered to a head in that nation's 
 Victim. It was by a national crisis, brought to a 
 sharp and bloody point, that the salvation of the 
 world came. Is it wrong to say that so also it 
 comes from time to time ? It came by an issue 
 of a nation's life or death on a matter of world 
 moment and eternal right. The sin that slew Christ 
 was sin in the grand style, sin worse than particular 
 wars, Satanic sin, hard to discern, beyond the 
 vision of a pedestrian ethic, and measurable only 
 by the moral imagination. The ruin came by an 
 * eternal sin,' and not by a passing crime. The 
 issue of the world-righteousness was decided in a 
 historic form and in a national doom. That was 
 (and is) the principle of its decision. The Christ of 
 the atoning Cross loved men as they have never 
 been loved, but He loved the world-righteousness of 
 God's holy Love more, and in national terms. The 
 
CHRISTIAN LOVE AS RIGHTEOUSNESS 99 
 
 Kingdom of God was not in voluntary philanthropy 
 alone, nor only in sympathetic atmosphere and 
 kindly ways; but it was in a national obedience 
 and insight. And it takes its course through the 
 contact or collision of peoples who stir issues of a 
 world-righteousness organic with that set up in the 
 Cross. 
 
 There is a type of mind which is strong and 
 sound on individual, domestic, and commercial 
 morality, but weak on a righteousness conditioned 
 by the whole course of history. It is full of a homely 
 and hearty ethic rather than an imaginative and 
 universal, an ethic of the primary colours, an ethic 
 of honesty alone without the delicacy or distinction 
 of honour. It has the moral mentality of youth 
 rather than the tragic wisdom and prophetic strain 
 of age. It is blind to the interactions of historic 
 movement or national policy with the Kingdom of 
 Satan, and it is dull to a world warfare on the scale 
 and style of the Redeemer and His Redemption. 
 It is not the state of its belief that is wrong so 
 much as the scale of it, the note of it, which is 
 apt to be provincial, sectarian, and in the end trivial. 
 Its Christianity has its focus not really in the Cross, 
 where the true universality of Christianity resides, 
 but in the Sermon on the Mount, which is largely 
 ' occasional.' It rallies not on the Cross which 
 overcame the world by a new creation of the con- 
 science, but on the precepts of the Teacher, which 
 were there to guide and clarify the regenerate on 
 whom the Cross had done its decisive work. It 
 gathers not at the moral crisis and holy centre of 
 
 H 2 
 
100 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 the world, but round precious illustrations and fertile 
 directions to the Church in a particular situation. 
 It rests not on the righteousness the Cross set up for 
 the world, but on a love esoteric to the Church. It 
 reflects the too modern tendency to reduce public 
 Christianity to a highly spiritualised ethic of patient 
 sympathy between brethren (which men are not)^ 
 together with an excessive concern for pain or life ; 
 and to ignore Christianity as the victory of love's 
 eternal and universal righteousness, with its crucial 
 imperative on the world even unto death. It does 
 not see (in Goodwin's phrase) that in Christian love 
 while the fond part is ours the real part is God's. 
 It has learnt more from Tolstoi than from Paul. It 
 expatiates in the sympathies of the Gospel, but it 
 does not realise what Paul described as the power of 
 the Gospel, and what he set mighty on the forehead 
 of his greatest statement of it. He is not ashamed 
 of the Gospel before great Rome because in it is 
 revealed the righteousness of God, a righteousness 
 greater than even Roman justice, and growing in 
 an ascending scale of faith (Romans i. 17). That 
 is the aspect of the Gospel that bears upon nations 
 and States. The public form of love is righteous- 
 ness. While the type of mind I have in view 
 moves happily in the ideal beauties of a non-national 
 Christian brotherhood, while it can even own God's 
 judgment in public nemesis ; yet it shrinks from 
 the positive movement of God's holy Kingdom 
 in peoples, and from the violence of the blood of 
 the Cross (that founded the Kingdom) as the last 
 and constant judgment of the world. It is a frame 
 of mind which is largely a result of our modern 
 
CHRISTIAN LOVE AS RIGHTEOUSNESS 
 
 lOI 
 
 concentration on the teaching of Christ to men of 
 sensitive good will ; to the neglect of His apocalyptic 
 wrath, and of the Atonement in which He created 
 the new ethic and the eternal. There he dealt a 
 doom of saving blood once and for ever to the 
 unrighteousness of mankind. But the piety I mean 
 lives on the blessings of love, while a principle like 
 justification by faith it finds only theological, and 
 therefore but academic. 
 
 But the theology of a historic revelation is not 
 a set of theses ; it is a tissue of powers. However 
 negligible it may seem within the few years of a 
 man's life, it rules the moral course of generations, 
 where alone it has room to turn round and come 
 full circle. This pacific type of mind fails to see 
 that, while the Love of God is the ruling spirit 
 between the members of the ideal Church, the 
 righteousness of God, striving even to blood, was, 
 and is, the form of the issue between His Kingdom 
 and the nations of the world, the spiritual man 
 and the natural. Its religion lacks the virile, the 
 dramatic, the tragic note, the note of historic con- 
 flict and moral victory therein. It does not realise 
 that, as the settlement of that love's righteous issue 
 on the Cross was the Church's one foundation, 
 the ethic of that act, love's righteousness unto blood, 
 is the Church's ruling principle. There God's holy 
 love of the world, which did not spare His only Son 
 violence and judgment, had its expression. It had 
 its expression upward in the supreme moral act of 
 Propitiation, and manward in the supreme moral act 
 of Justification. But Justification, in the form of 
 piety before us, is simply dismissed as archaic. It 
 
102 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 does not even undergo a moral re-interpretation to 
 fit the age. It is not, as final righteousness, the 
 moral focus and organising principle of the new life, 
 the new morality, the New Humanity, on both the 
 public and the private, on the eternal, scale. It is 
 not what gives that New Humanity its moral quality- 
 If it is understood at all, it is only as it concerns 
 grace to me, mercy to me. It is not realised as a 
 holy grace, which justifies itself to a cosmic and 
 eternal righteousness in the same act as carries mercy 
 to souls. It is but the justification of the sinner, it 
 is not also the justification of God to His own moral 
 self by an Atonement He makes in blood. The 
 supreme interest of the New Testament is always 
 the righteousness of the God of Love — the love that, 
 however tender to the penitent, yet, as holy, takes 
 its racial form and public effect in a sinful world 
 by a moral way, by the Cross, by a public way of 
 judgment-grace. But this current spirituality which 
 we discuss is moral in its fruits rather than its essence, 
 as if the root of its ethic were but in an arbitrary 
 decree of God for order's sake, and not in a necessity 
 of His inmost nature in the Cross revealed. And 
 so it tends to overlook the righteousness at any price 
 in the Cross, and the necessity of that war in heaven 
 which reached its acme there. It is pre-occupied with 
 Christianity as an ethical frame of souls or groups, 
 and not with the one universal, cosmic, eternal Act 
 of Holiness, which it takes a Church in its unity to 
 realise, and which is missed by a divided Church. 
 It does not read Christianity as the crisis of the 
 moral universe, which vibrates in all history, rules its 
 deep march, overrules its enterprise, and redeems and 
 
CHRISTIAN LOVE AS RIGHTEOUSNESS 103 
 
 masters, even in blood, the crimes of heroes and not 
 alone the vices of slaves. Among many devout 
 groups, Christ, even when His history is taken 
 seriously by such piety, is regarded too much as the 
 legislator of the Kingdom (which was not His metier 
 at all), yea, even as the saintly sage of the best 
 natural ethic and man's inner light, instead of the 
 Creator of the New Humanity in His regenerative Re- 
 demption and its covenant of blood. Such exponents 
 seem rather a sect gathered round the founder of 
 its programme than a Church round the Redeemer 
 of the world-conscience. The ethic of their faith 
 is in the realm of refined law rather than in the field 
 of creative Gospel, and it tends to live more by 
 detailed precept than by a costly Redemption. It 
 makes more for the morals of a regulative code than of 
 a reconstitutive Cross. It turns on a new ideal rather 
 than on the new life, created by the moral victory 
 of the Cross, and shaped by its moral principle, 
 which is the supreme source and interpreter of every 
 precept in the Gospels. The key-word of the New 
 Testament is not love but holy love. It is more, 
 it is its final triumph in that historic and national 
 righteousness which is the first and loving concern of 
 all holiness. It is not mere brotherliness, but the 
 triumph of the righteousness of a holy Father on the 
 scale of human brotherhood — on the scale of brother- 
 hood as set up by the Cross in the new conscience of 
 penitent love, and covering a New Humanity whose 
 unity is holy, i.e. absolutely moral in the conscience. 
 It is the righteousness of God and His Kingdom. 
 First righteousness then peace, first the Kingdom 
 then fraternity — that is the New Testament note and 
 
I04 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 order. That is the core of any Christianity which is 
 rooted in the new creation, and which is not merely 
 the apotheosis of a spiritualised human nature. 
 Faith in righteousness and its service of God, even 
 to wounds and death, to judgment not accepted only 
 but inflicted — that is the faith that is a nation's 
 strength no less than a soul's, that exalts a nation, 
 and makes it to be an agent of God's historic purpose 
 and a satrapy of His Kingdom. Righteousness is the 
 form divine love takes between men in nations, as 
 it takes the form of affection between souls in a 
 Church. It is the way love works in the Grace of 
 the Cross, whose great problem was the world's 
 unrighteousness, not man's indifference (for Israel 
 was a zealot) but man's wickedness. Love in the 
 culture of the Church has one aspect, in the judg- 
 ments of the world another. But it is love still. 
 
 The ethic I criticise rests really, in many cases 
 though not in all, on a spirituality more mystic 
 than moral, and therefore less than evangelical. 
 It is more subjective in our pity than objective in 
 Go^'s act. It also rests, like all mysticism which is 
 more occupied with the soul than with the conscience, 
 on the note of religious individualism which so fails 
 us in public crises. Like Schleiermacher, it presses 
 the God-consciousness of Christ's person on an 
 orthodoxy in great need of it. But it stops where 
 Schleiermacher did, with the mystic process and 
 person of Christ, but of a Christ dispowered of the 
 Cross and its poignant moral crisis for history. It 
 lacks (I have said) historic sense, moral vision, or 
 social control, being engrossed with those inner 
 
CHRISTIAN LOVE AS RIGHTEOUSNESS 105 
 
 movements in man which are believed to reflect the 
 inner processes of God rather than to respond to His 
 great Act This frame of mind is too much inter- 
 ested in the martyred Saint to think of His earthly- 
 death as the actual moral crisis even of Eternity. 
 It is more occupied with a principle of sacrifice 
 ascending through creation to Christ than with the 
 sacrifice that descended on creation in Him to make 
 the new and greater creation. The work of Christ 
 was, in this view, no more than to bring in a spiritual 
 type of righteousness, of which the law was indicative, 
 but, through some jar, incapable. It condenses the 
 light lighting every man, and it existed before Incar- 
 nation or Atonement. It becomes ours by an inner 
 illumination, and is not created by Christ's historic 
 deed, as if Christ had required men to believe in this 
 light rather than in His Person and its crowning 
 Act. 
 
 All this is part of the inability and indisposition of 
 this type of religion to grasp the moral core and crisis 
 of personality, to realise the mystery of iniquity, to 
 lay hold of the cosmic moral tragedy as the focus of 
 reality, to take the measure of historic righteousness 
 in a waxing Kingdom, and the providential national- 
 ism therein involved. It reflects (as I have said) 
 the type of mind which is more apt for the intuition of 
 ideas than for the sense of an actual situation. It 
 basks in the ancient light of the world rather than 
 thrills to its sting or throbs with its new life. It 
 does not kindle to the world tragedy of the holy life 
 amid the hopeless guilt. It does not gauge the grand 
 juncture of the general conscience, nor realise the 
 actual moral case of historic man before the righteous- 
 
io6 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 ness of God. It does not duly feel quanti ponderis 
 sit peccatum. Its nature is too idyllic to taste the 
 moral bitterness of things. It fails to see that the 
 absolute crisis of the race was in the moral crisis 
 of the Cross. It underrates the Man of Sin, either by 
 poverty or by generosity of nature. And it is by 
 the same defect that it fails to appreciate now the 
 world issue of life and death, the acme of divine 
 judgment, presented by such a struggle as is going 
 on in Europe between the prince of this world and 
 the Lord its Righteousness. It has a certain moral 
 aloofness, and a disconcerting impartiality as to 
 affairs, which is apt to become an honest affectation, 
 and a naive superiority — too proud to fight. In 
 belief it tends to be foreign to the idea of a Mediator 
 in any other sense than a medium. Revelation, for 
 it, is an enlightening avatar rather than a redeeming 
 Act. It holds by the inner light in every man, 
 whereof its historic Christ was the type rather 
 than the Creator. It views this as the sole and 
 sufficient seed of life, needing no Scripture nor 
 Church — a. view which is religious atomism. 
 It does not know Grace except as the divine 
 and multitudinous smile of benign forgiveness; 
 whereas for the real taste of God's Grace we 
 need to have known the taste of His wrath and the 
 existence of His Law. It has not the sense nor need 
 for a corporate Judgment, Atonement, and Regenera- 
 tion, due to the whole righteousness of the universe, 
 and creating a historic kingdom. It tends, with all 
 idealists, to credit offhand the inner spirituality of 
 man with final redemptive power — which is a very 
 great leap. It would leave behind such chrysales as 
 
CHRISTIAN LOVE AS RIGHTEOUSNESS 107 
 
 Justification, from which it deems the soul has long 
 emerged into flight ; and it cherishes in consequence 
 a non-ethical spirituality, or one, at least, whose ethic 
 is a sequel rather than a constituent, and lies in its 
 sympathetic fruits and not in its creative core and 
 nature. It trusts an immediate light, an individual, 
 and therefore an unhistoric, and therefore non-social, 
 light, which has in it more piety than faith, and the 
 bias to reflection rather than action, or, if to action, 
 then to action private and non-corporate. It is dena- 
 tionalised, and it is de-churched ; and it seems often 
 to owe more to the occasional conferences of groups 
 than to the common worship of the Church. Its 
 Reconciliation is all of love and none of righteousness^ 
 being more generous to men than just to God, and 
 resting on no Atonement as 2 Cor. v. 19 does on 
 verse 21. Salvation was not effected by Christ in 
 His moral and atoning victory, but only shown us 
 in His fine teaching and winsome truth. His high 
 precept and His gracious character. His death 
 is not the agent but only the image, and symbol, 
 and classic of the true Redemption, which is really 
 within each man and His experience. The world 
 was not in that death overcome for ever, all history 
 morally mortgaged to a holy God, and all public 
 righteousness impounded for His Kingdom, by the 
 creation once for all of an eternal world-righteousness 
 in and over the course of things. There is admitted, 
 of course, a valuable connection between the Cross 
 and history, but none necessary and creative ; there 
 is none such as those fathers of modern liberty, the 
 Puritans, felt and embodied between that historic 
 death, with its inner liberation of the soul, and the 
 
io8 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 public liberation of a people in the world, to say- 
 nothing of the creation of a new people in a new world. 
 The words and deeds of Christ are very precious and 
 quickening to these groups, but they are only symbolic 
 for souls, not effective for reality. They are more pre- 
 ceptual, exhibitory, or exemplary than sacramental. 
 They show but do not convey, do not create. With 
 such an idea of overcoming the world, the note of 
 public righteousness, as something involved in the very 
 nature of an atoning Reconciliation, is drowned in a 
 haze of sympathetic love, or tangled, like the Pleiads, 
 in a golden braid. This is a fine and fruitful phase 
 in a time of order and peace ; but in the present hour 
 of death and day of judgment it is like shutting down 
 the engines and expecting the crew to drive the ship, 
 or trusting the compass to set the course. In the 
 storm it has not a captain but only a cox. It calls 
 on Mary, as it were, when Messiah is the need. It 
 dwells on a city of dreaming spires, instead of a city 
 whose salvation is as battlements and towers. 
 
 All my remarks in the last few pages do not apply 
 to the Society of Friends, but many do — especially 
 in connection with the real crisis of the whole moral 
 world in the atoning cross of Christ. The treatment 
 of this doctrine is the chief defect in Barclay's Apology 
 (surely one of the finest books of its day and of many 
 a day). But it is a defect so central ethically that, 
 when a moral crisis should arise, of the first rank 
 and on a world scale, transcending all philanthropy 
 or mere veracity, it was bound to invite the disaster 
 that the war has brought to the principles of the 
 Friends and their cohesion. 
 
 I have said that the moral tone in such types 
 
CHRISTIAN LOVE AS RIGHTEOUSNESS 109 
 
 while it is proposed as superior, lacks the note both 
 of the lofty and of the large, and especially the note 
 of the deep, penetrative, judging, shattering, and re- 
 creative Spirit, the note of an evangelical and revolu- 
 tionary Gospel, and of a universal Church. It has 
 the note of a young country with more civilisation 
 than culture. It lacks action in the grand style. It 
 has the note of moral sectarianism, of a culture self- 
 disinherited of the past and secluded from the col- 
 lective continuity and influence both of Church and 
 State. Or, if it is not secluded, then it is influenced 
 but negatively, by way of antagonism instead of 
 obligation. It renounces the great moral legacy of 
 our providential place in a historic train and spiritual 
 tradition of the race which has done more to make 
 every citizen than he can do to make himself. It 
 ceases to be an actual citizen through a notion of 
 citizenship in an abstract Kingdom of God. It is 
 in its country but not of it. Now the sects have 
 been of the greatest value to the Church, and such 
 sectional ethic as I describe has been, in the case 
 of the Quakers, and in issues only civil or social, of 
 unspeakable worth to society. And, if Christianity 
 were but earnest pity, noble philanthropy, shrewd 
 veracity, and thoughtful fraternity, it would be of 
 supreme worth. But it is quite inadequate to the 
 great judgment days when the world is in a con- 
 vulsion of warring nations, powers, and principles, 
 days which shudder with a prelude of the last trump, 
 when the prince of this world is challenged in his 
 anarchic power and reign. Here the spirit of the 
 ethical sect is unequal to the vast situation ; and it 
 must rise and regain the catholic note of a moral 
 
no THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 Church with national import when its good work is 
 done. If it do not, it sinks into a mere provincialism 
 of the conscience, which it deludes itself in thinking 
 to be the true but hidden Kingdom of God. So a 
 worthy antagonism to the State's Erastian claim on 
 the Church may drop to an ignoble antagonism to all 
 claim by the Christian State on the Christian duty and 
 sacrifice of its members ; who, if they refuse, nursing a 
 prickly conscience and an atomic liberty now far on 
 its way to dissolve society, cease to be members of the 
 State and become its parasites. They live in facilities 
 secured by others who do not shrink from the sacrifices 
 which they refuse to the nation calling in her last 
 stress. * But every member of a group, in so far as it 
 is a moral association, should be unwilling to benefit 
 by any act of his representatives which he would 
 be ashamed to do for himself.' ^ And Mazzini says, 
 * Your country is the sign of the mission God has 
 given you to fulfil towards humanity.' The citizens 
 of a great old nation, if they believe at all that God 
 has been guiding and using it for His Kingdom, 
 should recognise its great, rare, moral calls as their 
 bounden duty and service, voluntary but not chosen 
 in self-will, rather laid on them from God in the way 
 of His historic Providence with us. God does not care 
 for one nation above another, but a nation is as need- 
 ful as a home is for His Kingdom, and for our moral 
 and spiritual growth therein. Surely a religion has 
 sunk as a moral religion which encourages us to live 
 chiefly on the sacrifice of others ; or which, should it 
 own sacrifice, owns it only in some self-selected form, 
 withdrawing us from the claim of humanity in the 
 * Delisle Burns, Political Ideals, p. 203. 
 
