Page:War and the Christian Faith.pdf/14

10 more true by the drowning of a hundred men or a million men.

As to the task of justifying the ways of God to men, of showing by human analogies that apparent ferocious, undeserved cruelty may be sweet mercy: that were indeed, the task for a high theologian. I do not think that the problem should be very difficult for the orthodox Christian. For he, by the very definition of his belief, grounds all his faith on the fact of the most infamous and hideous act of cruelty and injustice, pursued to the very death, that the world has ever seen. The Christian religion is founded on a certain undeserved punishment, on the story of the Grand Master who was foully and unjustly killed by the rebellious craftsmen: it will not be strange, then, to Christians if the lower grades share the calamity of the