eventually laughs. However, we need not linger here over these ancient
ways of regarding life. The man who keeps his God at a moral level which
we disdain ourselves rarely listens to argument. He protects his "faith"
by believing that it is a mortal sin (involving sentence of hell) to
read any book that would examine it critically. It is a most ingenious
arrangement by which the doctrine of a vindictive God protects itself
against moral progress.

Now any suggestion that God sent this war upon Europe--whether as a
judgment on the clergy, or a judgment on unbelievers, or a judgment on
the arrogance of the Germans, etc.--is part of this old barbarism, and
may be disregarded. It conceives that God is vindictive, and at the same
time assures us that Christianity sternly condemns vindictiveness. It
allows God to deal mighty blows at those who affront him, and tells men
to bear affront with patience and turn the other cheek to the smiter. It
is simply part of that mixture and confusion of old and new ideas which
a codified religion always exhibits. We pass it by, and turn to more
serious considerations. I pass by also eccentric ideas of Deity like
those of Sir Oliver Lodge or Mr. G. B. Shaw--two oracles who have been
singularly silent on the religious aspect of the war. Let us examine the
main religious problem as broadly and as honestly as we can.

The first and chief reflection that occurs to any man who does thus
seriously examine the relation of the war to theism is that, after all,
it is not so easy to disentangle theology from the crude old doctrines
which our more liberal divines think they have abandoned. They tell us
that they do not believe in a vindictive Deity, they disdain the
doctrine of eternal punishment, they smile at many of the Judaic
conceptions of Jehovah in the Old Testament. God is the all-holy and
benevolent ruler of the universe. They refuse to believe that the souls