CHRISTIAN LOVE AS RIGHTEOUSNESS in 
 
 concrete form, a historic crisis that is no mere tussle 
 of nations but a crisis in the history and fate of the 
 race. For a nation to repudiate national morality, 
 as Germany has done in word and deed, is to take 
 up arms against the Kingdom of God ; it is to 
 organise civilisation in the service of the Kingdom 
 of Evil ; it is to sin the sin against mankind which 
 God has given mankind the office to arrest and to 
 judge if there be international duty at all. It is to 
 transpose a national war into the awful key of the 
 Lord's controversy with the world ; it lifts a cam- 
 paign to this scale. But there are several types 
 of religion, and even of Christianity, where sacri- 
 fice escapes from both the control and the benedic- 
 tion of duty, and an inward light becomes a subtle 
 form of spiritual self-will — by which sin fell the 
 angels. It is not a question of personal courage 
 (which many freely, if perversely, show in their 
 defiance of public obloquy) but of a type of religion 
 which doth the human spirit cool, reduces an apostle 
 to a humanitarian, takes the red from the blood of 
 Christ, and turns the courage of faith to be but the 
 patience of the saint. 
 
 There is but one situation in which a servant of 
 God may discard his nation and leave it to the heathen 
 powers without. Jeremiah took that course, and 
 Jesus. It was because they were convinced that the 
 moral state of the people was hopeless for the historic 
 purpose of God with it. And, if we became sure of 
 the same thing about Britain, that might be our only 
 Christian course. Those who take that course to-day 
 should be clear in their minds that such is the state 
 of the country. But they should also be sure that 
 
112 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 theirs are minds with, the qualities of moral insight 
 and judgment that qualify for such a sentence on our 
 complex present, and our long and (though stained) 
 not quite ignoble past. 
 
 The point of the whole is that a type of religion, 
 part humanist, part mystic, and all too unhistoric, 
 has engaged the interest of large numbers of people, 
 especially among the young, and such as are by 
 nature as yet more in love with man than with 
 righteousness, and who resent wrong more than 
 they measure sin. To their prompt, subjective, and 
 unschooled sympathies a moral matter like justifica- 
 tion by faith is ancient and otiose. The source of 
 this temper is partly reaction from theology, as 
 they have heard of it. And, indeed, if justification 
 by faith were but a theological theme, instead of the 
 vital religion of the Christian man (to whom conscience 
 is even more than heart, and the Cross a salvation 
 as well as an appeal), one could not wonder, nor 
 criticise. But, in one form or another, justification, 
 with its moral verve, is the very central point of an 
 ethical Christianity, and of its Kingdom's righteous- 
 ness subduing the world. It is not an idea to be 
 absorbed, but among the chief of those energies that 
 fashion and command us. It is not a thesis but a 
 great power. It concerns the Grace of God as 
 righteous, holy Grace, requiring the Cross. And the 
 type of religion that ousts it from real concern to 
 make room for pious impression or imaginative 
 mystic produces an ethic too indifferent to the 
 righteousness of God's Kingdom to rule men, and 
 too human to meet human need. This righteous- 
 
CHRISTIAN LOVE AS RIGHTEOUSNESS 1 1 3 
 
 ness of God was the first charge on Christ's love in 
 His Cross. And a religion on which it is not also 
 the first charge, however attractive that religion 
 may be, is too limited ethically to be equal to a 
 moral world crisis of the first magnitude like to-day's. 
 It moves also at last, as in the recent case of a 
 prominent preacher of this type, to seek the objective 
 it uneasily lacks in a sacramental system instead 
 of a positive Gospel. It becomes therefore pacific 
 and aloof (with all its kindly light) when the more 
 robust and evangelical conscience goes to the Lord's 
 help against the mighty. Justification is an ex- 
 perience and not a thesis, an experience of the 
 conscience too, and not merely of the emotions. 
 With its faith of the conscience (and of the race's 
 conscience) giving the moral lead to charity, it affects 
 the whole quality of Christianity, especially in its 
 relation to society and to historic junctures. It 
 is not at last a question of love between men over 
 against righteousness between men, but of the love 
 and righteousness between holy God and evil man, 
 between love as communion where it meets love 
 and love as saving judgment where it does not. It 
 is the difference between a mystic communion of love 
 and a righteous kingdom of love. It is a question 
 of the application and exercise of God's love ; which 
 exercise is one thing within a Church of the regen- 
 erate, and another thing as righteous discipline and 
 judgment-grace towards a yet unregenerate world. 
 The salvation of God is, to those who are but in 
 a relation of law, righteousness ; but to those who 
 are joined in Gospel it is love. In the one it is law, 
 judgment, war ; to the others joy and peace in the 
 
114 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 Holy Ghost. But always love and always holy at 
 any cost to life or limb. 
 
 First righteousness, then peace. And, if righteous- 
 ness be no mere matter of a local conflict between 
 quarrelling nations, but of an Armageddon in the 
 Lord's controversy with the world, then even war 
 can be a call to the service of God's Kingdom. 
 
 And we may see how that which seems but a 
 theological issue, like justification by faith, creates 
 a certain type of religion, which is an asset of prime 
 value in a practical national issue of the last moment 
 for God's Kingdom. We may see how closely it is 
 bound up, by its stress on universal righteousness, 
 with national existence ; and how the type which 
 lacks it lacks also the due sense of a nation's dignity 
 in its moral vocation, which is service to the 
 Kingdom of God, resisting if need be even to blood. 
 
 We are now more than soldiers. We are of the 
 international police. We are there neither for con- 
 quest nor merely for self-defence, but for the world 
 order, liberty, justice, and humanity for which 
 Christ died. Or did He not ? With Mazzini we 
 would rescue the sons of men from the bastards of 
 mankind. We are set for a world-righteousness. 
 And that is the cause for which the Father spared 
 not His only Son, even to the shedding of blood. 
 If righteousness be the public form of love, may we 
 not, in the awful conflict and bitter agony, rise to 
 say that we so love the world as to give our beloved 
 sons for it and for its future. ' Therefore will I give 
 men for thee and people for thy life.' 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 CHRISTIAN ETHIC LAY AND HISTORIC 
 
 Several references in the course of discussing the 
 historic and practical issues in this great crisis may 
 have prepared us for certain questions which lie 
 behind them all. Matters of particular ethic are sub- 
 ordinate to such a question as that of the source and 
 standard of all ethic ; for of course our judgment on 
 particular cases will depend entirely on the standard 
 of principle with which we approach them. This 
 inquiry as to ultimates may not seem to all to be 
 called for ; and indeed it is not every man's affair. 
 It is one of those matters that are settled by a com- 
 paratively few, whose results filter down in course 
 into the general mind. To an extent we all act 
 as laymen in a Church of authoritatives. 
 
 From what has been said it may be clear that in 
 the writer's view there is no final ethic but a Christian 
 and a theological. The greatest conscience of all 
 the world must in His greatest Act be the source 
 of all morals if He is the source of Eternal Life. I 
 am well aware how much prejudice the word theo- 
 logical may raise, and especially even in some whose 
 objection is taken in the interest of ethic. For they 
 say that theology not only takes away interest that 
 ought to be given to ethic, but that the ethic in 
 
 115 I 2 
 
ii6 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 theology is of an inferior, and even mischievous, 
 kind. Now this is a frame of mind not hard to under- 
 stand, as theology has too often been pursued and 
 pressed. It has been treated as if it were but theo- 
 sophy, a branch of a hidden wisdom, instead of the 
 moral mind in God's public word to man ; as if it 
 were a secluded metaphysic of the divine instead of 
 the marrow of His saving message to the conscience of 
 the race ; as if it were the hobby of certain Christians 
 whose religion developed intellectual tastes, a scheme 
 of ideas which had no more bearing on aifairs than 
 mythology on appendicitis, a collection of truths 
 which have about as much relation to progress as a 
 museum of walking-sticks, a series of notions which 
 at best are but truths only, and the appanage of 
 pious thinkers who know little of history and less 
 of the world. Whereas in ethic, they say, we want 
 powers. It is for a practical purpose that we are 
 here. It is for action that we are made, and our 
 chief intellectual concern is with the principles that 
 move or guide action on the personal, and especially 
 on the historic, scale. In reply to such wholesome 
 critics it must be owned that the source of theology 
 is action and not thought. It is history. It is a 
 historic Act with a quality, meaning and effect which, 
 whatever else it is, is moral at the productive and 
 creative centre. The Cross of Christ is the crisis 
 of the eternal and immutable morality. But it has 
 been treated as a means of escape if we neglect so 
 great a salvation as conscience brings. 
 
 Again, there are some (preachers mostly) who 
 feel an aversion to theology without being devotees 
 of ethic, whose interest is not so much moral as 
 
LAY AND HISTORIC 117 
 
 sympathetic, who certainly feel that we must have 
 more than bare truths, but who, being unable to com- 
 mand power, take refuge in a halfway house called 
 impression. Such truth as they have does not yield 
 power, but it can be made to contribute to impression. 
 And they are tempted to think that weekly impression 
 may do the work of some great and perennial prin- 
 ciple which is the source of a continual regeneration. 
 That is hardly possible when we deal radically with 
 will and conscience ; for, while impression may be 
 moral in its nature, regeneration must be. The 
 one affects us, the other changes us. The one may 
 stir manhood, the other makes a new man of it. 
 The one is food, the other is vitality. The one is 
 a tonic, the other is power. And the Christian 
 doctrines, if they are living at all and not dried 
 specimens, wield something more than mere stimulus ; 
 they are vital powers because they go beneath the 
 sympathies to the fountains of life in will and con- 
 science. There is at times a certain feud (which 
 can even be rude) between the preacher and the 
 professor. The former does not see that impres- 
 sionism will not meet the moral problem of Chris- 
 tianity without regeneration (though he does feel 
 the drain it makes on himself, and often succumbs 
 to it) ; he stirs interest more than he conveys power. 
 While the latter has often failed to realise that 
 regeneration is not a theme, nor a magic, mystic, 
 merely individual thing, but that it is the deep 
 action of Christ in history and on history, and not 
 on the Church alone. For the regenerate Church is 
 the inchoate stage of the New Humanity and of the 
 Great History that is to be. 
 
ii8 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 In so far as theology is pious speculation or in- 
 tellectual hobby it has no more claim on the general 
 attention than theosophy or any other hobby of an 
 academic kind. And it has nothing much to do with 
 the soul and its salvation as a conscience. But 
 Christian theology is in no such case. Its doctrines 
 are not mere theses but forces, and its cohesion is 
 not mere system but the mentality of Eternal Life. 
 It arose out of history, out of the union of a historic 
 revelation with a historic situation. History is its 
 milieu. Its form has been much shaped by history, 
 and it has still much to do in the way of shaping 
 it. It aims, indeed, at the capture of history. The 
 object of God's will and purpose of love is mankind 
 as one, mankind as an organism, mankind in its 
 totality — in its moral totality round the redeeming 
 conscience of Christ and His Reconciliation. And 
 those doctrines of Redemption are the sinews of that 
 moral and historic organism. They are the thews of 
 Christ's body politic. They are not the peculium of 
 groups. For the Bible teaches no eternal election 
 of a particular section of individuals. The great 
 doctrines are not mere dogmas ; they are moral 
 powers ; they are historic powers. And by that 
 is meant not only that they have played a great 
 part (if often an unhappy one) in history, but that 
 they embody the moral principles on which society 
 must live, and history must run more and more if 
 it is moral, and if it is moving for a Kingdom of 
 God at all. The righteousness swift and complete 
 in the Cross is the same righteousness which is 
 slowly making the kingdoms of the natural world 
 into the righteous Kingdoms of a holy God. All 
 
LAY AND HISTORIC 119 
 
 history in its deep long meaning, in its slow substan- 
 tial meaning, is Christ coming into His own. It is the 
 self-exposition, the self-effectuation, of the Redeemer. 
 The great Christian doctrines are the moral tracks 
 of His Kingdom. They are the nervous system of 
 the whole body and movement of history as it is 
 bespoken for Christ. They are not academic to 
 Christianity nor otiose to the world, but they are 
 morally organic to the history of humanity as the 
 New Humanity which Christianity intends. They 
 are not for seminaries but for pulpits and parlia- 
 ments — not indeed as creeds, but as directives and 
 dominants. The mind which is not critical only but 
 also sympathetic, nor is theologically illiterate but 
 has been caught at the formative age and trained 
 on the classics in this kind, will, I trust, grasp what 
 I mean, whether it go all the way with me or not. 
 The Christian doctrines cover principles and forces 
 which, working in all history, guide it to the Kingdom 
 of God. They are much more than religious ideas 
 in precipitate. They are moral, spiritual, creative 
 powers. A philosophy of history traces the move- 
 ment of ideas of which the chief actors were quite 
 unconscious, and which only a later age can discern. 
 But that is not the part played by the great Christian 
 doctrines, which rather created and moulded great 
 men both in the Church and in the world. For 
 they were the conscious possession, experience, and 
 principle of these great figures, whether we take for our 
 instance a Cromwell, or a Hildebrand, or a Bernard. 
 Christianity is a historic religion not only as appear- 
 ing in history, but as congenial to it, taking command 
 of it, and controlling its development with a destiny 
 
I20 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 and bias forgone and imperative. Its central doc- 
 trines do but form the source or the condensation 
 of those moral powers, so urgent and so final, to 
 which we look for the conversion of human history 
 from a welter of egoist dragons tearing each other 
 in slime to all that arrests the moral imagination as 
 the Kingdom of God. 
 
 These doctrines are the idioms of the largest living 
 consciousness of the Church. They are both expres- 
 sions and agents of an imaginative moral realism 
 which is as full of human passion as of divine power. 
 The blood of Christ is the sap of humanity. The 
 moral Catholicism of the New Humanity is in the 
 atoning Cross of Christ, which is the crisis of 
 man's moral tragedy, at once the focus of the first 
 creation and the source of the new. History is 
 the long and struggling fulfilment of Christianity, 
 which is its prophecy, and not only its prophecy but 
 its producer. The love of God is more mighty than 
 all progress ; and the judgment of God in the Cross 
 of Christ is a thing more terrible than any wars ; 
 it is the ruling principle for interpreting all the other 
 and inferior judgments in history, however great. 
 It is a misfortune that its true moral majesty should 
 have been claimed and belittled by the ethic of the 
 greybloods, who are more shocked with the patent 
 sins of the streets and tribunals than by the deadlier 
 sins of cabinets, which make the arbitrament of war. 
 I read once of the pity due to a virtuous man em- 
 barrassed by the necessity of doing something 
 important. 
 
 I venture therefore to follow up what I have 
 said by a discussion which is theological in the great 
 
LAY AND HISTORIC 121 
 
 sense I have described, but which may be passed 
 over by any who wish to confine their attention to 
 that range of ethical interests which they may 
 consider the layman's province. 
 
 We are being carried by the line of thought in 
 our preceding chapters into the inmost questions as 
 to the source and genius of Christianity. 
 
 It seems a hard saying, but one of the banes of 
 modern religion is its Idealism. And for Germany 
 the one has ruined the other. It can be as fatal 
 as Materialism, which it can idealise. 
 
 The Bible knows nothing of idealised man, but 
 of man redeemed and reborn. It founds on justifi- 
 cation, and it insists on repentance from all. And 
 repentance is the soundest destroyer of our illusion. 
 God is not the supreme Idealist. He is our Redeemer. 
 He is under no illusions about man, since He has to 
 do everything for him. 
 
 No doubt in a country such as Germany, or 
 France, or England was in the early nineteenth 
 century. Idealism was a precious gospel. In the 
 face of a Materialism both theoretical and practical 
 it was much to the good both of morals and imagi- 
 nation. When the soul cleaves to the dust anything 
 is welcome that gives it wings — whether in the 
 region of religion, art, philosophy, literature, worship. 
 All such things are visitations from the High God. 
 But, in His Church at least, the Eternal is no mere 
 visitant. And it is not His visitation that we need 
 most but His indwelling power. We cannot live on 
 the wing. We must have renewals always sure. 
 We must have footing, moral strength, the power, the 
 
122 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 majesty, and therewith the eternal patience, of God. 
 In this respect Idealism needs to be saved from it- 
 self. It needs power, and power beyond inspirations 
 that come and go. Above all things, above even 
 the power of God periodically renewed, we need a 
 perennial spring, a faith which is a new life. We need 
 faith as power to trust ourselves and our world to 
 His power. And not for what that power may do 
 but for what it has done ; and we need this faith 
 for life, in the way of a new birth and a new life 
 for mankind. We must trust Him for a Kingdom 
 coming because come — sure, final, and eternal. 
 That is faith. It is no mere expression of moral 
 ardour, of the enthusiasm of the conscience as an 
 enthusiasm of humanity might be felt. Greater 
 that the doctrine of moral personality, its conscience, 
 and its culture, is that of a secure Redemption, by 
 which alone the moral personality comes to its own 
 at last, by a regeneration growing up it knows not 
 how. Faith is trust in what God has done in this 
 way for good and all, trust in the great decisive 
 thing not as one day to be done but as done once for 
 all. It is trust in a fundamental moral realism. 
 It is trust in a Kingdom come, and working out 
 mightily through everything. If our chief interest 
 be but in the ideal future there is always some 
 uncertainty. Has the ideal its own guarantee ? 
 Can it give itself effect, bring itself to pass, and 
 not only evolve but redeem ? What if an accident 
 happened to the idea on its course ? How can we 
 be perfectly sure that it will arrive ? How can faith 
 in final good be absolute if all things are but on 
 their way to the great goal, on their tentative way 
 
LAY AND HISTORIC 123 
 
 — if they are only working towards some Great Event 
 and not working it out, if our last faith do not trust 
 it as already done and secure in all but its actual 
 effect with human wills ? Faith is in its nature 
 absolute and final ; it is not probablist ; it does mean 
 such certainty and trust of a fait accompli in God. 
 Whereas Idealism means but the fine sense that it 
 should be, and the highest hope that it will be, 
 done ; and a fine faith need not be a final. The 
 Christian morality, the righteousness which is of 
 faith, is not simply an ought but an is which in- 
 volves an ought. It is not a noble ought but a 
 glorious is, to eyes unsealed. It ought to be on 
 earth because it already is in the heaven within 
 earth. But to a mere ideal anything may happen. 
 
