Page:The War and the Churches.djvu/79

Rh characteristic of the whole body; they ask us to apply a different standard to their own body. Plato and Socrates were Pagans; Marcus Aurelius and Antoninus Pius—to speak of warriors and statesmen—were Pagans. The truth is that a glory in war for its own sake was no more generally characteristic of Paganism than it was of Christian Europe until a century ago: it was probably less. Most of the German Emperors and of the Kings of England, France, and Spain would fairly come under the description which Mr. Guttery calls Pagan. One hardly needs to know much of history to perceive that this moral improvement in the conception of war belongs to the last century and a half, and it is somewhat bold to claim that a change which made no appearance during a thousand years of profound Christian influence, and did begin to appear and make progress as that faith waned, can be claimed for Christianity. I do not forget that the theologian began long ago, in the seclusion of his cell or study, to condemn offensive warfare. But there have been hundreds of offensive wars waged by Christian monarchs since that date, and we do not read of any instance in which the clergy failed to endorse the thin casuistry by which the offensive was turned into a defensive or a preventive war, or refused to sanction an entire neglect of the principle.

Dr. Scott-Lidgett followed on somewhat similar lines. The whole trouble, he protested, was due to an anti-Christian, illiberal, and inhuman system. It seems that he was referring to Prussia, and it is regrettable that he did not feel called to explain why that system prevails in the year of the Lord 1915, or how it finds an instrument of its ambition in a militarism that ought to have been denounced and abolished