Page:Cecil John Cadoux - The Early Christian Attitude to War.pdf/13

Rh hope into the belief in the swift possibility of great moral change and spiritual advance, is one sanctioned by modern thought, and provides again that atmosphere of expectation and faith in which alone great adventures can be made; he has preferred to keep the whole subject free from any such entanglement. But he has shown how an uncritical view of the Old Testament revelation tended to embarrass and corrupt the pure Christian instinct on the subject of war. This view, save for one or two recent examples of adoption for war emergencies, has now almost totally disappeared; and since a humaner belief concerning God's methods of purgation in another world is demanded by the enlightened conscience, we are left with that first Christian instinct about war only further supported by modern belief; and this, it should be noted, without reducing God’s love to mere leniency and sentimentality. God has His ways of punishing, but they are as different from man’s as the heavens are higher than the earth; and where man’s most conspicuously fail, there is ground for hope that God's will in the end succeed.

The only real objection which can be urged against the revival of the early Christian attitude is that Christianity has accepted the State, and that this carries with it the necessity for coercive discipline within and the waging of war without; in which disagreeable duties Christians must as citizens take their part. To refuse this will expose civilization to disaster. It may perhaps serve to provoke reflection to notice in passing that this was the argument of Celsus and is the general attitude which determines Gerran thought on this subject. The truth is that the way of war, if persisted in, is going to destroy civilization anyhow, and the continual demand