Church in our great and promising Commonwealth is not clear. In the
course of this important sermon, in which he is delivering his very
personal and mature conclusions on the greatest issue of the hour, the
Archbishop observed that "the Roman Empire had been attacked by Attila"
and "Attila scourged the Romans for the crimes of which they had for a
long while been guilty." One is surprised that he did not add the pretty
legend of the awe-stricken Hun retreating before the majestic figure of
Pope Leo I. However, most of us are aware that, as a student in any
college of Australia ought to be able to inform the Archbishop, Attila
never reached within two hundred miles of Rome, and that the Pagan
Romans, whom the Archbishop obviously has in mind, had been extinguished
long before the monarch of the Huns was born. There is no greater
historical scholarship in the other proofs which the prelate brings in
support of his thesis that war is often deliberately sent as a
punishment.

But what are we to make of the moral standards of an eminent prelate of
the Roman Church who can hold and express so appalling a theory? It is
based on the moral standard of the Prussian officer, of the medieval
torturer. The majority of clergymen have at length come to realise,
tardily and reluctantly, that the man or woman who rejects the creeds
they offer may quite possibly not believe in them. The practice of
describing a refusal to assent to the doctrine of hell and heaven as a
wilful rebellion of passion against the restraining influences of
Christianity is going out of fashion. Christian people were meeting too
many heretics in the flesh, and did not recognise the thing described
from the pulpit. The sturdy Archbishop will have none of this pampering.
Unbelief is a matter of the will as well as the understanding. And he
actually believes that God guided the thoughts of William II in
engineering this war--believes it for a reason a hundred times worse