But the religious interest of the war is by no means exhausted when we
have concluded that it marks, in one of the most important departments
of human action, the complete failure of historical Christianity. My
purpose is to discuss this relation to the Churches, and it would not be
completed unless I considered the war in relation to their fundamental
doctrine, the moral government of the universe by a Supreme Being. In a
few months, we hope, the war will be over: the Allies will have
triumphed. We know, from experience and from history, what will follow
in the Churches. From end to end of Britain, from Dover to Penzance and
from Southampton to Aberdeen, there will rise a jubilant cry that God
has blessed our arms and awarded us the victory. Now that we are in the
midst of the horrors and burdens of the war God is little mentioned. One
would imagine that the great majority of the clergy conceived him as
standing aside, for some inscrutable reason, and letting wicked men
deploy their perverse forces. When the triumph comes, gilding the past
sacrifices or driving them from memory, God will be on every lip. The
whole nation will be implored to come and kneel before the altars.
Royalty and nobility and military, judges and stockbrokers and working
men--above all, a surging, thrilling, ecstatic mass of women--will
gather round the clergy, and will avow that they see the finger of God
in this glorious consummation. The relation of the war to God will then
become the supreme consideration for the Christian mind. It may be more
instructive to consider it now, before the last flood of emotion pours
over our judgments.

I have already discussed some of the clerical allusions to the share of
God in the war. They are so frankly repellent that one cannot be
surprised that the majority of the clergy prefer to be silent on that
point. They prefer to await the victory and build on its more genial and