 I have been speaking of the movement, philo- 
 sophical and imaginative, known as Idealism. But 
 it would be a rash thing to say that all idealism is 
 of this kind, or is to the good. For we are faced in 
 Germany with the extinction of the old Idealism 
 (which had become its chief religion) and the 
 growth of an idealism which is but materialism 
 glorified to a megalomania, a combined worship 
 of Mammon, Mars, and Mercury (thief and liar), 
 a compound of militarism, commercialism, and a 
 nationalism based on these, rooted in force, and 
 reckless of morals. That is an idealism divorced 
 both from thought and from faith — the idealism 
 of the man of sin. But the Germans only do very 
 thoroughly what others are moved to do with less 
 audacity. They go on to do what we did at a stage, 
 but what, under Christian influence, we have been 
 
124 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 striving to atone for by such a practical repentance 
 as our treatment of India, and South Africa, and 
 the smaller nationalities. There is much to repent of 
 and to renounce in the way we came by both India and 
 the Cape. And if our moral frame is not changed or 
 changing there is more than a little truth in the charges 
 of hypocrisy that our enemy adds to his shells. 
 
 Even under the guise of peace, and in home 
 affairs, practical idealism can be very heady stuff. 
 Intoxicating many who are unaccustomed to the 
 handling of ideas, it may bring with it a fatal im- 
 patience, and carry more sail than ballast. We 
 are led by it to feel as if everything depended on 
 us to realise the idea ; and we become eager, and 
 even nervous, to reach it before some accident cross 
 its path, before our strength fail, or the victims die. 
 Among the working classes, for instance, there never 
 was a time of so much idealism as distinct from 
 faith, nor of so much danger for us all because of 
 their impatience for their ideal. True, it is a class 
 idealism, and in so far an egoist idealism, and there- 
 fore it is the less pure. But that might not be so 
 fatal apart from its impatience for some grand coup 
 like a general strike, to end the crisis by force, and 
 wreck society by aggressive war within. And this 
 is but one instance of what I mean. The women 
 went in the same way. But the habit and principle 
 of faith destroys this fatal haste in destroying uncer- 
 tainty. Faith knows that the great thing for the 
 race's history, for the New Humanity, is substantially 
 done and cannot be shaken or lost. We have but 
 to wait on the opportunities of getting it into the 
 actual course of history, and the daily experience 
 
LAY AND HISTORIC 125 
 
 of souls. The destiny of mankind is as sure as God 
 and the soul. God has secured that. We are not 
 dependent on the course of events for a belief in 
 God, or His salvation, or our destiny. The great 
 transaction is done. And if the path of its realisa- 
 tion among men be through desert, hill, sea, or earth- 
 quake which casts the hills into the sea, that does not 
 destroy the soul's rest, patience, or power, its work, 
 sacrifice, or worship. Faith is fixed on God's eternal 
 saving Act for history, sure beyond the reach of 
 any catastrophe that history may show. 
 
 The idealist movement has had a very great 
 effect on the modern type of religion, in which there 
 are few things more conspicuous than the unrest, 
 impatience, and impotence of which I have spoken. 
 And the reason is, as I say, that what it has gained 
 in idealism it has lost in positive faith. But it is not 
 idealism, it is faith that pleases God, works with Him, 
 brings His Kingdom, draws on His Almighty Power, 
 and is stayed on His victorious finality. The reason 
 why I suggested that one of the banes of modern 
 religion is its idealism may now appear. It has 
 replaced historic and apostolic faith by imaginative 
 hope, and by dropping the principle of an actual 
 Justification in the dream of an ideal justice it has 
 lost in moral power what it has gained in sympathetic 
 interest. It has lost ethically and gained aesthetically. 
 And what the soul of the world most needs is neither 
 interest, nor even sympathy, nor charm. It is power. 
 It is moral power. And that is what positive Chris- 
 tian faith gives — power to see God's practical way, 
 power to trust it, power to take it, power to pursue 
 it, and power to secure it. If it do not give that it 
 
126 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 is better gone. It prevents prayer for something 
 that will give us the power. Let it go, and let us 
 give ourselves to the new quest. For many indeed 
 it has gone. We are living in a dense, almost stifling, 
 atmosphere of precepts, impressions, ideals, and 
 sympathies ; and we are not in tonic contact with 
 the powers and realities whose principles prescribe 
 methods. We have been brandishing liberty when 
 we should have been exercising service. We are 
 more interested in being free than in being right, 
 more concerned about being free with God's help 
 than about being obedient to His Grace. (For 
 freedom, you see, is humane and important, but 
 Grace is only theological and negligible.) Our 
 freedom we do not feel that we owe entirely to 
 His Redemption. His very love has slackened our 
 passion for His righteousness ; or it has shrunk our 
 notion of His righteousness to fraternal behaviour or 
 mere fair play. The Church He redeemed with His 
 blood falls into kindly groups of mystics, or camps 
 of free lances. We become good and inept, devout 
 and trivial. We form coteries and lose the nation. 
 And we only manoeuvre, because we are powerless to 
 mobilise. What we need is power from on high, to 
 make us wonder, and worship, and forget ourselves 
 after a godly sort ; what we keep craving is atten- 
 tion from the Purveyor of our salvation. 
 
 Were this impotence the general note of the 
 Church its days would be measured and its creed 
 doomed, but for some great new departure and 
 creation of the Spirit. And some devout souls are 
 already waiting and looking for that new departure, 
 as if, through the calamities of the time, the Spirit 
 
LAY AND HISTORIC 127 
 
 would break with a mystic light and vision whose 
 effect would be to scrap the old creeds and provide 
 a new revelation. But this would really mean a 
 new religion. And the Church can never admit a 
 new religion. It stands there in trust of the final 
 revelation, and therefore of the final religion. And 
 whatever new thing awaits us must be a fresh ray 
 from the old faith, and a fresh shoot from the old 
 creed. That creed is much pollarded, and even 
 hacked ; but its substance remains when it is lopped 
 — the holy seed is the substance thereof. 
 
 I have not forgotten my brief for an ethic both 
 evangelical and national. What I have been saying 
 is illustrated by the state of Christian ethic revealed 
 by the present crisis, which is testing and sifting 
 so much else. Many who wish to obey Christ in 
 such a juncture are at sea as to what His will is; 
 and largely because they have never taken any 
 serious pains to ask such questions when their mental 
 foundations were being laid, nor to submit to be 
 taught in quarters where real teaching is to be found. 
 For most, at their early stage at least, the liberty 
 to choose their teacher is the chief responsibility and 
 the best freedom they have, and it is the liberty 
 most full of result. But so many are more eager to 
 get out their raw views than to wait upon the wise. 
 They want to be themselves more than to be right. 
 They are more concerned to develop their own 
 individuality than to let the truth do it for them. 
 But a chief part of Christ's will is that we should 
 go to school in the proper quarters as to what His 
 will is. Yet there is nothing we dislike and distrust 
 
128 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 so much. We court the tickler and dread the 
 teacher. Or we will not let the teacher speak for 
 anxiety to get our own crudities out. That, it is 
 claimed, is democratic freedom. We will take joy- 
 fully the spoiling of our goods, and especially of 
 our neighbour's, rather than give up our self-will 
 and our self-confidence in picking up Christ's will out 
 of a meagre experience, or the face value of Scripture. 
 We will trust Him with our soul — if He will lay it 
 up in lavender, and do not ask us to give up our 
 amateur constructions of His will for our conduct, 
 if He do not expect us to take as much pains, or 
 seek as much help, in learning to understand Him, 
 as in making money, asserting our conscience, or 
 producing pulpit effect. But He certainly does ask 
 these surrenders for proficiency of soul, for profi- 
 ciency of the moral soul. Only our care for that is 
 lost in the kinder efficiencies and experiences — till at 
 last the flood comes upon our spiritual eating and 
 drinking, our lyrical pieties and our ethical societies, 
 and we are caught unready for a real moral drain 
 upon us. We have been too much with the religious 
 troubadours and too little with the knights of the 
 Holy Cross. The junctures that call for soul pro- 
 ficiency are fewer than the genial occasions, but 
 they are much more crucial and creative. 
 
 If such a moral amateur as I have described is 
 asked what the source of Christian ethic is, Christ 
 straightway stands before him as the idealist legis- 
 lator ; and his readiest answer is that it is the precepts, 
 or at most the teaching, of Christ, and particularly 
 the Sermon on the Mount. One reason for his answer 
 is that he is a plain person (he says) and needs plain 
 
LAY AND HISTORIC 129 
 
 directions ; and when lie is taken away from the 
 words of Christ he is cast on theology, for which he 
 has no more use than Cob den had for Thucydides. 
 It would be extraordinary — the way instructed 
 people, even learned clergymen with the epistles 
 before them, seem yet to lack the idea of any 
 source of Christian ethic or conduct but the teaching 
 or example of Jesus — were that notion of theirs not 
 but a part of the general disposition of their time 
 to go round the Cross, and to dislodge it from the 
 creative centre of the whole regenerate soul. It is 
 not Christ that is now denied but His Cross. In 
 the case of the clergy, it may be a sign of the 
 traditional inability of a patristic culture to give 
 the Cross its central and genetic place, the place 
 which was recovered for it from the New Testa- 
 ment only after a clerical millennium and more. 
 So original and profound was its essential note that 
 it lay hidden all that time, though not inert. This 
 tendency has produced, under the guise of escaping 
 from theological subtleties, a certain spiritual hebe- 
 tude, a blunting of the religious nerve and verve, 
 which makes such people impatient when they are 
 called on for religious effort that does not allow of 
 a committee on it, or for a really ethical type of 
 religion, or one that draws upon some study, and 
 not merely a glimpse, of the Christian reality. In 
 religious reviews, for instance, which propose to in- 
 terpret the Church's belief, I have been much struck 
 with the frequent contrast in an article between the 
 sweep of the title and the shrinkage of the text ; as 
 if the title were a borrowed phrase and the treat- 
 ment original dilution ; as if the writer read more 
 
130 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 than lie studied, and was sprinkled with his subject 
 rather than immersed in it. The article has a large 
 programme on its front but the body of it is a body 
 of humiliation. Its effect is to bring down the great 
 issue to a level of obvious truth, vague edification, and 
 exasperating piety, such as a few hard-working clergy 
 could listen to while they digested a milk lunch, and 
 before they rushed off to a round of parish trivialities. 
 
 But apart from the amateur's generosity with 
 his small change, the Christian conscience and 
 thoroughness have to contend with a dominant type 
 of religion whose tendency is to becloud the ethical 
 core of Christianity in a mystic or a genial haze. 
 The white passions, or the grey, bedim the red and 
 their reality. The blood of Christ is made of no 
 effect. Love is stripped of wrath. Death is de- 
 tached from judgment. The worm dies and the fire 
 is quenched. God ceases to be a consuming fire, 
 and only flickers on the family hearth, the frater- 
 nal group, or the spiritual circle. He does not rule 
 among the nations. He only works in the societies. 
 He is held to be more near in unction than in con- 
 science, and in the private conscience more active 
 than in the public. Take any group at random of 
 the members of the Church below middle age. Take 
 especially the young end. Question them. Ask if 
 they can remember ever having heard a sermon or 
 a lesson upon the anger of God, or upon the terrible 
 things in righteousness which answer our need of 
 salvation or our hunger for love. Their persuasion, 
 such as it is, did not come from men who knew the 
 terror of the Lord but only a winsome Jesus. Allu- 
 
LAY AND HISTORIC 131 
 
 sions there may have been by their teachers, or 
 phrases reminiscent of an age when the wrath of 
 the Lamb was a reality ; but never anything to 
 indicate that such judgment is an element as vital 
 to a holy God as they hold His pity is to a God of 
 love. One may tell you that he used to hear that 
 God loved the sinner while hating the sin — which is 
 a meaningless phrase and a psychological anomaly. 
 It separates sin from a sinning personality, and re- 
 duces it therefore to a mere abstraction, incapable 
 of rousing the wrath of a real God. Such talk but 
 swells the froth on the water of life. Not one will 
 tell you of any help given to conceive of God (with 
 Paul, for instance, in Romans xi. 28) as at once 
 loving and hating the same personality in the Gospel, 
 in the very purpose and act of redeeming it. That 
 is to say, a whole hemisphere of the nature of God, 
 all the holiness of His love, was practically left out 
 of their religious training. Think what that means, 
 repeated at many centres and spread over a whole 
 generation. These catechumens were reared to 
 worship but a demigod. They knew but a kind 
 God over against a hard world — as if God were all 
 kindness and the world all hardness ; and neither 
 is true. As if the Christian revelation was God's 
 love, instead of the sure and final power of God's 
 love to overcome everything, and of God's holiness 
 to establish itself everywhere. The ethical, the 
 holy, element in God's love, that which gives it its 
 dominion, its stability, its eternity, was practically 
 left out of their religion. The element of righteous- 
 ness and judgment wherewith He rules among the 
 nations was not there. They know nothing of 
 
132 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 ethic in the great vein. And as a consequence 
 our youth was sent out of our Churches with no 
 conscience in its religion. But it had a general, 
 just, and clean notion of conscience in the ordinary- 
 moralities and chivalries, which it tacked on to the 
 religion. The religion in itself was of a kind more 
 excellent in style than moral in nature. It was too 
 exclusively sympathetic to feel anything like com- 
 mand in a complex moral situation such as the 
 modern world presents. It was apt to lack the 
 historic scale, the national note, the moral genius, 
 the prophetic apostolicity. In the result, when great 
 public questions challenge the Christian conscience, 
 this type has a conscience only on an individual or 
 domestic scale — on a claustral scale at the utmost. 
 It is unequipped for the moral reading of such huge 
 forces as now are loose. It cannot even understand 
 or measure them. It can stand up to imps but not 
 to Satan. The gentle maxims of a sequestered place 
 may be brought out to settle a crisis of our whole 
 earth. The communities which live on such religion 
 must lose weight with a public reared in business 
 or other schools which have grit and gumption but 
 still need a moral guidance that it is the duty of 
 a practical, a historic, and an ethical religion to 
 provide. A Christ and a Cross which have been so 
 de-ethicised as to become but the one a prophet, the 
 other an object-lesson, of God's love cannot maintain 
 moral manhood. A cross so de-ethicised that the 
 love in it has lost the whole idea of expiation for 
 sin and judgment upon it is a Cross demoralised. 
 And it can be the source neither of ethic nor con- 
 science, as the focus of moral redemption must be. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 CHRISTIAN ETHIC HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 
 
 The matter of Christian ethic is often more diffi- 
 cult than that of Christian theology, from which 
 so many think to find in ethic an escape. And this 
 is shown by the varieties of uncertainty that come 
 to light in connection with the very first step. 
 What is the source of Christian ethic ? Is it his- 
 toric revelation or inner light ? Is it national or 
 just humane ? 
 
 If we try to answer in a radical way we must surely 
 recognise that its source can only be the same as the 
 source of the soul's Christian life. The supreme 
 conscience of the world, in His supreme Act, must 
 be the source of Christian morals if He is the source 
 of Christian life. The rule of living must lie in the 
 principle of life. Yet this is not what everybody 
 would own. A crude notion is that our soul receives 
 its new life (when a new life is really meant, and 
 not merely an old life refurbished) from one source, 
 say from the Cross of Christ, or from sacraments, 
 and that then, in due course, its ethic as Christian 
 is supplied to it from another source. The injunc- 
 tions of the Church, or the teaching of Christ, or 
 the precepts of the non-theological parts of the 
 epistles are dropped into the vague new good will. 
 
 133 
 
134 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 The matter of the ethic is preceptual, the Cross 
 but provides the sanction or the impulse to do it. 
 This unhappy idea is the result of the de-ethicising of 
 the interior of the Cross consequent on sacramental 
 theories on the one side, and of starved evangelical 
 ideas on the other. The function of the Gospel 
 in the former view is an infusion of new vitality 
 (which need not be moral but finely physical) ; in 
 the other it is a theological arrangement, which is not 
 so much forgiveness (and therefore not moral) but 
 only a juristic condition preliminary to forgiveness. 
 As a result, forgiveness is not realised to be the 
 supreme moral act of the Holy Love, but is regarded 
 as a merciful provision for our escape from a 
 moral region which has become too inclement or 
 oppressive for our spiritual health. As the preacher 
 on Heb. ii. 3 put it, while his first head was the 
 greatness of the salvation, his second contained direc- 
 tions how to escape if we neglected it. 
 
 So far, however, is the Cross from being but inci- 
 dentally and indirectly ethical that, as the greatest 
 moral Act of Time or Eternity, it is the greatest Act 
 of a holy God's creation, and the very source and 
 norm of all ethic universal and eternal. (For it is 
 only in the moral region, the region of our miraculous 
 freedom of will, that we can form any conception 
 of what creation is.) The thing the Cross had to do 
 was to destroy a world sin by the supreme moral 
 Act of the universe. And the destruction of sin 
 could only take place by righteousness on a like 
 scale. But this, if we grasp the inveteracy of sin, 
 means a regeneration. It means a resurrection of 
 the conscience from the dead, or at least from a 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 135 
 
 paralysis only too perceptive for our peace. The 
 Cross is therefore the most creative thing we know — 
 the creator of the Kingdom of God and the New 
 Humanity. The Act that ends sin is something 
 more than erasure therefore. It has eternal moral 
 quality and power, which is not sequential merely 
 but intrinsic to it. It was a moral transaction. 
 It is the centre, spring, and principle of a universal 
 ethic, both as the highest Act of a holy God from 
 heaven, and as the power of social righteousness on 
 earth. The Cross founds in history the righteousness 
 of the Kingdom of God and the New Humanity. 
 
