and independent enough to make the claim. It is of the Churches we ask
why this appalling system has taken such deep root in the life of Europe
that it resists the most devoted efforts to eradicate it. It is not
_this_ war, but war, that accuses the Churches. We are entangled in a
system so widespread and so subtle that, when a war occurs, each nation
can persuade itself that it is acting on just grounds. It is the system
which interests us.




CHAPTER II

CHRISTIANITY AND WAR


The day will come when the student of human development will find war
one of the most remarkable institutions that ever entered and quitted
history. Civilisation took it over from barbarism; barbarism from the
savage; the savage from the beast. So we are accustomed to argue, but we
must make a singular reservation. The lowest peoples of the human
family, which seem to represent primitive man, do not wage war, and are
little addicted to violence. They seem by some process of natural
selection to have obtained the social quality of peacefulness and mutual
aid. There was, in a sense, a stage of primitive innocence. As, however,
these primitive peoples grew in numbers and were organised in tribes, as
they obtained collective possessions--flocks and pastures and hunting
grounds--they came into collision with each other, and all the old
pugnacity of the beast awoke. Skill, and even ferocity, in war became a
valuable social quality, and we get the stage of the savage. The