Page:The War and the Churches.djvu/93

Rh make it impossible for one to understand how non-Christians can say, as they do sometimes, that if they were to accept a creed, it would be the Roman creed.

Any theory of the war which proceeds on the lines of the hell-theory is simply barbaric, and is beneath serious discussion. We know to-day that both ethics and religion are in a state of constant evolution. We look back over a stream of several thousand years of historically traceable development; we follow that stream faintly through earlier tens of thousands of years in the ideas of primitive peoples; and we see the evolution going on plainly in the creeds and ethical codes of our own time. But the practice of registering certain stages of this evolution in sacred books or codes, which are then imposed on man for centuries or millennia as something unalterable, has been and is a very serious hindrance to development, both in ethics and religion. It is all the worse because these codes and sacred books always contain certain elements which belong to even earlier and less enlightened stages, and whole regiments of philosophers or theologians are employed for ages in putting glosses on ancient and barbaric ideas at which the world 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