 Great and moving indeed is the power of love. 
 Nothing is so effective and impressive while it lasts. 
 It is love, love, love that makes the world go round. 
 But suh specie eternitatis what is there in it to guarantee 
 that it will last, will survive, will round off the world, 
 and conquer all the adverse possibilities of the 
 unknown ? Often enough it does not outlive the 
 mutations of Time. Fine, also, and mighty is the 
 power of man's loyalty, whether to his brother or to 
 his chief. But what is there in loyalty between men 
 to warrant our making it a religion absolute and for 
 ever ? Is it given to loyalty to have life in itself ? 
 The greatest thing in the world is not love, as the 
 phrase would be understood by most who welcome 
 it. It is something that can stay and comfort when 
 every object of affection on earth is swept away. 
 The greatest thing in the world is something out of 
 it. It is holy love alone that has the promise and 
 potency of an indomitable life. It is love inseparable 
 from absolute righteousness with its moral necessity 
 to establish itself everywhere, and its moral power in 
 
136 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 the Cross to do it. It is love with righteousness not 
 as its happy sequel but as its intrinsic nature and 
 purposed object. Great is love to heal a heart or to 
 break it. And great is loyalty, which may pass even 
 the love of woman. But greatest of all is the Gospel 
 of holy love, of love's absolute, and self-sufficing, 
 and ubiquitous righteousness, which is the guarantee 
 of its victory and eternity. This is the Catholicism 
 of eternity — ^what unites Protestant righteousness 
 with Catholic love. The triumph, the universality, 
 the eternity of love is due only to its essential feature 
 of holiness, so neglected by all the poets of passion 
 and the hierophants of the great human heart. 
 
 And where do we find this holy love ? For there 
 is the source of Christian ethic ; the source of the 
 new life must be also its norm. We find it neither 
 in the affections nor the intuitions of the individual 
 heart, but in Christ. And it is not in Christ's con- 
 viction and teaching, nor in His example, but in His 
 great creative and crucial Act behind all His teaching 
 and beneficence. It is in the Cross, where is the 
 one all-comprehensive gift of a holy God, and the 
 one constant source and principle of the new 
 life. It is in the Cross of our regeneration, a Cross 
 at once historic and holy. By its atoning holiness 
 it has in it the absolute principle of all morality, 
 by its connection with Israel the principle of national 
 morality, by its solidarity with history the principle 
 of morality universal and public. By its work on 
 the soul it is mystic, by its work in society moral. 
 It makes the mystical union with Christ moral, and 
 the moral union mystic. It thus unites soul and 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 137 
 
 conscience, faith and life, piety and publicity. By 
 its universalism it makes our new life organic with the 
 ultimate moral movement in history, and its principle 
 concrete with the deep course of public things. The 
 Cross as the public satisfaction and revelation of 
 God's holiness is the source and principle of Christian 
 ethicy private and social. There is both the impulse 
 and the law of Christian conduct. There we have 
 moral utterance large enough for the society or 
 nation in which the individual has his being. Love 
 (as the holy and atoning Cross creates love), and 
 do as you like. That is Christian ethic. It will 
 bring us out at the long last at the Sermon on the 
 Mount, if we do not begin and end there. 
 
 In the teaching of Christ we have applications 
 and illustrations of this principle, but the principle 
 itself in its power came to us by nothing so pinched 
 as legislation or precept, but by action. It came by 
 the action of a person, and of a providential and 
 public person that at once condensed a nation into 
 itself and judged it ; by regenerative action, on that 
 public and national scale, upon the race. It came 
 by a new birth which is the entrance of man, through 
 nationality and its subsumption, on a new moral 
 world. It is the Cross that interprets the Sermon not 
 the Sermon the Cross. We come to the Sermon with 
 the Cross, not to the Cross with the Sermon. Even 
 if the Sermon is to be taken for its principle rather 
 than its precept, that principle is given us where the 
 whole Christ is — in the Cross, the atoning, redeem- 
 ing, regenerating Cross. In the teaching totus 
 Christus adest; sed non totum quod in eo est; that 
 was not put forth till the Cross. The instruction in 
 
138 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 the Sermon was not regenerative (no instruction, no 
 precept, is), but it was regulative for the regenerate 
 in certain concrete situations. It applies but to such ; 
 it was only laid on such. And even there in given 
 circumstances. Its limitation is shown by the fact 
 that Christ did not always follow it. He did not give 
 to every asker. He would not answer every question ; 
 and the answers He gave were not always in love. 
 There is nothing in it to regulate or explain Christ's 
 treatment of the Pharisees, or His cleansing of the 
 Temple, or His doom on Israel as a nation. As a 
 matter of fact everybody makes his own selection 
 from the Sermon. And it has no national reference at 
 all. The precepts contained no guidance for nations. 
 It was the Cross that dealt with the nation, taught 
 nationality its place in the Kingdom of God, and 
 consecrated judgment as a principle of national 
 righteousness. The Sermon was less absolute than 
 occasional. It did not legislate, and certainly did 
 not in the air. It prescribed for special junctures, 
 guiding the individual conduct of Christians in the 
 face of religious persecution from the world ; or it 
 was for the guidance of the Church in certain of its 
 internal affairs. But it has nothing to say on the 
 relations of equal and self-governing nations where 
 Christianity is formally acknowledged. It is not a 
 sketch or manual of Christian ethic for all time and 
 circumstance. It is more like the germinal Bundeshuch 
 (Exod. XX. 22-xxiii. 33) of the New Testament; 
 a small collection of case law, of precepts carrying in 
 them great principles, and made for particular un- 
 recorded junctures which were submitted to Christ 
 within the individual or the Church life at an early 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 139 
 
 stage ; or they concerned the Christian's relation to 
 a hostile pagan world, and not at all to the world of 
 the Christian State more or less Christianised. It has 
 a wealth of expansible meaning and duty in circum- 
 stances parallel to those present to Christ's mind, 
 such as the religious persecution of an ideal Christian 
 community. For instance, we have the precept 
 ' Resist not evil.' Often the individual has shown 
 how powerful non-retaliation is. But it is a wild 
 leap from that to the ' martyr-State ' — clearing 
 much more than a thousand years in one day. Shall 
 we interpret Christ's own Cross by that doctrine, and 
 rob it of its active and positive effect, its national 
 and universal range, by treating it as the supreme 
 case of passive resistance ? That is a fallacy which 
 is destroying the Christianity of many at this moment, 
 by reducing the Cross from a world-conquest to a 
 soul's resigned martyrdom, and assigning a moral, 
 and even a saving, value to sacrifice and death per 
 se. But neither pain, nor death, nor sacrifice has 
 saving value per se, but only according to its object. 
 Christ did not atone by submitting to death, but by 
 submission to death as God's judgment on sin ; and 
 He conquered death not by being put to death but 
 by dying, and dying in deliberate obedience to a 
 requirement in God. He laid down a life which 
 could never have been taken from Him otherwise. 
 His death was moral victory on a national, cosmic, 
 eternal scale. The Cross has its value in its activity 
 not its passivity to God's will, and in its activity in 
 a national situation (as King of the Jews) on a world 
 scale (as Son of Man) for righteousness unto blood 
 (as Son of God). There are serious moral conse- 
 
140 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 quences, of a kind too quietist for the Kingdom of 
 God, when we view the work of Christ on His 
 Cross simply as an overpowering display of God's 
 love to souls, and not also, and chiefly, as the 
 confession and effectuation of God's righteousness in 
 the same Act for a world. The present moral confu- 
 sion of the pacifists is the debacle of a view of the 
 Cross which is more sympathetic than moral, and 
 more devout than holy.^ The Cross was meant to 
 do much more than impress us, more even than to 
 reconcile us. Its final bearing was its bearing on 
 God, to whom it was chiefly offered. The Reconcilia- 
 tion rests on a moral Atonement set forth in blood, 
 something that met a requirement of God whose 
 holy urgency was greater even than the need of man. 
 The Cross, by a holy war, sought first the righteous- 
 ness of God, and only then and thereby, the wellbeing 
 of man. The great public thing it did for man was 
 to do justice to God's holiness in a nation's crisis, 
 and, in the act, to destroy the evil power. Such is 
 the love that melts us and fuses us in a Church. So 
 the Cross-made Christian has not simply to consider 
 his brother, but first his God. Our relation to the 
 God of the universal and holy Cross is the founda- 
 tion of all morality. There, in the practical faith 
 of that Cross and the saving judgment in it, there, 
 and in no preceptual conduct, lies the moral nerve 
 of Christianity, and its creative ethic for the New 
 Humanity. Death, viewed from the Cross, is not 
 resigned suffering, and not impressive suffering. 
 
 * It is odd that some of the most ' tender ' exponents of a senti- 
 mental reUgion are among the most belligerent critics of the paci- 
 fists they have been making for many years. 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 141 
 
 Christ did not die just to show how god-like a meek 
 death could be made, nor even to show with the last 
 emphasis how loving God is ; but to hallow the Holy- 
 Name, to secure the real and universal righteousness, 
 to destroy the work of the prince of this world, to 
 judge him to death, and to set up the Kingdom of 
 God on earth. 
 
 Everywhere the effect of death is an expression 
 and an agent of God's righteousness reacting against 
 sin ; and in Christ's death it reacts to sin's destruc- 
 tion. By God's ordinance the wages of sin is death, 
 or the horror of it. But death in itself could no 
 more destroy the sin it dogged than suffering could. 
 And in Christ we rise to a higher moral plane, and 
 death acquires a new and nobler power. In His 
 Cross we have a second reaction. We have there 
 God's reaction upon death itself as the reaction on sin. 
 If we should personify. Death itself, as an upstart 
 servant and Jack-in-office, is slain, and its function 
 is re-born. ' And death once dead there's no more 
 dying then.' This was the war in heaven brought 
 down to earth — ^not the abolition of death but its 
 transcendence. And we also must react to death 
 in this way if we die with Christ. We must take the 
 nemesis and the terror out of it, and exploit it for 
 God's glory. We must not cosset life, court immunity, 
 or live for exemption. We are to react, at due call, 
 and at the cost of life if need be, against unrighteous- 
 ness, especially in its public and demonic forms. We 
 are to do so by no mere passive resistance but actively, 
 even if this course involve death or pain to ourselves 
 or others. We are to destroy the aggressive works of 
 
142 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 the devil, even in blood. Did the crucified Christ 
 make no war on Israel ? Had He nothing to do with 
 its national doom ? If we are in Christ we are upon 
 occasion to resist public evil, world-evil, inhuman 
 evil, spiritual wickedness in high places, to the death 
 whether of ourselves or of others. Christ, who was 
 no martyr, made many. He cost them ease and life. 
 He caused them suffering and death. So to resist 
 evil, and destroy the work of the prince of the age, 
 is to partake in Christ's intercession ; which is not 
 mere petition, but the energy of a soul poured out 
 still in real action for the Kingdom of God among 
 men and affairs. 
 
 That indicates the way in which the Cross is the 
 fount and norm of Christian ethic, especially on its 
 public scale. It must be so as the source of the 
 Holy Spirit, searching to moral depths, filling a 
 universal Church to be something else than a world- 
 wide sect, and renewing all things that are done. It 
 must be so as the source of the new birth and the 
 new life on a universal and corporate scale — if 
 that life is the moral life, the regenerate conscience, 
 life not nursed in a retreat but spent in affairs, the 
 new life of a world-righteousness in the Kingdom, 
 the life that was born in a national crisis. To treat 
 the Cross as only priestly, and for single souls, is to 
 lose power out of it. To regard it as but a means of 
 escape is to reduce it at last to the means of my 
 escape only. It was priestly, but it was still more 
 kingly, and therefore social and justiciary. He did 
 not become a King by dying. He died as King — He 
 said He did — taking order for the Kingdom and its 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 143 
 
 righteousness in the world. That He sought first, 
 for it involved all else — the New Humanity, the new 
 heaven and earth. The treatment of Christ as priest 
 suffered long from neglect of Christ as saint ; and 
 now Christ as saint becomes ineffectual, for lack of 
 His due recognition as King, and His concern with 
 history, with men in nations and realms. His death 
 and resurrection, as the source of the new life, is 
 the source of the universal ethic. It was the royal 
 Act of world-righteousness in a national crisis, over- 
 coming by warring unto blood. The moral nature 
 of the source prescribes that of the course. The 
 true destiny and ethic of history lies folded in 
 the Cross, and in the regeneration there by and for 
 holiness, by and for love's universal and absolute 
 righteousness at any cost. It came not in a new 
 commandment but in a new life — in a new life, a 
 new power, quality, and principle, a holy energy 
 of divine, historic, cosmic range, and not merely a 
 new manner of life. The regeneration must be 
 taken more seriously, searchingly, and radically 
 than that, else let us get out of the way for the 
 baptismal regenerationists, who are thorough enough 
 on their wrong line. It must of course be taken more 
 seriously than the rationalistic moralists do when 
 they treat it as mere amendment. But it must also 
 be taken with more moral seriousness than the 
 sacramentarians do, who treat the new life as an 
 influx rather than a birth, as a subconscious infusion 
 into our nature rather than a radical change in the 
 consents of our will and conscience. It is no mere 
 subsidy, stimulant, restorative, or fresh impulse. It 
 is a gift of life ; yet of more than a mere spiritual 
 
144 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 vitality. Tlie gift has a nature, and a nature which 
 (being holy) is above all things moral and creative for 
 the soul, and works mightily for righteousness in the 
 moral relations and groupings of mankind. It was 
 not a mere tonic. It was not merely a fresh draught 
 of elan. It was nothing simply inbreathed to repair 
 a flagging vitality, or act as an antiseptic to original 
 sin. It was more revolutionary than that. It was 
 a new moral birth. Only that, being moral, it was 
 not unconscious as our natural birth is. At least 
 it was not subconscious in the sense of being sub- 
 liminal, but in the sense that the Act which saved 
 the soul, being an Act of a compass which saved the 
 whole world, was, in its moral range, beyond the 
 grasp of the soul it saved. But for that soul it was 
 newness of life from moral death. It was rescue from 
 the death, the impotence, of sin. It was therefore 
 moral re-creation by the Holy. It was effect given 
 in the soul, by a creative revolution, for the moral 
 ubiquity of the Holy, and His Self-establishment 
 everywhere. It was the appropriation of His world- 
 salvation. It came about not by a new wave of the 
 old creation, but by a new Act of creation on a higher 
 plane, by creation re-created, by a creation in its 
 nature ethical, spiritually ethical, because holy. It 
 was the source and principle, therefore, of the new life 
 of the conscience and heart ; it was not but a fresh 
 charge of the old power to set us running again, and 
 make the old car do its best with the old roads. And 
 the second creation was at least as wide as the first. 
 It was an act of fresh righteousness for the world, 
 a quite new departure in that way, a creative thing 
 with more love in it than led to the first creation. 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 145 
 
 but righteous above all (Romans i. 17). And it 
 settled the fate of the world in the historic crisis 
 and doom of a nation. 
 
 Its moral products are in its own kind. Vultus 
 index animi. They are holy love's native acts of 
 worid-righteousness. The new soul shall live and 
 act on a world principle. Live and act on a principle 
 good for all men who are in your case. The prin- 
 ciple of the Cross for ethic is, therefore, something 
 more than the primacy of individual love ; it is 
 the primacy and the final dominion of love as public 
 righteousness in a Kingdom of God, even unto 
 blood ; it is the public and universal action of love ; 
 it has love's liberating action on the world's history 
 through regenerate souls as a first charge on it. And 
 still farther, it is something effected, and secured by 
 central moral conquest once for all, and not merely 
 so declared. The Cross was not there to show love in 
 the sky over all, but to establish it for good in right- 
 eousness amid history. It is inadequate to say ' we 
 must live out Christ's principle of forgiveness.' That 
 way lies so much of our liberal futility. The principle 
 of Christ's forgiveness was the principle of a gracious 
 God's righteousness asserted for a world lost and 
 secured as a divine Kingdom won. It can be lived 
 out only by securing practically that type of right- 
 eousness in human affairs from the soul's centre 
 outwards. Christ's first charge was not simply to 
 forgive, to be a living channel of forgiveness, but to 
 do practical justice and honour to the holiness of the 
 Grace that forgave, and that even He did not procure. 
 It was to give eternal life in righteousness. It was 
 not to forgive without more ado, nor to produce a for- 
 
146 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 giving spirit, but to justify men, and to do so by "a 
 self-justification of the holy God. It was to forgive, 
 moreover, by a national way that secured by active 
 judgment, even through agony and blood, the great 
 righteousness of the world and of Eternity. It was to 
 effect the forgiveness of the Holy in a saving judg- 
 ment that still acts as the deepest power hidden in 
 God's detailed method with concrete history and its 
 peoples. The Cross was a world event. It carries 
 national effects, glories, and dooms. It is not a 
 matter of private piety alone but also of public judg- 
 ment. The consideration of the good, godly, and 
 gentle spirits in Israel did not arrest Christ in the 
 doom He knew He brought on the whole State. He 
 did inflict a,d. 70. The prediction of a mere prophet 
 became in Christ's mouth infliction from a Judge and 
 King. It was not a view but a sentence when He 
 spoke of the destruction of Jerusalem. He went to 
 war with Israel by Caesar, His satrap and servant. 
 And if Christ judge the world, man, as he is in Christ, 
 may and must do so in the hand of God. He is the 
 commissary of the judgment of Christ, even when he 
 deserves it not, nor even knows it. 
 
 The Cross is the source and norm of Christian 
 ethic, public and private, in these respects among 
 others : — 
 
 1. It was the destruction of egoism ; and it was 
 so in a national conflict. It broke, not nationality, 
 but national egoism, which is idolatry. And it 
 remains the grand power of the moral world for 
 that purpose, whether in a national form or not. 
 
 2. It founded the final and universal principle 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 147 
 
 of the New Humanity on love's righteousness — and 
 especially on the new righteousness of faith in Grace. 
 It founded the great principle in which religion and 
 ethic finally meet — ^justification by faith. What 
 holiness is to love in heaven that righteousness is to 
 love on earth. And the relation is less an analogy 
 than a continuity. 
 
 3. It was and is the supreme revelation of the 
 Holy, i.e. of the moral Absolute, as the active and 
 decisive power in history. It was the source of the 
 Holy Spirit, which at once goes to the soul's moral 
 depths, and at the same time makes the social 
 wealth of the universal Church among the peoples. 
 
 4. It contained the moral principle, therefore, 
 of Judgment, and was indeed its effectuation on the 
 whole scale of God and man. It was, in the deepest 
 sense of the words, the last judgment. The wicked- 
 ness of all the world was so judged on Christ that it 
 is judged by Christ. It was so judged by His bearing 
 of it that He mastered it, wielded it, and became by 
 His Cross the Judge of all the earth, and the living 
 Providence of the action of the final judgment in the 
 nations. Such judgment is the grand moral principle 
 of history — not in a negative way as retributory^ 
 but positively (and Scripturally) as the establishment 
 of the righteousness of God's Kingdom, as the prin- 
 ciple of the new creation. 
 
