will, the demand, that is wanting. For that lack we charge the utter
failure of the Churches during the ages of their power to enunciate a
plain moral lesson, and their positive encouragement of an evil system.
That is the real indictment. It affects the Christian Church in every
nation.




CHAPTER III

THE APOLOGIES OF THE CLERGY


Any person who cares to read the reports of the utterances of our clergy
in the current religious periodicals will recognise that they are
painfully conscious of the reproach which this war implies. One
constantly finds them repeating that in this year of tragedy
"Christianity has failed" and "the gospel has broken in our hands." It
had been their boast that Christianity had civilised Europe, and none of
them has the audacity or indecency to claim, as some writers have done,
that such a war is in harmony with the principles and ideals of
civilisation. They have preached brotherhood and peace, and the greater
part of Christendom is engaged in a strife of the most terrible nature.
It is not a struggle of Christian and infidel; it is a struggle of
Christian and Christian, and one or several of the Christian nations
involved are guilty of a crime greater in magnitude than all the murders
in Europe during a decade. Above all patriotism, above all immediate
anxiety, above all argumentation about responsibility, this grim fact
stands out and reproaches them: after fifteen hundred years of Christian