Aurelius and Antoninus Pius--to speak of warriors and statesmen--were
Pagans. The truth is that a glory in war for its own sake was no more
generally characteristic of Paganism than it was of Christian Europe
until a century ago: it was probably less. Most of the German Emperors
and of the Kings of England, France, and Spain would fairly come under
the description which Mr. Guttery calls Pagan. One hardly needs to know
much of history to perceive that this moral improvement in the
conception of war belongs to the last century and a half, and it is
somewhat bold to claim that a change which made no appearance during a
thousand years of profound Christian influence, and did begin to appear
and make progress as that faith waned, can be claimed for Christianity.
I do not forget that the theologian began long ago, in the seclusion of
his cell or study, to condemn offensive warfare. But there have been
hundreds of offensive wars waged by Christian monarchs since that date,
and we do not read of any instance in which the clergy failed to endorse
the thin casuistry by which the offensive was turned into a defensive or
a preventive war, or refused to sanction an entire neglect of the
principle.

Dr. Scott-Lidgett followed on somewhat similar lines. The whole trouble,
he protested, was due to an anti-Christian, illiberal, and inhuman
system. It seems that he was referring to Prussia, and it is regrettable
that he did not feel called to explain why that system prevails in the
year of the Lord 1915, or how it finds an instrument of its ambition in
a militarism that ought to have been denounced and abolished centuries
ago. Mr. Shakespeare, another distinguished Nonconformist, follows the
same facile course--casts all the responsibility on Germany--and equally
fails to explain how Germany came to find the machinery of destruction
at its hand in our age.