 These four heads make the substance of what I 
 proceed to say, even if I do not follow their formal 
 division. And the heart of the whole matter is two- 
 fold — first, that the ethic of nationality is given by 
 the Kingdom of God ; and, second, that the Kingdom 
 of God was set up in the Cross of Christ, 
 
 L 2 
 
148 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 Let us keep constantly in view the fact that 
 Christ's ' finished work ' was victory in a real moral 
 conflict within His universal personality. If its 
 nature was theological its manner was psychological. 
 It ran through a dramatic history in His experience. 
 It had what is called a moral pragmatism, a motiva- 
 tion more or less traceable in His holy consciousness. 
 His soul had a history, and it also intended a historic 
 Kingdom. It was, moreover, a history not only 
 in contact with the history of His nation, nor only 
 concentric with it, but identical with it. He was 
 the soul of Israel's history, the ' truth ' of it. The 
 work of Jesus is the breath of prophecy. Israel 
 came to itself in Him. His Cross acted deep below 
 the nation's conscious centre, at its real core and 
 true self. The proximate form in which He defeated 
 the world and its egoism was national. And it was 
 royal. He felt and said He was the true Israel. 
 For Him Israel had been called into being, led, 
 disciplined, and endowed. He was the King of the 
 Jews. Egoism on His own part was lost in royalty 
 — as it is in the One God, whose moral majesty it 
 is to glorify His own name. He was really the Son 
 of God that Israel had been poetically called. He 
 not only saw, but He was, the Soul of Israel's divine 
 history, all overlaid and falsified though it had 
 come to be by the traditions of the fathers. These 
 had come totally to misread the revelation that made 
 the nation's vocation in the world, which it had 
 changed from grace to force, and from witness to 
 empire. Christ was not in His career working off 
 a theological programme. That would have turned 
 His life from real drama to histrionics. The drama 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 149 
 
 in it was the drama of a nation, of history, the 
 drama of humanity — of the last reality. It was all a 
 real and moral conflict within His universal person- 
 ality ; and the form of it was prescribed by a national 
 issue of righteousness. The whole deadly difference 
 between Him and the Pharisees turned on their 
 different interpretation of public righteousness. And 
 the collision condensed, like our present war, a whole 
 world issue for the New Humanity, and a striving 
 unto blood. We may here think of His own blood 
 which the nation shed as its end began, or their 
 blood which His providential judgment shed, when 
 the end came in the dreadful fall of Jerusalem. 
 
 His suffering, for instance, was very real. It was 
 not aesthetic. He did not sit in ideal light and 
 only feel the darkness of others. He did not use 
 His immortality in such a way as made death to Him 
 but a tunnel and not an abyss. He did not use 
 His position as God's Son for privilege or immunity. 
 He was not lifted by it to a bliss that left no room for 
 pain. His suffering, sympathetic as it was, was not 
 sympathetic only. He did not feel just what a kind 
 heart would feel, only on an imaginative scale. 
 He felt as only the Holy One could feel human evil. 
 He felt sin as God felt it ; and that was more than 
 any fellowship of human pain. He never lost His 
 sensibility for the moral situation — nay, for His 
 own central place in it. So far from being always 
 storm-free within. He was at last the storm centre, 
 as He poured out His Soul unto a death which was 
 God's curse upon sin. He saw and felt His death as 
 the last judgment of His God, which He least of all 
 could evade. He met it, but it was in no frame of 
 
ISO THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 mere courage, and certainly not as a superior person 
 smiling down grief to a parterre of admirers. He 
 met it with a fear and an agony which He conquered 
 only by prayer, and in God's sight only, not man's. 
 
 Yet He suffered also as a citizen-Saviour, as an 
 Israelite indeed, and the legatee of a unique historic 
 past. In Him transpired the real tragedy of Israel's 
 national soul. His agony was not superhistoric only. 
 He was not rapt in another world. 
 
 It is said that Hegel, coming out of his house 
 in Leipzig one day during the siege, was surprised 
 to find the French in the streets. He had forgotten 
 the investment of the place. No such unworldly 
 reverie was an opiate to the Christ of the Passion. 
 It may be true that His warfare was not with flesh 
 and blood ; that He was engaged in a mysterious 
 battle in the Unseen ; that He was at grips with 
 Satan ; that He was deep in the realisation of all the 
 weight of the world's sin, and in the sense of God's 
 wrath on it. But let us not in that conviction lose 
 sight also of the historic realism of the situation, 
 nor of His own sense of that. (Our religious indi- 
 vidualism has beclouded all this to us, and made 
 the very discussion of such things unintelligible.) 
 There was enough in His personal experience to 
 move Him to His depths, enough in the apparent 
 collapse of His vocation as it seemed cut across by 
 His death. The sense of the historic situation never 
 left Him — the sense that He was putting His nation 
 to the touch to win or lose all, and dooming in His 
 death the race His whole effort had gone to love 
 and save. Israel would not be severed from the 
 Pharisees who had prussianised its religion. These 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 151 
 
 were its gods. He was losing all the hopes to 
 which He had given His life ; and He envisaged 
 all the doom He was bringing upon His people. He 
 was its greatest and most fatal Lover. And how 
 He loved them ! ' Father, forgive them. They 
 know not what they do.' That was not for the 
 ignorant executioners, but for the murderers, for 
 Israel. Yet the prayer, even His prayer, was not 
 granted. He must go to war and judgment on this 
 people, and He must entail, not to say inflict, its 
 defeat and ruin in blood. His life was a process of 
 disillusioned love, whose reality He came to find but 
 in service, suffering, and death, and not in the enjoy- 
 ment of success. But He did find reality and life 
 there. The love of the Father whose will it was did 
 not fail Him. If His Father forsook Him His groan 
 never challenged the righteousness in it. Hence, 
 though He could be bitter, He was never embittered, 
 and never desperate. He was a patriot, but the 
 patriot of Israel's true mission against Israel's egoism 
 and empire. It was God's Kingdom against world 
 empire. He not only saw His people making the 
 greatest mistake a nation could commit, but He 
 was the occasion of it. He, their Saviour, was 
 the stumbling-stone on which they broke. He 
 was forcing the issue in which a people that was 
 religious or nothing was sealing its doom by mis- 
 taking its God, and misreading that revelation of 
 Him whose custody gave the nation its only right 
 to be. It was, for the then Church, the same fatal 
 blunder which, at a later date, made inevitable 
 the Reformation and all its train ; the like blunder 
 by which the Church, become incurably canonical, 
 
152 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 seized on the wrong element in its Bible, and chose 
 the ritual and sacramental factor in the New Testa- 
 ment instead of the prophetic and evangelical. It 
 had become priestly at the cost of its apostolicity. 
 Christ's whole charge against the Pharisees was that 
 they had done the same with their Bible as God's 
 Word. A veil was on Moses' face that the more 
 people might look, and the most miss the glory. 
 Observance had engrossed their obedience and stupe- 
 fied their soul. Rabbinism had quenched insight, as 
 philology might literature, or as a clericalism kills 
 apostolic succession. That was why they could not 
 recognise or own Him when He came as the real 
 burthen of prophecy. He came as the soul of a live 
 national righteousness which they had reduced to 
 rabbinism. He was the true Gospel of a catholic 
 book which they had turned to a mere propaganda. 
 So when He was not meaningless to them He was 
 exasperating. His Gospel for a world made a crisis 
 for His people. He had to press that crisis to the 
 far end. And in doing so he had to take a step 
 which involved the giving up, not of ' life's minor 
 hopes or desires which mean so much to those with- 
 out vocation,' but what had seemed His national 
 vocation till now. He had to see His great 
 Messianic aeon sink in blood, and feel it all to be 
 the result of His prophetic action to His people. 
 He could not till the last moment settle to the cer- 
 tainty that the intelligible way of the Messianic King 
 was fruitless, and that the unintelligible doom of the 
 Cross was God's will and way for Him — though living 
 or dying He was His Father's. The Cross presented 
 itself as it had often loomed on Him — ^as the end and 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 153 
 
 ruin of Messiah's work, or at least of its first 
 gracious form — the preaching of God's Sovereignty 
 of Grace and Fatherhood. But now for Israel Grace, 
 perverted into force, turned to judgment. His 
 passion to preach repentance to His nation was now 
 cut across by a certainty of judgment on it which 
 left no place for repentance, but only tragedy and 
 ruin. The conviction had long been growing in Him, 
 it now came to a sure head. He never doubted 
 indeed that God would prevail. But He had to 
 realise that God's last gift to Him was the failure 
 of all on which He had spent His life in the hope 
 of saving at least the better Israel from its hard 
 taskmasters. The hope was vain. The people had 
 been taught too long and too skilfully, and had 
 been debased too much. They had chosen their 
 masters and lost their soul. The Cross confessed 
 the national failure of the most royal prophetism, 
 of all Christ's work in that vein. For Israel was 
 impenitent. It was rusted into its bonds. It was 
 hardened beyond the possibility of salvation. There 
 remained but its collapse. And He must not evade 
 the Cross, which began in His blood the end which 
 was completed in theirs. He must not stand aside 
 from this judgment, let it go past Him, do nothing, 
 seek retreat, and leave God to work a miracle if He 
 would avert bloodshed and ruin. That were tempting 
 God and deserting Him. He inflicted on Israel His 
 death and all that that entailed. He did the one 
 imperative thing. He so went to judgment as to 
 become their judgment, and He left the historic result 
 to God. His blood was on them and their children. 
 And in all this Israel stood to His mind for the race. 
 
154 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 The New Israel was the New Humanity — not dena- 
 tionalised, but with its nations bright in their setting 
 in the family of peoples and the Kingdom of God. 
 
 It cannot be right to ignore as we do the fact 
 that Christ's work of Reconciliation was conducted 
 by a sharp unsparing polemic, a national polemic, 
 the greatest polemic the world has ever seen— the 
 war of the Kingdom of God against its nation chosen 
 and fallen. The Cross, when taken profoundly 
 enough, supplies the lack which has been charged 
 against Christianity of having no public ethic. It is 
 the source of national morals as well as private — 
 the Sermon is not. 
 
 The action of a nation is not the mere parallel of 
 the individual's on a larger scale, though it is the 
 postulate of individual action and its medium. 
 Therefore the source of social, and especially of 
 State, morality is different in kind from that which 
 might suffice for stray individuals. It is not pre- 
 cept. It is divine action, ending one age and creating 
 a new. It is equally real with law, but ampler in its 
 wealth and power. It comes from the heart of a 
 great historic and divine event, from a national re- 
 velation, with a reference both individual and cosmic. 
 It comes from the place of the Cross of Christ in 
 Israel and its function there for the Kingdom of God. 
 That Cross was the crisis of an ethical nation's 
 doings, and the focus of that nation's doom. It has 
 the secret in it of a nation's moral soul, and the 
 principle of a nation's place in the Kingdom of 
 God, i.e. of a nation's ethic, and of the judgment 
 in that ethic. Christ did indict a nation. He de- 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 155 
 
 clared war on it (though not on its nationality) to 
 His own death, and to His people's final doom in 
 blood. He moved against a nation deeply religious, 
 but whose religion had sunk to a fierce, proud, and 
 pious patriotism, thirsting for the mastery of the 
 world.^ It had fallen into the hands of those who 
 would sacrifice the whole people to that ambition. 
 It had therefore become a non-moral religion, and 
 thereby the enemy of the Kingdom of God. It was 
 not the ' immorality ' in the sinners of Israel that 
 Christ encountered, despaired of, and judged to 
 death and blood. It was the immorality of respect- 
 able, cultured, and religious Israel. It was a 
 Pharisaism which had captured the Bible and 
 the people, and so misread its own charter and 
 mission as to substitute national dominion for holy 
 grace, and therefore for ethic, in public affairs. 
 Israel had become the vassal of Pharisaism, with a 
 military hero, Messiah, and Superman, and an iron 
 law laid on humanity and freedom. Such righteous- 
 ness Christ called sin, and such good evil. The system 
 was radically, mortally, wrong for Him. Pharisaism 
 had many virtues and much culture as these things 
 go. It was able, thorough, accurate, even punc- 
 tilious, and devoted to a national ideal. But it 
 had no insight nor faith, and therefore it was rotten. 
 Its burthen was the culture of its Thorah — of life 
 systematised and policed. The nation that fell to 
 that system, that religious prussianism I have 
 called it, was judged in Christ's blood upon it and 
 its children. It was doomed to perish at the hands 
 
 » May I refer to my article in the Contemporary Review, June 
 1 91 6, on the ' Conversion of the Good ' ? 
 
156 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 of a more efficient form of that imperialism whose 
 cult had blinded its eyes to Himself. Christ declared 
 war on theocratic Israel, not on Rome — as we do on 
 Christian Germany and not on pagan Japan. The 
 worst antagonism may be where there is most in 
 common. God quenched for ever His own Israel. 
 Judgment begins at the house of God — to the 
 scandal of those charitables who deplore warfare 
 more than wickedness. 
 
 Christ found Israel more antichrist than Rome. 
 Yet He did not raise and lead an army against 
 Israel. That is not God's way. He sets evil against 
 evil, dividing Satan's house against himself, making 
 the war of man to praise Him. He found the instru- 
 ment of His judgment to His hand in Rome. Rome 
 was His sword and scourge, as Assyria had been. 
 The Roman Empire, unsaintly as it was, was the 
 agent of God's providence for purposes both of law 
 and arms, of peace and war, of blessing and judg- 
 ment. It was both His staff and rod. He certainly 
 used that Jewish war for His righteousness, setting 
 evil against evil. It was His holy judgment on 
 Israel's moral crime. It was part of His providential 
 ethic. And it was none the less so that it was 
 worked out by a moral necessity, that the same 
 demented moral temper which slew Christ made its 
 desperate and infatuate throw against Rome. From 
 His Cross He ruled that war in His saving providence 
 for history. It was the Cross that doomed Israel. 
 At any rate Christ did not shirk the full moral 
 issue, nor did He draw back because it involved 
 the personally guiltless in desolation and blood for 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 157 
 
 righteousness' sake. He did not cease to beard the 
 rulers of His people's darkness, nor hold His hand 
 because the Pharisees were truly religious, godlier 
 than Caesar, and had more in common with Himself. 
 It is not always with those with whom we have most 
 in common that we most agree ; they may hold the 
 truth in unrighteousness. Christ's holy love did not 
 evade a crisis charged with misery and death to the 
 innocent and the unborn. It would be more true to 
 say He forced it. For all His love of His people 
 He did not retire from strife with the kind of religion 
 that had captured them. He did not spare them 
 because some among them represented the best and 
 most earnest religion of the time. This must be 
 remembered when we are told of the deep religion 
 in Germany. It is religion pious, but de-ethicised 
 below even its own deep knowledge. It is religion 
 content with Prussia and Belgium. It is religion 
 whose Church has never raised a voice against the 
 national massacre of innocents, though it has in it 
 some of the most valuable authorities on Christian 
 ethic of an academic kind. It is religion that gave 
 all its children a holiday for the ' Lusitania.' 
 
 Christ did not go out of public action because of 
 the good men whom He was involving in Israel's 
 doom ; nor did He retreat from His aggressive 
 treatment of His rebels and slayers, and betake 
 Himself to a long life of prayer, and to the quiet 
 influencing of groups who might leaven the future. 
 He did not take the pietist line, forswear national 
 action, and leave God to work a miracle to save 
 His Kingdom. It is not so hard to exchange the 
 moral for the miraculous. It relieves us of the 
 
iS8 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 coward's dread — responsibility. Many will endure 
 martyrdom for an opinion for one who will take 
 responsibility in a great venture. He carried to the 
 bitter end His war with an Israel whose egoism, for all 
 its virtues, served Satan more than God. He became 
 the national doom who had been the nation's victim. 
 And He did so in view of all it meant for national 
 misery. His work was not to avert judgment — 
 He even took it on Himself, He let it fall on Him. 
 Nor was His object to refuse to act as the instrument 
 of judgment in God's hand. For it was His agony 
 to know that the Cross He freely went to was to 
 be His nation's curse. But His purpose was to 
 convert judgment both in the endurance and in the 
 exercise of it, to turn a nation's doom to a world's 
 boon. Judgment falling on goodness like His, on 
 such love of man, on such obedience, such passion 
 for righteousness, and such practical confession of 
 God's holiness, became redemptive. And such Re- 
 demption, as it is our chief gift, becomes our chief 
 responsibility and therefore our chief judgment. 
 He converted condemnation to salvation, and made 
 judgment the agent of love and its atonement ; 
 which is a far greater moral achievement than to 
 go round it, take the gentle way, and win the 
 winsome fame. (It is high time to moderate our 
 application of dainty terms like winsome to the 
 crushed sin-bearer, the Judge of all the earth, and 
 the antagonist of the prince of the world. Even in 
 His Resurrection glory He is something else than 
 winsome.) But in the Act He became our Judge. 
 This stone, if we do not fix it on our chief corner, 
 falls upon us, and breaks us to powder. God Himself 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 159 
 
 uses force at last from the very Cross, and gives it 
 its moral place within a Christian ethic whose source 
 is there. The love that lifts life, that sweetens, 
 fortifies, and hallows it, is also a consuming fire. 
 
 We may pause here to notice again that facile 
 view of salvation which, by abolishing judgment 
 and eliminating atonement, reduces the freeness of 
 redeeming grace to a revealed amnesty or suffusion 
 of love which simply deifies paternal affection. This, 
 the favourite theology of the public has done for 
 half a century. This creed is now working out its 
 ethical consequences in a decay of moral virility, or 
 of moral realism on an imaginative scale. It might, 
 to the passing glance of a mere reader, seem a piece 
 of extravagance to connect the Atonement with a 
 national ethic or with public affairs at all. But 
 it is really their disconnection that has been the 
 bane of religion for public effect. It is a real 
 Atonement that really ethicises Christianity. This 
 is a point which it is impossible to elaborate here. 
 But it may seem less absurd if, being prepared to 
 admit that the starting-point of all theology is the 
 holiness of God, we notice that that places an 
 absolute and mystic ethic in command of all things. 
 The Atonement was the founding of God's Kingdom 
 among the nations in the practical meeting by a 
 historic Christ of the requirement of that sublimated 
 righteousness which we call the holiness of God in 
 His kingdom. To holiness the idea of judgment is 
 even more essential than that of sacrifice, which is 
 associated rather with love. So that if God is holy 
 love the Cross is a judgment sacrifice. And if we 
 
i6o THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 are fellow-workers with. God we must not shrink 
 from executing judgment any more than from 
 making sacrifice. We must make sacrifices to 
 execute God's judgment, even if we feel no more 
 worthy than was Cyrus His servant. The elimina- 
 tion of this central and public conscience in 
 Christianity takes shape in the conventual pacifism 
 of devout groups, whose idealist faith has parted 
 with the tonic of judgment, and whose ethic has 
 another centre and a poorer quality than the world- 
 righteousness of the Holy One's Cross. Theological 
 error about the core or source of an ethical religion 
 always works out in time into moral failure at a 
 crisis correspondingly great. And this present crisis 
 is one where nothing less than the principle of a holy 
 and righteous Redemption of a world in the blood 
 of Christ will serve as moral guide. 
 
