of the English clergy was so extreme that writers in the dignified
monthly reviews felt moved to protest against it. When the pastors of
Switzerland issued a collective protest against cruelties to women and
children in the South African concentration-camps, it was the Right
Reverend Bishop of Winchester who was brought forward to make reply.
Nowadays all England is reading Bernhardi, and shuddering at Prussian
glorification of war; but no one mentions Bishop Welldon of Calcutta,
who advocated the Boer war as a means of keeping the nation "virile";
nor Archbishop Alexander, who said that it was God's way of making
"noble natures".

The British God had other ways of improving nations--for example, the
opium traffic. The British traders had been raising the poppy in India
and selling its juice to the Chinese. They had made perhaps a hundred
million "noble natures" by this method; and also they were making a
hundred million dollars a year. The Chinese, moved by their new
"virility," undertook to destroy some opium, and to stop the traffic;
whereupon it was necessary to use British battle-ships to punish and
subdue them. Was there any difficulty in persuading the established
church of Jesus to bless this holy war? There was not! Lord
Shaftesbury, himself the most devout of Anglicans, commented with
horror upon the attitude of the clergy, and wrote in his diary:

I rejoice that this cruel and debasing opium war is
terminated. We have triumphed in one of the most lawless,
unnecessary, and unfair struggles in the records of history;
and Christians have shed more heathen blood in two years,
than the heathens have shed of Christian blood in two
centuries.