WILL CHRISTIANITY SURVIVE THE WAR? 15 



ficent government of the universe by Providence untenable. 

 No one has ever accepted that belief in the plain sense of the 

 words. The existence of evil has always been an insuperable 

 difficulty in the way of those who have tried to conceive of 

 God as omnipotent and yet a benevolent man-like being-, 

 similar to a philanthropic head of a state. There are plenty 

 of innocent people who, nevertheless, think that they can, 

 and do, so conceive of him. This war will not disconcert 

 them ; other wars have not done so. The religion of the 

 future immediately following the present war will not be 

 affected by such considerations. 



In my opinion, the Christian religion which, we must 

 remember, is a complex of many different teachings is being 

 enormously strengthened in its noblest features by this war. 

 Every man, woman, and child in this country and that of our 

 Allies who loved it before, and many who were previously 

 indifferent to it, will love it with fervour, because in fact its 

 teaching comprises indeed, has disseminated throughout 

 the civilized world the great principles for which we are 

 fighting at this moment against Germany : namely, those 

 involved in the desire of peace and goodwill among men, 

 love of honesty and justice, pity and compassion for the 

 suffering and oppressed, and the watchwords Liberty, 

 Equality, Fraternity. 



Those who nourish hostility to Christianity do so because 

 they overlook the fact that under this name are blended and 

 confusedly indicated two totally separate things. The first, 

 on the one hand, is a system of morality which in its essen- 

 tial teaching is to-day approved by the united conscience of 

 civilized man. It is the outcome of long ages of human 

 thought and experience. The second, on the other hand, is 

 a fantastic mythology, which was based upon Jewish tradi- 

 tion, curiously interwoven with non-Jewish polytheism, and 

 with a poetic development of the widely-spread fables of 

 a divine incarnation and the immolation of the god-holding 

 victim. 



The Christian mythology, though rejected by many 

 educated men to-day, has, in the past, aroused the interest 

 and gained the belief of millions of mankind, and still does 

 so. It has been, by its poetry and mystery, the means of 

 carrying the Christian morality throughout the world, and 

 of establishing it as the basis of the moral creed of all 

 civilized nations. On the other hand, Christian morality 

 has given a value and currency to the Christian religion 



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