 I heard a remarkable phrase lately, used to reprove 
 those who thought that the whole Christian issue 
 for history was involved in the war, and that because 
 of it the Kingdom of God was struck in the face. 
 ' As if because of the war God's Kingdom had ceased 
 to go on.' Certainly God will see that His Kingdom 
 does go on. But that great faith was not what 
 underlay the phrase. What did underlie it was a 
 greater interest in the evangelisms, reforms, and 
 benevolences of the societies and committees than 
 in the moral issue of nations at the core of the long 
 tragedy of history. It was the spirit of historic 
 detachment which keeps a sect a sect. It was a 
 greater concern for the benevolent business of the 
 Church than in the imperial business of the Kingdom 
 of God. It betrayed a frame of mind which has 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL i6i 
 
 much, if not everything, to do with the present 
 ineffectual state of religion. Is the Kingdom of God 
 concrete with history and public affairs in such a 
 way that if things went wrong at a world juncture 
 and a moral issue like the present it would receive 
 one of the greatest blows in Time, from which no 
 benevolence could recover us ? Or is that Kingdom 
 of such a nature that its subjects and its efforts 
 might go on at religious business as usual, with a 
 minor concern about the war, its moral inwardness, 
 and its practical issue for the whole world ? Would 
 it be but partially and indirectly, but not sub- 
 stantially, affected by our defeat, so long as the 
 atmosphere and work of, for instance, American 
 Christianity, or the Keswick Convention, or the 
 Swanwick Conferences, or the May Meetings went 
 on ? Luther taught us to carry religion into our 
 life's vocation, and said that business was no less 
 sacred in its nature than monkery, and lent itself 
 no less to the Kingdom of God. But there is a 
 kind of protestant monkery, cultivating a religion 
 of coteries, the ideas of a cave, with benevolence 
 of a merely individual kind, and moving in a bustle 
 of organisations which are apt to be but littleness 
 writ large. Truly it is a blessed work; but it can 
 be a blinding unless it is carried on a creed as large 
 as its desire. These cloistered circles tend to become 
 more or less indifferent to the great historic and 
 national movements of the Spirit, or indeed to 
 any public issues, unless these affect the obvious 
 moralities of Villadom, or some religious programme 
 more ambitious than catholic. Neither Luther nor his 
 Church has carried his valuable principle into their 
 
1 62 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 own national life ; which, has accordingly been 
 captured for a commercialism that despises the 
 Church, but lusts to capture the world, a militarism 
 that expressly flouts the Kingdom of God and the 
 humanities of men, and a policy that renounces 
 moral control at choice. But the more a nation 
 escapes from mere force, and becomes a State 
 with a system of law and right, the more does it 
 acquire moral personality. Such a State corres- 
 ponds in a nation to personality in the individual. 
 And accordingly it has the vocation of all moral 
 personality to serve God, and seek first the righteous- 
 ness of His Kingdom in history. There are in the 
 Cross of Christ ranges of righteousness for that 
 Kingdom whose scope transcends the limits of the 
 individual, but are in some parity with the compass 
 of State action. A State may or may not establish 
 a Church, but it is morally bound to establish the 
 Kingdom of God in its conduct with other States, 
 and to carry out that righteousness with other 
 nations. In that service it is bound to serve God's 
 historic principles and purposes, even to the point 
 of acting as His agent of judgment at need. It may 
 have to police on due occasion the peoples that 
 abjure, in profession or conduct. His realm of 
 righteousness and humanity, and that stand in the 
 world for * absolute war,' war, that is, with no 
 consideration moral or human. This, however, is an 
 aspect or function of the historic Cross which has 
 been neglected by a domestic evangelicalism, a too 
 homely ethic, a too personal pietism, or a senti- 
 mental liberalism of mere fraternity — to the cost of 
 the public influence of the whole of those types o^ 
 
HISTORIC AND NATIONAL 163 
 
 religion. In the pacifist movements we have this 
 monkery, this non-nationalist religion, going on to a 
 religion anti-nationalist, rather than supernationalist. 
 We have amateur ethic, and a religion disinherited 
 of the long history of its public either in Church or 
 State. We have a conventicle Christianity without 
 weight with the public because without moral nerve 
 or insight on a world scale, a theological scale. We 
 have, emerging into sight and effect, the difference 
 between a Church Christianity and a group Chris- 
 tianity, between a Christianity founded on the 
 evangelical ethic of a new creation of the historic 
 conscience in the holy Cross and a Christianity 
 founded on a natural ethic of atomic conduct re- 
 published by Christ with a new impetus in His 
 fine personality and precept. The whole group type 
 has an anti-national tendency, from which the sects 
 only escape when they grow, by the evangelical 
 range of conscience, out of mere societies into true 
 Churches. It lives in pools that the sea has left, 
 in religious backwaters and unhistoric juntos. In 
 a book I published in 191 2 entitled ' Faith, 
 Freedom, and the Future,' I tried to call atten- 
 tion to what seemed to me the neglected fact that 
 Independency was the product of two factors — the 
 intimate, energetic, but scrupulous Anabaptism of 
 Germany, driven through Holland to England, and 
 the controlling Calvinism of the stately Puritans. 
 It was the stiffening of Calvinism that saved the 
 sectary element from sinking into the sand as it 
 did elsewhere, and made the Free Churches. But 
 the theological element has gone for the hour, with 
 its binding, steadying, and majestic ethical strength, 
 
 M 2 
 
i64 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 and with it has gone our rule by the evangelical 
 principle. The spiritualistic element is left to its 
 head in certain idealists, and it takes its conventiclist 
 effect against the idea and ethic which make and 
 mark a Church, whether that effect take the shape 
 of neologism at one time or of pacifism at another. 
 The public reaction from the pacifism of groups 
 (whether ethical, pious, or rationalist) will, at a later 
 point, be a great asset for the national Church. 
 The Free Churches will, however unreasonably, be 
 stamped with the group stigma, owing to the scope 
 they give for honeycombs of devout fellowship, too 
 cellular and too sweet. I say such a stigma would 
 be unreasonable because such groups are but sporadic 
 in the general tone. They are not without much 
 value for religious elevation, but in ethic they do 
 less to brace and guide. 
 
 If it be asked whether the line of discussion is 
 not wandering somewhat afield from the matter of 
 Christian ethic I may repeat myself to the inquirer 
 thus. What holiness is to love in heaven that 
 righteousness is to love on earth. And the con- 
 nection is much more than an analogy ; it is really 
 a continuity — holiness continuing in heavenly con- 
 ditions the righteousness in earthly affairs, and the 
 same love being the bond of heaven as is the bond 
 of heaven and earth. Therefore we do not ramble 
 when we speak of the great Atonement by holiness 
 to the holiness of God as being the foundation of 
 all the ethic of righteousness on earth, and the 
 principle of all judgment on men and all justification 
 of man before God. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 JUSTIFICATION AND JUDGMENT 
 
 How is ethic, and especially national ethic, connected 
 with a piece of religion so theological as Justification 
 by Faith ? The answer to that question is not simple 
 but it would take this line. The doctrine represents 
 the moral feature which lifts the Christian Recon- 
 ciliation above the level of a mere composition 
 with the divine Creditor. The moral quality of 
 Christ's supreme work is shown by the fact that the 
 same Act which reconciles us is also our justifica- 
 tion ; and it is farther shown by our justification 
 having moral goodness not as its mere sequel, but 
 as its object. As Wernle says : it is in the doctrine 
 of justification that Christian theology and Christian 
 ethic meet. Our faith is neither an assent nor a 
 sensibility ; it is our life answer in kind to an Act 
 which made us really righteous, and not but piously 
 — righteous in a quite new and living way, attuned 
 to God's higher will. We are placed by that Act 
 (if we will) in a new order of righteousness called 
 the Kingdom of God, which is really the Sovereignty 
 of God, and means a vital relation to Him and His 
 holiness more than a compliance or an organisation. 
 It is quite other than legal or preceptual, being 
 a matter of life, and of ever deeper life, in a personal 
 
 165 
 
i66 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 relation with the Holy and His love. Our small 
 and turbid streams, full of such sound and fury, 
 are received into a world-righteousness of love and 
 life eternal, whose moving waters flow in pure 
 ablution round earth's human shores, and which 
 salves and completes the partial justice or goodness 
 of earth. We are caught up with all our loose 
 ends, and woven into the goodness not of a deca- 
 logue but of a Christ. We are ingrafted into a holy, 
 and only therefore changeless, love, whose first con- 
 cern is cosmic and eternal righteousness, and which 
 chastises without ceasing to love ; for our Lover 
 is our Holy One, Who for His holiness spared not 
 even His Son. 
 
 The tissue of history has two sides, an upper 
 and an under. On the upper side the pattern is 
 clear and complete, on the under it is ragged and 
 dim. On the upper side the eye of God alone rests 
 Who sits at the loom of Time, on the under side our 
 gaze is turned. We therefore decipher the design 
 with difficulty, and, where the pattern is fine, not 
 at all. But it is given to us, looking up beyond 
 the edge of this canopy, to see in a glass what the 
 Weaver sees always. We see condensed and re- 
 flected, as in a concave mirror in the heavens, the 
 large lines of the scheme and even the denouement. 
 We see there, in a small but finished form, the 
 purpose which on the seamy side of the fabric is 
 but in blurred and uncouth shape. We see not yet 
 all things working out the Kingdom, but we see 
 Jesus. But it is the same righteousness. His 
 righteousness, on both sides of the historic web. 
 Perfect heavenward in Christ, it is but striving 
 
JUSTIFICATION AND JUDGMENT 167 
 
 to be articulate on its earthly side, through, the 
 confusion of the history we see. It is struggling 
 to the Kingdom of God. The upper side is the 
 righteousness of the Kingdom come and sure, the 
 under is that of the Kingdom coming, the realm of 
 historic judgment and justice. The former is the 
 region of faith, the latter of sight. We are in the 
 former by our personal faith, in the latter by our 
 public works. The one is the realm and range of 
 the eternal fulness, the other the realm of the same 
 spirit, but humiliated to man and his procession of 
 strife. The one is the land of love in possession, 
 the other of love in its agony. But it is the same 
 love, holy and irresistible. The righteousness that 
 reigns with Christ in heaven is the same righteous- 
 ness that wrestles in historic affairs for judgment 
 and mercy, sweating great drops of blood. The 
 conflict of the nations, within or without, is the 
 action and ferment of the Kingdom of God, whose 
 new wine bursts the old bottles. But by faith we 
 open and drink in that Kingdom. 
 
 Therefore to men of faith (and not of sentiment 
 or aesthetic) this world-righteousness must be, in 
 public matters, the first charge on their love ; which 
 love aims, accordingly, at placing all men in that 
 final good, whether nationally by just liberty, or 
 personally by holy faith. For a Christian nation, 
 like a Christian soul, owes its last right to be to its 
 place and function in the Kingdom of God. Love, 
 when we pass beyond instinctive or domestic limits, 
 and when we enter its historic Christian principle, 
 is the desire to see our neighbours in the possession 
 of their best right, dignity, and liberty, which is a 
 
i68 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 common life in the loving and saving righteousness 
 of God. The more wide and public its range, the 
 more it becomes the righteousness of the Kingdom. 
 We are saved, whether as souls or nations, in a 
 Church and Kingdom where the mighty matter is 
 love — but love in the form of a real world-righteous- 
 ness and a passion to set all men and peoples there, 
 in heart, conscience, and condition, to the glory of 
 God the Father. It may or may not take the form 
 of individual affection. And it does not ignore the 
 wrath, the judgment, of God. 
 
 We are justified moreover by faith in this cosmic 
 righteousness not as a mere ideal (with its impatience) 
 but as a foregone achievement of God in spiritual 
 places, on which we rest and in patience win our 
 soul. It is the loss of this moral and final idea of 
 justification, the replacement of its faith either by 
 an unhistoric mysticism or by a mere idealism, 
 dropping to religious naturalism — it is this that is the 
 cause of the worst weakness and the most placid 
 demoralisation in recent and popular versions of 
 Christianity. In such a way that love, stripped of 
 its moral element of intrinsic and inalienable holiness, 
 subsides into sympathy alone, and ends in sentiment 
 and a sentimental virility. The Cross of Christ, 
 ceasing to be related to the holiness of God by any 
 Atonement, ceases to be moral at the core. It ceases 
 to be the ground of our justification, i.e., the source 
 of our new morality, which we think to find in a mere 
 and simple fatherhood of pity and benediction, 
 without judgment unto victory. The Cross becomes 
 but the exhibition of fatherhood at a particular 
 call on it instead of a constituent element in it ; 
 
JUSTIFICATION AND JUDGMENT 169 
 
 it becomes an impressionist device instead of an 
 act of real judgment. Or it is viewed as the great 
 outcrop of the sacrificial and redemptive principle 
 in the first creation, instead of a constant element in 
 the holy fatherhood of the second, and due to the 
 Father's holiness even more than to the children's 
 need. Thus, by the loss from our Christian faith 
 of the religious experience and the moral theology 
 of justification, we lose also the principle of Christian 
 ethic as rooted in a holiness eternal and a judgment 
 unto forgiveness. It becomes a sequel rather than 
 the element of our salvation. And we become 
 the victims of all kinds of susceptible sympathies, 
 or of an idealist and ineffectual conscience which 
 is more apt in asserting its own freedom than 
 in divining the righteousness of God, and feeling 
 His way in this jungle of a world with the woodcraft 
 of the Spirit. Christian ethic is a theological ethic. 
 There is but one ethic, which is the Christian ; and 
 it has but one source — the Cross of the Holy Love. 
 And the doctrine of justification by faith carries 
 within it the moral principle and spiritual badge of 
 this supremely ethical religion for man as he actually 
 and morally is — man in families and nations within 
 a Kingdom of God. 
 
 The ethic of Christian faith, therefore, has a first 
 regard to the eternal righteousness of God's historic 
 Kingdom for the New Humanity, built on the founda- 
 tions of the historic and atoning Cross. The first 
 interest met by God's love is righteousness — if the 
 Cross reveal that love as holy, if it is the atoning 
 Cross of our Justification. Our new righteousness 
 
I/O THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 was in Christ's blood. The Atonement was the 
 crisis of the * war in heaven,' of God's moral war- 
 fare with man. Human righteousness came by 
 that offering and joy given to God's righteousness, 
 and prolonged in us by the indwelling action of 
 the Holy Crucified and Risen. It was and is by 
 the mortal obedience, surrender, and reparation of 
 the Holy to the Holy. It was under the suffering 
 conditions of a holy yet historic war. But always 
 (I keep urging) the world-righteousness of the Holy 
 One was first (Romans i. 17), at any cost of 
 either suffering or death (2 Cor. v. 21). That 
 requirement of God was the first thing in Christ's 
 last thoughts, and took precedence of man's need. 
 God Himself paid the price (the Father suffering, 
 maybe, more than the Son), but paid it must be; 
 judgment there must be, but a judgment where 
 deaths teem with moral life. And there, in that 
 divine and racial Act, lies the creative principle 
 of Christian life and ethic — especially of its more 
 public and historic forms. The larger our scale 
 of action the more does love take this historic form 
 of righteousness at any cost, and the Kingdom at 
 any price. The Cross shows that the public form 
 of love is righteousness — sympathetic righteousness, 
 first with God, and then with man. It is for each 
 soul a concrete, historic, actual, and social righteous- 
 ness working out into the world, because the 
 Cross was not shown in the air but inserted in the 
 tissue of history, with the eloquence and action of 
 affairs. It involved the Roman Empire, as was 
 shown in due course when it took possession of it. 
 The Cross was organic with human history, and 
 
JUSTIFICATION AND JUDGMENT 171 
 
 Christ with the New Man. Its ethic therefore is not 
 trivial, ethereal, nor aloof, but concrete with affairs. 
 As soon, for instance, as a war passes beyond the 
 tussle of two peoples, as soon as it becomes a world- 
 conflict not only by its area but by the moral quality 
 of its issue for humanity, as soon as one side 
 disowns all moral control and humane conduct at 
 national choice, and thus makes its enemies the 
 champions of conscience and humanity — ^then love, 
 if it is divine, goes to a Cross, takes up the form 
 and function of righteous judgment, and resists unto 
 blood. It is not as if we had a realm of providence 
 in the first creation with a realm alongside it of redemp- 
 tion in the second, and the inscrutable calamities in 
 the one were just meant to cast us over the frontier 
 into the other, there to shelter till the storm was 
 overpast. That is a crude and maimed concep- 
 tion of the divine action, and lacks its unity of 
 plan. But the first creation with its providential 
 course was made for the second, and only comes 
 home in it, though by the way of creation and not 
 evolution, of redemption and not mere develop- 
 ment. Conversely the second creation has all along 
 been reacting on the first and moulding it. Nature, 
 if not the mother, is the matrix of Grace. Salvation 
 is the ground plan of creation, and the pritnutn mobile 
 of Nature itself. And it is from the second creation 
 and its new birth that the last powers and initiations 
 proceed which subdue the prepared ways of the first 
 to its control, as the goal is rest after strife. The 
 whole creation creaks and groans for the manifesta- 
 tion of the crucified Son of God, and the bringing 
 forth of His judgment unto victory. 
 
172 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 No one can dwell on the inwardness of these 
 mighty matters without feeling the effect of a current 
 which sets against him from the mentality of the 
 present age. He is suspected, or charged, with 
 getting so far away from what the modern mind 
 deems reality that his whole line of thought is treated 
 as lucubration. The whole modus operandi in a 
 matter like justification is regarded as too abstract 
 and too artificial, too forensic for simple religion 
 or the plain conscience — though when a man needs 
 justification most his religious condition is anything 
 but simple, and his conscience anything but plain. 
 
