In fine, Dean Welldon, one of the most energetic spokesmen of the Church
of England, addressed this Free Church Council, and imparted an element
of originality. He used the inconclusive and dangerous argument of _tu
quoque_. If, he said, you claim that this war exhibits the failure of
Christianity, you must admit that it shows equally the failure of
science and civilisation. Nay, he says, growing bolder, if your
contention is true, Christianity has done no more than supply the
instrument of its own destruction, but science and civilisation have
brought us back to savagery.

It is, of course, difficult to follow a man's rounded thought in the
crabbed phrases of an abbreviating reporter, but it is plain that Dean
Welldon has here been guilty of a confusion which only betrays his
apologetic poverty in face of this great crisis. Science--and it is
especially science that the clergy conceive as the rival they have to
discredit--has no concern whatever with the war. Science, either as an
organised body of teachers or as a branch of culture, has never
discussed war, and never had the faintest duty or opportunity to do so.
Economic science may discuss particular aspects of war, but the
economist deals with things as they are, not as they ought to be. Moral
science even is not a preaching agency, desirous of dividing with the
clergy the ethical guidance of the people. When men pit science against
religion, they usually refer to its superior power of explaining
reality. And if it be objected that therefore no morally educative
agency would remain if religion were discarded, the answer is simple. A
system of moral idealism founded on science--it is absurd to call it
science--does exist, and might at any time be enlarged to the
proportions of a national or international educative agency. As yet it
is left to individual cultivation or crystallised in a few tiny
associations, such as Ethical and Secularist and, partly, Socialist