Religion and the War. Yale University. Divinity School
accomplished without it. All its moral evil at any rate will be regrettable forever. And the only possible way of guaranteeing beforehand greater good than evil as an outcome of the war, even supposing the side of justice and liberty to be victorious, will be for individuals and groups so to relate themselves to truth, to right and to God that flagrantly immoral international relations will become practically impossible. The only safety of the race lies in an essentially Christian international morality, and the only adequate guarantee of this is an essentially Christian personal religion. The only failure of essential Christianity of which the war may fairly be regarded as evidence was its failure to be given an adequate trial; which means, of course, not a failure of Christianity as an ethical or as a religious system, but a failure of the human will to be adequately Christian.
III
THE CHRISTIAN HOPE IN TIMES OF WAR
FRANK CHAMBERLIN PORTER
Of Paul's three things that abide, hope is the one of which we are now most conscious of our need. Never before in our experience has hope been so much the center of our inner life and the heart of our religion. Our mood alternates between hope and depression, hope and fear; and we look to our religion to make hope strong, and turn to our sacred book to seek secure grounds and satisfying expressions for our hope. We hope for the winning of the war. We hope for the safety and the home-coming of those we love. We hope for a new world-order organized to make war impossible, inspired by a spirit of coöperation and good will between classes and between nations. We hope as never before for an assured and abundant life after death. We put these hopes in some relation to each other, weighing one against another, subordinating one to another. And when we seek their right relationship and look for their ultimate grounds, we ask what Christianity has to say and to do about them. What is Christian in these hopes that are filling the mind and heart of the world? The importance of this question is very great. The future of the world depends on the truth and the strength of the hopes that now inspire and direct men's purposes and efforts. The future of the Christian religion turns in no small measure on its ability now to keep the hope of mankind high and pure, free from self-seeking and from material interests, and true to the ultimate reality of things, and to give this hope confidence and prevailing strength.
Christians are not at one over the question what, as Christians, they have a right to hope for. Most evidently is this the case between us and our enemy. We differ in things hoped for; and it is perhaps not too much to say that the truth of our hope and the strength of our hope constitute and measure our spiritual equipment for the winning of the war. The Germans are fighting for their hope of national expansion and domination, for their dream of a new world empire of the chosen and fit people of God. We cannot question the strength of this hope of theirs, and its powerful influence toward bringing itself to realization. We and our Allies are resisting these nationalistic and arrogant hopes, and are appealing to the contrary hope of an inclusive human brotherhood, in which good will shall prevail between nations, and hence right and peace. The hope that is truer, more in accordance with the nature of things, the nature of man, the will of God, and the hope that is most deeply felt and most loyally served, with most conviction and most sacrifice, will prevail in the end. That is the hope that will come true. Ours is inevitably a religious hope, for it is universal in range, big as the world, and needs not only every power of ours but the Power not ourselves to bring it about. It is for every one who holds it intensely, in a real sense, a hope in God and a hope for God. But is it certain that it is also a Christian hope, a hope in Christ and a hope for Christ?
There are, not only between us and our enemy, but among ourselves, radical differences as to what a Christian should hope for in the present world crisis. There are those who search the Scriptures for predictions of the Kaiser and his overthrow, and see in the anti-Christian philosophy and in the anti-Christian arrogance and cruelty of his militaristic state, a sign that the end of this evil world-age is near, and that Christ will come quickly and set up his reign on earth. And there are those to whom such literalism in the use of Scripture and such externality in the hope for Christ's coming are intellectually impossible and untrue, and religiously harmful. To them the meaning of the Bible is to be found in the tendency and spirit of its teachings, and their hope is for the presence and rule of the spirit of Christ and the dominance of his principles in the common life of humanity. This involves a radical difference in the hope of Christians for a new world, a new human society, and in the ways in which this hope will affect their motives and efforts. There are also deep-going differences in regard to the hope for a life after death. That many are looking eagerly for material, "scientific" proof through physical communications from the dead, while many, on the other hand, are feeling that immortality belongs to the race and not to the individual, and that the sacrifice of the young and the strong finds its only and sufficient end and justification in the new humanity they die to create, indicates that Christ has not yet brought life and immortality to clear light for humanity. Such differences are not to be desired. If Christianity is to be the religion of the present eager and pressing hopes of mankind and give these hopes elevation, truth, and victorious endurance and enthusiasm, Christians should be clear and united in the contents and character of their hope.
Among these hopes of mankind there can be no doubt which one has the first place in the minds of the intellectual leaders and the actual rulers of the allied nations. Never before has a truly prophetic note been so clearly sounded by leading men of affairs, and by the press and the leaders of public opinion, as well as by the poets and preachers to whom prophecy naturally belongs. From all sides we have expressions of a hope which four years ago was judged to be the dream of impractical idealists, the hope for a new order of human life, in which good will and mutual coöperation shall take the place of suspicion and competitive struggle. We need not be blind to whatever motives of self-interest may have entered into the action of this or that one of our Allies in undertaking the war. The outstanding fact remains that while the German Government appeals to the self-assertion of the German State and seeks its aggrandizement through force at the expense of its neighbors, the allied governments appeal to national self-sacrifice for the sake of international redemption. It is to this appeal on behalf of the rights, the freedom, the happiness of mankind, that our soldiers respond; for humanity, not for national gain, that our peoples are prepared to give and to suffer. This hope takes concrete form in the word Democracy, and in the idea of a League or Federation of free, democratic nations, bound together for the defense of human rights, for coöperation in all that concerns human welfare and progress, and the repression of every attack upon the peace of the world. So viewed the war becomes definitely a war to end war, and as such it is engaged in and supported by peace-loving peoples, against the nation that glorifies war and would perpetuate it.
Is this great hope Christian? Is Christianity the religion which a hope so high and so difficult needs if it is to keep its height amid the many influences that tend to lower it, and if it is to prove possible and become actual in spite of powerful forces that work against it? It is not self-evident that Christianity will prove equal to this which is clearly the greatest task that the present imposes upon it. There are many who doubt its adequacy; many who see that it has brought division and warfare, and think it unfitted to create unity; many who see that it has withdrawn from the world, and think it unadapted to provide the moral principles and spiritual energies of the new social and political world-order. It is for us who believe in the sufficiency of Christ to prove that he alone provides those religious and moral principles and forces without which no democracy, still less any federation of democracies, can stand.
The ideal of human brotherhood which the war has revealed as the deepest desire and faith of men and has put before us as a goal that we must now set out to reach is of course old in its beginnings, and for a generation it has been taking ever stronger hold on the minds of men. Prophetic utterances of this ideal could be quoted in abundance. A striking example is a saying of Alexander Dumas in 1893: "I believe our world is about to begin to realize the words 'Love one another,' without, however, being concerned whether a man or a God uttered them. … Mankind, which does nothing moderately, is about to be seized with a frenzy, a madness, of love." And Tolstoy's comment on this at the time of the Russian revolution, in 1905: "I believe that this