 And one of the oldest and most obvious objections 
 to the doctrine of justification is its moral unreality. 
 If God (it is said) can count right a man who is 
 wrong, and has not yet amended his life, that destroys 
 our idea of God by its moral falsity. There is illusion 
 somewhere, incompatible with moral clarity. And 
 no doubt if justification is not fundamental it is 
 fallacious. 
 
 The answer is that the objection treats God as 
 an observer, a thinker, a critic, forming a certain esti- 
 mate of us on a divine survey of our merits. But 
 that is not the Christian relation between Him and 
 us. For religion it is not a question how we think 
 of God ; and so it is not a question of how God 
 thinks of us, how He reckons us up. Were it so, 
 there could of course, with a perfectly holy God, be no 
 such thing as justification. But it is not a question 
 of His thought of us ; it concerns His will toward 
 us. It is a matter not of verdict but of treatment, 
 not of a judgment He forms of us but of a judgment 
 He exercises on us. The unreality comes from treat- 
 
JUSTIFICATION AND JUDGMENT 173 
 
 ing a personal relation as a mere case of connection, 
 observation, and decision. If you treat your neigh- 
 bour, who is a living will, merely as an object of 
 inquiry and estimate, with mere logic and its con- 
 clusions, you are unnatural and unreal, morally 
 unreal. You are not handling a moral reality in 
 a moral attitude, with the moral method. And 
 to transfer such an attitude to our God is to 
 introduce moral unreality there. It is to demoralise 
 religion. The justice of God is not justice of mind 
 but of personality. It is not mere assessment of us, 
 it is something more sympathetic, something creative. 
 His judgment on man is creative judgment, the 
 creative judgment of the Holy, saving and sanctifying 
 judgment, judgment which always views its own 
 sanctity as the destiny of all, and which makes the 
 thing it misses in that direction. It is not a judg- 
 ment merely critical. Its notice of what is wrong 
 is but the condition and passion for setting it right. 
 This is the nature of God's righteousness as given us 
 in Christ, Who is the great moral reality of the world, 
 and the moral principle deepest in its life and action. 
 In this self-revelation of His moral holiness, God 
 took the field as the forgiving and redeeming God ; 
 for holiness was there not simply displayed for 
 adoration by those sensitive to it, but it was estab- 
 lished in command of humanity in a Kingdom. And 
 holiness cannot be established except by making men 
 holy — which was done in Christ as the creative 
 Surety of their future, and not merely its dawn or 
 its prophet. We are His entail and not merely His 
 sequel. That is His will, His supreme righteousness 
 — a forgiveness which is also Eternal Life, and which 
 
174 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 overcomes and commands the concrete world. Our 
 supreme righteousness is to meet this great deed and 
 gift. That is faith. Faith is meeting God's holy- 
 forgiveness in kind. It is responding to His righteous 
 mercy and its last judgment. When we live by that, 
 we live by the supreme moral reality, we come to 
 our moral selves. Redemption is the most royal 
 thing we know in God ; and man's royalty is his 
 loyalty to it. It is more royal than conscience. 
 The conscience really loyal meets that Grace with 
 faith in it, with self-committal. There can be no 
 unreality in trusting the saving righteousness of God, 
 and there can be nothing immoral in answering this 
 great Act of His holy love in kind. Our evangelical 
 faith is doing supreme justice to a God Who, because 
 holy, must establish holiness in command every- 
 where. Who, therefore, is supreme as Saviour, Who 
 is just and the Justifier, Who judges iniquity out of 
 being, Who is righteous even to the pitch of holiness 
 in all the ways of His love, and to our redemption 
 into it. Indeed it is the one means of putting right 
 all that is wrong with us. The man of perfect faith 
 in God's Grace is right with that supreme will of 
 God. He is the man made for the divine image, 
 made to reflect God, the man of the normal person- 
 ality, the personality for which he was earmarked 
 by a God holy enough in His judgment of us to 
 redeem us into a holiness to which we had failed to 
 grow. Faith is the divine destiny of free beings 
 created for righteousness by holy love. We were 
 born to be redeemed, and to believe in our 
 redemption into this holy and active righteousness ; 
 which is not compliance with injunction but response 
 
JUSTIFICATION AND JUDGMENT 175 
 
 to a person. Faith is not a second best ; as if the 
 absolute best would have been sinless obedience to 
 instructions, correct attention to orders, or even full 
 trust in a lovable person, who yet might not have 
 power in His love to redeem. There are moral 
 resources in God and His holiness which nothing but 
 our sin and Redemption draw out. So far, felix 
 culpa I And these reserves are the deepest — the 
 resources of Grace, of which He was well aware in 
 Himself when He created man free to sin. Only the 
 mighty to save could make us free to fall. To meet, 
 and confess, and hallow in action that deepest thing 
 in God is the greatest thing we can do as men. The 
 greatest moral act of which man is capable in wor- 
 shipping obedience to God's holy grace. That is 
 our faith. That is what it does. The trust of Grace 
 is greater than the obedience that never strayed from 
 Love and knows no repentance. It is a greater God 
 that redeems than just blesses ; and to trust Him as 
 Saviour is therefore the greatest work possible to the 
 soul. The praise of men is greater than that of angels. 
 
 When we really close with the question, is there 
 more moral unreality in Justification than in any 
 contact of a holy God with guilty man ? If we 
 gauge it, that is a thing more startling than war. If 
 we are ever to be in any right relation to God, it 
 must now be amid our sin. We have behind us, the 
 race has behind it, a mass of sinful acts or experiences 
 which go to form the actual and concrete situation. 
 Yet we meet with God's mercy and answer it. 
 But if He thus come out to us and consent to touch 
 us, if such as we have access to a holy person at all, 
 
176 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 if we ever worship Him, it is touching Him with 
 our sinful personality. Is there not, on the critic's 
 hypothesis, a moral unreality there — in any friendly 
 contact of the Holy with the sinful ? Could the Holy 
 One simply forget His Holiness ? It would be for- 
 getting Himself. Could He forget our treatment of 
 it ? Can the past be undone and be as if it had 
 never been ? Impossible ! Unreal ! This is only 
 mentioned here to show that the difficulty in Justifi- 
 cation by faith is not a theological cobweb, but it 
 is the question of all religion in proportion as it is 
 seriously taken and morally. The mystery of Justi- 
 fication is the mystery of a holy God and the sinful 
 soul altogether, when that mystery is thoroughly 
 faced. And it is a mystery solved only by an atoning 
 redemption and the new creation in it. Exactly 
 how, how He can forgive fully and be absolutely 
 holy, that is the mystery of Atonement. It was 
 certainly not done in exchange for what Christ 
 brought ; for He came from Grace, He did not 
 procure it. If the first creation is a mystery the 
 second is a miracle. Religion has no existence 
 except as the answer to Revelation ; Christian 
 religion is the answer to Revelation as Redemption 
 and Regeneration. True and living religion is the 
 answer to true and creative Revelation, a Revela- 
 tion which makes us over again. But for Christianity 
 Revelation is holy love at issue with sin. It is 
 therefore holy Grace, when we come to the point 
 with Christ and His Cross. Real religion, there- 
 fore (if the real is the moral), is the answer to such 
 Grace. But the answer to Grace free and infinite is 
 neither character nor conduct (which would still be 
 
JUSTIFICATION AND JUDGMENT 177 
 
 achievement, and so would limit Grace) but it is faith 
 in Grace absolute. It is a man meeting and trusting 
 a gracious God for everything, for his very Atonement. 
 It was to create such faith that God gave Himself 
 in revelation, to make a new man, not to patch the 
 old. It was not to enlarge the old goodness but to 
 create a new type of goodness, and a higher — higher 
 because the second creation reflects a deeper interior 
 in God than the first did. If we come to our true 
 selves as we rise to our destiny in creation it is by our 
 response to this new creation. Behind and within 
 the first creation there was always the second as a 
 greater creation still, a greater thing in the way of 
 creation than the first. It is the new creation in faith 
 that gives us our truest selves, and makes us com- 
 pletely right with God's holiness, which was not 
 revealed in the first creation at all. We are only 
 really, finally, morally right only as God's Grace has 
 its way with us, as the immoral thing, sin, is judged, 
 doomed, and replaced by the moral thing, faith — 
 faith moralised by its holy object. The deeper 
 righteousness of God is revealed as we go on from 
 faith to faith, from natural faith to supernatural 
 and not simply as we rear by conduct and culture 
 the moral personality. It might perhaps obviate some 
 difiiculties if we were more exact in our language, 
 and spoke of Justification by Grace as regeneration, 
 and Justification by faith as conversion. 
 
 God's judgment-Grace to sin is His supreme 
 action as righteousness. He is never so true to His 
 Holy Self and law as in that Atonement. It may 
 indeed be for us the supreme problem. Like purging 
 
178 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 war we should never have expected it in His world. 
 It is the matter and miracle of His revelation, the 
 union in Grace of holy law and holy love, of holy 
 God and evil man. The precise mode of adjust- 
 ment, its ultimate moral inwardness, is something 
 He has reserved in His own hands to a large 
 extent. Yet so that He should be inquired of. 
 It is of the Holy Spirit that we make our theories 
 of Atonement. They are part of our worship of the 
 Act and Fact. They are another phase of the theo- 
 logy of miracle. They are our efforts to penetrate the 
 mystery on the note and the impulse He has given 
 in His revelation of reconciliation. But at least we 
 know that the deep divine relation to the world is 
 one of moral crisis rather than evolution. And 
 crisis is judgment. The crisis of the Cross is the 
 moral centre and principle of the world, the Act that 
 makes a new moral universe ; and the response to 
 it is our answer in kind to the last moral reality, 
 which underlies aU creation, all history, aU the 
 movements of men in nations, though they be as 
 terrible as the national crucifying of the Son of 
 God. 
 
 Faith is a life, and therefore a righteousness. 
 It is not merely an experience, nor a single act, 
 far less a forced act, but it is a life-act. That is, 
 it is an act, before all else, of the will and conscience 
 which make personality, with all the power and glory 
 of Christian love latent in it, and only possible 
 through it. It is a life in a direct union of trust 
 (and not fusion) with God as the God of holy love. 
 Truly the foundation of Christian ethic is love. But 
 it is God's love, not man's — God's holy grace, not 
 
JUSTIFICATION AND JUDGMENT 179 
 
 man's lovely romance. It is much more than human 
 desire, or sympathy, or passion. It does not rest 
 on man's love to man amiable or needy, and it 
 is not ruled by it ; but it rests on God's love 
 to whatever He loves most. And what He loves 
 most is not His prodigal, nor even His saint, 
 but His Son. He loves most the perfect and per- 
 petual reflection of His Holiness in His eternal 
 and delightsome Son, in whom His satisfaction is 
 eternal. * Not for your sakes do I this but for my 
 Holy Name, which ye have defiled.' God's love, 
 as distinct from man's, is holy, and it has therefore 
 a place and need for judgment as man's has not. 
 To deify man's love gives one religion, to trust God's 
 is another. And the latter is religion as revealed 
 and as Christian. It founds on the self-revelation of 
 the Holy Love acting and reacting amid sin. Its 
 prime concern, as revealed in the holy Cross, is 
 with blood-won righteousness in a world kingdom, 
 a kingdom of souls, a historic kingdom, whose 
 being is among the nations though its fulness 
 is in heaven. Heaven is its continuation and com- 
 pletion, it is not its contrast. God's Kingdom is not 
 of this world, but it is jot it. And God's love is His 
 love to man, but to sinjul man. It acts to evil man 
 in the only way in which the Holy could love him, 
 in the way of redeeming the race, through its history, 
 for that holiness, and by the way of that righteousness. 
 It is in that righteousness, historic and racial, that 
 every soul is saved. It is in the action of that moral 
 love in its blood. But if man is redeemed in that love, 
 by and for that historic righteousness, the historic form 
 of his Christian ethic corresponds to its fount. It is 
 
 N 2 
 
i8o THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 prescribed by the form taken by that holy love in 
 the historic redemption of the world. And that form, 
 while it is truly sacrifice, is not sacrifice only (which 
 may or may not be good) but also blessed judgment — 
 an offering and a sacrifice not alone for man but also 
 to righteousness, to glorify not man but God's holy 
 name in its severe and saving reaction on human 
 sin. Moreover, it took effect in a national crime, 
 the shirking of God's national call ; its action there- 
 fore cannot be irrelevant to national conduct and 
 destiny. It is set for public righteousness as for 
 personal faith ; and for public action, not negative 
 goodness. 
 
 Faith is therefore a life practically devoted above 
 all things to the righteousness of God, its New Creator 
 in Christ. But in Christ means in history. A 
 people with little or no historic consciousness cannot 
 grasp it. It is a life of love devoted not to kind- 
 ness alone but to righteousness, to righteousness 
 concrete and not abstract, historic and not ideal 
 nor remote. And it is devoted to a righteousness 
 already set up and not merely indicated ; and set 
 up by a national action amid the whole context of 
 the actual history of nations. Even Christ had 
 not to readjust the jarred nature of God, but 
 to secure His righteous Kingdom among men, 
 to satisfy God's fd^or/^-righteousness, and not His 
 internal righteousness, which never shook. Holy 
 Father and Holy Son were never severed. Faith 
 is thus the life-trust and active service, public no 
 less than private, of the world-righteousness of 
 the Kingdom, wherein is the salvation and safety 
 both of the soul and of society. But that gives the 
 
JUSTIFICATION AND JUDGMENT i8i 
 
 Church, as the trustee of that righteousness, a very- 
 vital interest not in benevolence only but in public 
 affairs, however indirect its action may be. There 
 is such a thing as national faith, whose form is not 
 creed but action. It will hardly be said that the 
 action of God's Kingdom among men is only in those 
 operations of love which when palliative we call 
 philanthropy or when extensive evangelisation, and 
 which are largely in the way of repair. It surely 
 does not fall outside those issues of positive righteous- 
 ness which are involved in the business and progress 
 of nations, in public policy for public righteousness, 
 and public movements for the New Humanity. 
 Faith is the soldier's loyalty to man's absolute King, 
 and not simply the nurse's obedience to the good 
 Physician. We trust and follow not simply the 
 priestly side of Christ in His sacrifice but His action 
 in His royal person. He did not come to give an 
 ideal of sacrifice, but He shrank from no sacrifice for 
 the holy and righteous purpose of God. He shrank 
 neither from making such sacrifice nor from imposing 
 the duty of it. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE JUDGMENT ON THE CROSS AND IN THE 
 FIELD 
 
 The drift of our plea has been this. Christianity, 
 especially on its ethical side, is regeneration. Regen- 
 eration is by a way of Justification. Justification 
 is righteousness by Grace. Grace is the merciful 
 act of the holy love facing defiant sin and not 
 responsive love. Being the great Act of the holy 
 love, it and its justification is the action of the 
 absolute righteousness, of the eternal and immutable 
 morality. And it deals with actual man at his 
 moral centre. It is God's historic treatment of the 
 sinful conscience, of the race as it historically is. It 
 is the greatest moral Act of Time and Eternity, the 
 most real and creative. The second creation is much 
 more creative than the first because it meets not a 
 material chaos but a moral crisis. Being so ethical 
 and so historic it has in it, therefore, the last moral 
 principle of history and human affairs. And its 
 revelation and principle in the historic Cross is the 
 focus of Christian ethic, especially on the public 
 scale, the national scale, which the Sermon does 
 not touch. 
 
 We take one step more. Within justification is 
 
 judgment. The ethical nature of the Cross, its moral 
 
 182 
 
THE JUDGMENT ON THE CROSS 183 
 
 normality and finality for life, does not turn only 
 on the moral psychology of the justification which 
 founds our new life ; it is pointed in the nature of 
 our redemption as its source — as effected in an 
 atoning act of loving and saving judgment. The 
 idea of judgment has gone out of the centre of our 
 Christian faith, and it is taking severe judgments 
 to bring it back. 
 
 The whole question is one of the type of religion 
 which we cherish as Christ's. It is the question 
 whether it be dominated at last by sympathy or by 
 righteousness, and whether exercised in a fraternal 
 group or in a world-Church founded on the moral 
 triumph of a world-Atonement. There is no doubt 
 that for the Christian public of the last half century 
 the type has undergone a great change — a change so 
 great as to involve a departure not only from a stiff 
 orthodoxy but from the New Testament norm. 
 The book is reduced from a charter to a classic. Ex- 
 perience and its edification have taken the place of 
 faith, its regeneration, and its confession. With 
 the abeyance of theological and objective religion, 
 and the prominence of a religion subjective, facile, 
 aesthetic, or pathetic, only not regenerative, the 
 ethical note has fallen out of piety, and especially 
 the junior piety ; or else it has been reduced 
 from being the very nerve and nature of our atoned 
 salvation to being a mere sequel of it, in the way 
 of conduct on humane or honest lines. And 
 the result is shown in an ethic of love which 
 has lost the supremacy of conscience in a union of 
 hearts, and the love of righteousness in the kindness 
 of compassion. That is to say, we have lost from 
 
1 84 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 our idea of reconciliation the moral note always 
 underlying it in the New Testament as a first charge, 
 and secured in the principles of justification and 
 judgment interior to it there (cf. 2 Cor. v. 19 and 21). 
 The idea and claim of the holy is not felt (just 
 as the notion of Grace had previously faded from 
 current conceptions of love, which was too senti- 
 mental to feel the weight or sting of sin). Chris- 
 tianity becomes a humanitarianism abetted by 
 Christ, and regardless theologically of holiness, his- 
 torically of nations, and ethically of public judgment. 
 But the holy love of God in the Grace of the Cross 
 is at once the public righteousness and the intimate 
 kindness of the world. His kindness is dearer than 
 His righteousness, but it is His righteousness we 
 worship. The one we praise, the other we adore. 
 Both are in His holy and eternal Love. 
 
