that they hate not only their enemies but everyone who does not
share their hatred, and that they want to fight and to force
other people to fight. They have turned their churches into
recruiting stations and their vestries into munition workshops.
But it has never occurred to them to take off their black coats
and say quite simply, "I find in the hour of trial that the
Sermon on the Mount is tosh, and that I am not a Christian. I
apologize for all the unpatriotic nonsense I have been preaching
all these years. Have the goodness to give me a revolver and a
commission in a regiment which has for its chaplain a priest of
the god Mars: my God." Not a bit of it. They have stuck to their
livings and served Mars in the name of Christ, to the scandal of
all religious mankind. When the Archbishop of York behaved like a
gentleman and the Head Master of Eton preached a Christian
sermon, and were reviled by the rabble, the Martian parsons
encouraged the rabble. For this they made no apologies or
excuses, good or bad. They simple indulged their passions, just
as they had always indulged their class prejudices and commercial
interests, without troubling themselves for a moment as to
whether they were Christians or not. They did not protest even
when a body calling itself the AntiGerman League (not having
noticed, apparently, that it had been anticipated by the British
Empire, the French Republic, and the Kingdoms of Italy, Japan,
and Serbia) actually succeeded in closing a church at Forest Hill
in which God was worshipped in the German language. One would
have supposed that this grotesque outrage on the commonest
decencies of religion would have provoked a remonstrance from
even the worldliest bench of bishops. But no: apparently it
seemed to the bishops as natural that the House of God should be
looted when He allowed German to be spoken in it as that a