 But no religion can conquer, it cannot even last, 
 unless it openly hallow the holy name, and give 
 practical effect in its love, amid whatever suffering, 
 to the public righteousness of God the Saviour. 
 It must also give it concrete effect among men in 
 nations and not simply in crowds. The religion 
 of love holy and incarnate must be the religion of 
 God's intrinsic righteousness in a historic way. 
 But this is not possible for us sinners without the 
 moral action of justification by the Grace of the 
 Holy. Nor is that again possible without the 
 action and the satisfaction of love's holy judg- 
 ment in the manner of our justification. For 
 the average Christian mind love and judgment are 
 contraries ; and the action of love is to provide 
 an escape from judgment. But that is not the 
 
THE JUDGMENT ON THE CROSS 185 
 
 Christian revelation at all. It is fatal to it. It 
 is immoral. It is not God's account of His love 
 in the only place where He reveals it — in the Bible, 
 in Christ, in the Cross. Whom He loves He chastens. 
 The love of the Father to the soul is sure ; but it 
 was exercised in judgment, and in national judgment. 
 This national feature in the redemption marks off 
 Christianity very sharply from the other great 
 religion of redemption, Buddhism — and from all its 
 mystic dilutions. It took that national form in 
 connection with Christ's historic work for the con- 
 science of the world. The love of God could not, 
 even in the case of His beloved Son, in whom He was 
 always well pleased, be severed from the public wrath 
 of God. Not only did it fall on Christ, but Christ 
 also, by His manner of bearing it, became the agent 
 and mandatory of its blessed descent on the world of 
 peoples. All judgment of the world was committed 
 to the Son Who endured the judgment for the world 
 of men and nations. If Christ is the Grand Exemplar 
 of love, it was a love which both took judgment and 
 inflicted it. The anger of God as the anger of love 
 is without hate. And this love we must show forth 
 as occasion and duty call. In His name we may 
 have to punish, but without hating. As the historic 
 servants of Christ and His Kingdom we carry out 
 the divine judgment ; and a collective nation can 
 become the whip of small cords dutifully to scourge 
 the instruments of unrighteousness. The just anger 
 of a nation is the nearest thing we know to the 
 wrath of God. It is an ignoble thing for any Christian 
 nation to take the rape of Belgium with superior 
 indifference, or pious detachment. 
 
 N3 
 
1 86 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 There are notions of love and reconciliation 
 which are amiably immoral in their public effect 
 because they are non-historic, and therefore non- 
 moral, in their theology, because they have no place 
 for the exercise of judgment, private or public, in 
 that Cross of Christ whose Reconciliation is the moral 
 principle and living norm of the New Humanity and 
 its history. Christian love grows not out of religious 
 instinct but out of positive Christian faith. The 
 quality of the one is prescribed by the other. And 
 justifying faith, with all its implicates, is not a 
 surrogate for righteousness, it is righteousness. It 
 is the supreme form of righteousness on a world scale 
 and at a soul's depths. It is our relation to holy 
 love in a central, personal, creative way, and not in a 
 mere legal, levitical, theocratic way ; not in the way 
 of precept, but of moral vitality, of fellowship with 
 the Holy, of a community of goodness. Rectitude 
 rises above correctitude, moral sympathy above 
 moral compliance. The new commandment does 
 not require but inspire. Inspiration is the mode of 
 injunction from the holy. But the holy is in standing 
 reaction and judgment, that often outbreaks, on the 
 wickedness of the world, on the world's repudiation 
 of conscience and humanity. And that judgment 
 is not translunary, and not subliminal, but it is 
 historic, were it but by the very place and nature 
 of the Cross. And men are its servants and agents 
 as they are men of faith, and as the holy life abides 
 in them to will and to do. They are its servants 
 and agents according to the crisis of the hour and the 
 call of occasion. If men and nations are not agents of 
 the judgments of God then He just ignores them ; or 
 
THE JUDGMENT ON THE CROSS 187 
 
 He uses them only in the region of the sympathetic. 
 This is a view which leaves out His saving providence 
 with peoples, atheises the State, and condemns us 
 but to a cloistered ethic, a stunted conscience, and 
 a demoralising regard for mere life, success, comfort, 
 and happiness. All these may masque in religious 
 guise, in types of piety which turn the bones to 
 water, and make lymph of the blood of Christ. 
 
 The starting point in our whole Christian con- 
 ception of God is His holiness, the holiness of His 
 love. The revelation of it was historic and national. 
 And the historic and social form of that unsparing 
 holy love is righteousness. We are saved; men and 
 peoples, as we enter on that righteousness ; and this 
 we do by a faith which is really a union with Him, 
 the Faithful to death. This union is not mystic 
 and rapt chiefly, but moral, a union not with His 
 static person but with His dynamic work and His 
 soul outpoured. What Christ did with humanity 
 was not simply to maintain a spotless life in its 
 midst, but to achieve, amid extreme judgment, and 
 under national conditions, a universal moral con- 
 quest and a racial Redemption. He unsinned 
 humanity in His own moral victory in a national 
 issue ; which victory was so constant, so universal? 
 and so final that He became the Conscience of 
 the race and its moral Providence. The process 
 and progress of the Kingdom of God in history 
 only unfolds this final achievement of His universal 
 person. This ethical victory was His consecration 
 of humanity ; which was not simply a touch or a 
 mark set on it, nor effected simply by His having 
 
1 88 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 * tabernacled ' with us, but by a divine life of voca- 
 tion achieved in a fulness of moral power at a 
 centre of committal to Eternal Life in the midst of 
 Time. In escaping from Christologies merely Chal- 
 cedonian and static we moralise theology, and carry 
 Christ into the actual life and righteousness of the 
 race. The Incarnation was not His deep and quiet 
 habitation of human nature, as a precious chalice 
 might be filled with priceless wine, but an active 
 moral conquest of history, under conditions the most 
 extreme of antagonism from evil, and especially 
 national evil. There is no compromise between 
 holiness and evil. One must destroy the other. 
 And in the moral energy of Christ in His miracle 
 of Grace, the attempted destruction of holiness 
 by sin was turned to the death of sin by holiness. 
 The judgment inflicted on Christ falling on His 
 holiness, underwent a spiritual change that makes 
 Him, in virtue of that victory, the judge of the 
 old world and the principle of the new. And as 
 in His blood he obediently met the worst that 
 evil could do in antagonism, so the society whose 
 life He is must also do. Its history works out in 
 extenso what He effected in fetto. As He judged 
 His judges unto holiness in the central and national 
 crisis of the world-righteousness, so His living action 
 in the warfare and spread of the historic Kingdom 
 among the nations must go. Christ's moral con- 
 quest was crucial and racial ; and human history 
 now transpires in Him ; Whose prolonged presence 
 acts not only in the circles that confess Him but in 
 the judgment on those who do not. He is the ruling 
 providence in great affairs, and the principle for 
 
THE JUDGMENT ON THE CROSS 189 
 
 all who would master them for His Name and 
 Kingdom. He is still the chief of the Great Powers, 
 whenever (as now) it is an issue of world-righteous- 
 ness. Man is not a mass but a mosaic of nations 
 destined to be members of each other. Men in 
 nations must serve the Kingdom, and not merely as 
 individuals, groups, or Churches ; for a nation has 
 a personality of its own. Human history, the 
 history of peoples, transpires within Redemption. 
 It is slowly bent into the history and evolution of 
 God's forgiveness of man by judgment which makes 
 it a new creature. The New Humanity comes by 
 the loving and saving judgments of God in the 
 world. History, thus read, thus made, is the pas- 
 sion of Christ writ large. It is salvation by blood. 
 It is the salvation of warring man because it is 
 the salvation of righteousness in blood, and the 
 establishment of holiness in judgment. Mankind's 
 acquirement of its soul is Christ's moral and 
 bloody victory worked into detail. His Justice made 
 to triumph, and sin made to yield its opposite. We 
 have indeed no more wars of religion, but still war 
 may be made religious, a duty to God, and an agent 
 of His Kingdom. Greater and more fertile than the 
 martyr State is the State as judge if the Cross of 
 Christ was more of a holy judgment than a saint's 
 martyrdom. His destruction of evil is, in the same 
 act, the infusion of holy life, and a new future, on 
 the wreck of Satan's kingdom. He is crucified 
 to the world's end, said Pascal, and to the 
 end the Atonement is worked out in history, 
 as it was at the first, by judgment in an issue 
 of world-righteousness ; and of this judgment the 
 
190 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 righteous man or nation is made, as the Christ in 
 history was made, the agent and executor, to the 
 hallowing of the New Mankind. So the very 
 catastrophe of war is subdued and enlisted in the 
 function and service of the blood of Christ for the 
 Kingdom and its righteousness. The great ethic 
 is there — for war as for all else. Unless, as I 
 have said. He is only with the ambulance and not 
 in the trench, acting only in the Church and not in 
 the Cabinet, only among the worshippers and not 
 in the warriors at all, not parting the sheep and the 
 goats on the battle edge where a nation administers 
 His saving justice. 
 
 The 'wickedness' of our share in a war like the 
 present for humanity and a world-righteousness 
 is really a huge step for the moralising of politics, 
 and for the religionising of international relations. 
 
 God in Christ came forth in sacrifice and blood 
 for righteousness' sake. He came to magnify His 
 holy name in a propitiation through judgment that 
 created the new man. To trust this eternal Act of 
 love, and make it the principle of our life's whole 
 carriage, is faith. If we are more than moral neo- 
 phytes we are committed to resist unto blood, our 
 own or another's, striving against world-sin in its great 
 and deadly forms, and in a real and concrete way. 
 We can hope for a new moral world only in this 
 moral and faithful way. Such a world is already 
 constituted in the blood of Christ, which is the seed 
 of the New Creation, and the principle of the new 
 conduct. We must carry forward His creation of 
 such a new world at His cost (for He did not thus 
 
THE JUDGMENT ON THE CROSS 191 
 
 war merely to affect a few select souls). We are 
 regenerated in the regeneration of tlie race ; and it 
 is by those principles which are not merely martyr, 
 passive, and pious, but active, warlike and redemptive 
 whenever the great trump calls to a world- judgment 
 as it now does. A full Christian faith is the trust 
 and service of holy love acting as righteousness in a 
 historic Kingdom ; that is, acting at call under public 
 and historic conditions, and not alone under the con- 
 ditions of a personal pathos of pity, sympathy, 
 fraternity, or the like. In this moral and fundamental 
 regeneration our own past sin, private or public, 
 cannot be allowed to arrest the duty and service of 
 the present hour for the new and Christian humanity 
 in its crisis of life and death. If ever we have been 
 seduced, in the days of our ignorance, into doing any- 
 where what it is now Germany's policy and principle 
 to do in its thorough way by * absolute war ' against 
 mankind, that is no reason why, with our eyes 
 mercifully opened, we should not start back on the 
 edge of the abyss and help to stop the career of those 
 who still rush to destruction. We have outgrown 
 our Elizabethan buccaneering, our Cromwellian * paci- 
 fications,' our Palmerstonian dictation. In Gladstone 
 we sloughed off our Bismarck. In the last century 
 we have gone through a political regeneration in 
 this respect, which is shown, above all, in our 
 treatment of India and of South Africa. But 
 * the world will not believe a man repents,' far less 
 a people. Yet if we had shirked this war we should 
 have surrendered the claim to be a Christian nation. 
 A Christian nation is not one that carries out the 
 precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, which never 
 
192 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 contemplated a nation, and would make a nation 
 impossible. For a nation is not a magnified indi- 
 vidual, and therefore cannot be the subject of such 
 conduct as the Sermon enjoins. For Christianity 
 love is, of course, the supreme principle, but in 
 public relations love takes the form of mutual 
 respect, of law, justice, liberty, and even help — 
 especially to the weak. It does not take the form 
 of affectionate feeling, or more than goodwill. Love 
 in the emotional sense is impossible toward masses of 
 people we never see, and to vamp it up as feeling 
 reduces religion to hypocrisy. A Christian nation 
 is one that grows in the power of owning its place 
 and duty in the Kingdom of God as the Cross set 
 it up ; one which honours His righteousness 
 especially where He most revealed it, in the greatest 
 national issue ever raised — in the saving judgment of 
 the Cross ; one which does not shrink from being the 
 agent of His purpose and judgment in the world 
 of nations, for the New Humanity, and in defence 
 of right, freedom, and mercy from a people's atheist 
 and imperial ego-mania ; and one which desires 
 and promotes for all men that fulness of life and 
 liberty which is God's gift to all. A nation is 
 Christian according as the State comes to be 
 served for the sake of the world-Kingdom of God, 
 and in concern for the weak, individuals or peoples. 
 These have most to suffer from force, egoism, inso- 
 lence, and cruelty, and the fanatic of peace would 
 leave them to it all.^ 
 
 ^ While writing the above, I met these words from a defender 
 of the conscientious objectors : 
 
 ' We ought to remember that it is we who have made these 
 men conscientious objectors. It is our insistence upon the 
 
THE JUDGMENT ON THE CROSS 193 
 
 At the present hour we can hardly think of the 
 great war except as disaster and suffering on a scale 
 which evokes all the pathetic and consolatory side 
 of a religion matchless in its resources of that kind. 
 
 authority of the teaching of Jesus which has made them feel — 
 rightly or wrongly — that in loyalty to their Master they cannot 
 take any part in military affairs.' 
 
 On which I remark, first, that Christianity is not chiefly loyalty 
 to a Master but life in a Redeemer, i.e. life on the principle of His 
 Redemption, i.e. in the Holy Spirit. Second, I note that if we 
 have been insisting on the supreme authority of the teaching of 
 Jesus we cannot be surprised that our pupils turn Quakers. But 
 as Evangelical Christians we ought not so to insist. We have 
 been rearing our neophytes wrong. The teaching of Jesus is 
 not the foundation of Christian ethic but is to be interpreted by 
 that which is — namely the Redemption of the Cross as the 
 moral crisis of the world and the creator of the new conscience 
 in historic conditions. Our present confusion is the debacle of 
 the didactic or epideictic theory of Christ's work, the view that 
 treats even the Cross as but the supreme object-lesson and most im- 
 pressive display of the love of God. When the idea of holy love's 
 saving, atoning judgment in Christ's blood has gone out of the 
 centre of Christian ethic it takes severe judgments to bring it back. 
 
 The passage I criticise went on : 
 
 ' I am not myself a conscientious objector, but I am 
 absolutely convinced that the men who at such cost to them- 
 selves are fighting English militarism at home are, at any rate, 
 doing as much for their country as the men who are heroically 
 fighting Prussian militarism in the trenches of Flanders. Some 
 day, when war is over, and we recover our lost ideals, we shall re- 
 pent of our silence.' The moral perspective of values is startling. 
 
 This is equivalent to saying that the worship of conscience 
 (and individual conscience) is doing as much for the world 
 as the worship of righteousness (and public righteousness) — 
 which is subjectivism of a very dangerous kind, and one for 
 which the Spirit of the Age provides many victims. If we do 
 not take as much pains that our conscience is true, the pains we 
 take to be true to our conscience are wasted — as a sad amount 
 of martyrdom is, especially in the young, whose unschooled 
 views should lead them to be content with protest and not go 
 on to rebellion. It is more important for the public that con- 
 science should be sound than even that it should be free. To 
 be true to conscience is a great thing ; it is not easy. And it 
 gives scope for a good deal of courage of the dogged kind. But 
 it is not so hard nor so fruitful as to get the conscience true to 
 its pole. Some might be advised to go into dock long enough 
 to have their compass adjusted if they are to avoid shipwreck 
 from steering by it. 
 
194 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 But the same religion carries us farther still. It 
 carries us higher and deeper still. It puts us on the 
 issue of a world-righteousness and a Kingdom of God. 
 I do not here mean that in the reflective it stirs inquiry 
 about the righteousness of God in permitting such 
 a thing to be. No doubt there are many who are 
 speculating, with Job, about the theodicy of the 
 matter, and doing so, like him, as no mere speculators. 
 But possibly question of that kind will come more 
 freely when the practical exigencies of the situation 
 have been met. And the practical urgency is not 
 merely. How shall we win ? It has more to do 
 with a world-righteousness than that. What stirs 
 us, braces us, and sets our face most is, How 
 shall we, in the actual situation, secure anything 
 like a world-righteousness, morally divine in sanction, 
 human in compass, and humane in kind, upon earth ? 
 That is what is challenged and threatened by the 
 self-idolatry of a Force State which owns no moral 
 allegiance. That, and no mere victory of a nation or 
 imperialism of a race, is now the issue. It is a 
 world issue of righteousness, put to us in a national 
 conflict unto blood — as Christianity was at the first. 
 How for the future are we to secure anything like 
 a Kingdom of God on earth ? How paralyse its 
 supreme enemy for the hour ? 
 
 But once this matter of urgent righteousness is 
 settled we shall be carried into regions of question 
 where no few are already engaged, and also in con- 
 nection with the righteousness of God. With the 
 Kingdom of God nearer at hand we shall repent. 
 Having in a measure secured the peace of the future 
 the conscience will turn to the principle of the past. 
 
THE JUDGMENT ON THE CROSS 195 
 
 And it will ask God, not with a challenge to Him, 
 
 * How could you ? ' but, with misgiving for man, 
 
 * Why must you ? ' It will not be a question of 
 theodicy but of judgment. The victor will have 
 suffered little less than the vanquished ; and, if he 
 has any belief in moral causation in human affairs, 
 he will turn to ask what it was, common to both, 
 that incurred such common chastisement. For this 
 is not a mere earthquake due to physical causes 
 alone. More and more the moral horror of such a 
 war will come home to those who are not past feeling, 
 after the energy of waging it, and the flush of victory. 
 But there will also come a moral exaltation in 
 the great thing done. And then will be the time 
 to urge that our horror of the convulsion is a 
 mere reflection and index of God's horror of the 
 sin in the civilisation which it chastens. We shall 
 feel that the wonder is not that such things come, 
 but that they should be so long in coming upon 
 a society which so successfully forgets and ignores 
 God. When Christ in Gethsemane sank and quailed 
 it was not simply at death and suffering ; it was 
 with the horror of His insight into the sin as God 
 saw it, and into the judgment of God upon the 
 crime that inflicted the Cross. If they do these 
 things on a green tree what will be done on a dry ? 
 If they treat me so who am Israel's green tree of life 
 what will God do to an Israel sere and dead ? He 
 foresaw the year 70. So also those who are now 
 moved to such issues as held Christ find behind the 
 horror of death, suffering, and cruelty, the horror of 
 wickedness and of judgment, not upon the aggressor 
 alone but on the whole civilisation he represents 
 
196 THE CHRISTIAN ETHIC OF WAR 
 
 in his too too thorough way. And the people may 
 be led, in the coming and calmer days, to see be- 
 hind the horror of judgment the greater moral 
 horror of the sin whose correction the judgment is. 
 We may gauge our tremendous old prosperity as it 
 always appears before Him whom it always hides. 
 This is a grief and a wound that wrings the soul of 
 many a non-combatant whose limbs are safe while 
 his nights are prayer. And it forms his contribution 
 to the general sense of the solemnity of the situa- 
 tion, and the general pain and care. Christ suffered 
 more than those He cured. A pain which is less 
 poignant may be more crushing. And the penitents 
 of the race are not among its ineiffectives. Its con- 
 fessors rank with its martyrs. Its intercessors are 
 among the great Soldiers of the Kingdom. 
 
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