WILL CHRISTIANITY SURVIVE THE WAR? 17 



possible to speculate as to whether mankind would have 

 reached by now to an identical moral ideal had the Chris- 

 tian Church never come into existence. Speculations as to 

 "what might have been " have but little value. 



Whatever its failures, we cannot doubt that Christianity 

 (often by the agency of heretics and seceders from " the 

 orthodox Church ") has in the past given, and does at the 

 present day give, a currency and authority to some of the 

 finest conceptions of human duty. Even though accom- 

 panied by much that is incompatible with the reasonable 

 conclusions of later times, the Christian morality has given 

 permanent features to the moral law recognized by the 

 civilized world. It is precisely on account of the deliberate 

 rejection of that Christian element by the German military 

 rulers that the whole civilized world regards Germany with 

 horror and loathing. We are fighting for what we all 

 recognize as the permanent and indisputable essence 

 refined, interpreted, modernized, it is conceded of Christian 

 morality. And so I venture to maintain that the outcome 

 of the war will be a strengthening of the hold on men's 

 minds not of Christian mythology, or ritual, nor of ecclesi- 

 astical domination and obscurantism but of the essential 

 precept of Christian morality, " Love one another." 



As Rationalism slowly spreads among the peoples of 

 the earth, the crude mythologies of early ages cease 

 to carry authority, but remain as interesting evidences 

 of the evolution of human thought and speculation. The 

 philosophy of the Greeks, on the one hand, and, on the other, 

 the moral precepts of the Jewish doctors, assimilated and re- 

 produced by Jesus, have become the one, the parent-stock 

 of modern philosophy ; the other, the indisputable basis of 

 the common morality of the civilized world. Yet the gods of 

 Olympus have become lifeless shadows, and those of Judaea 

 will also pass. It is the fact that the only important addition 

 made by the modern world to the moral precepts of Jesus of 

 Nazareth (apart from the rejection of some of its ascetic and 

 local excrescences) is that of which Huxley writes namely, 

 the duty of " veracity of thought and action, the resolute 

 facing of the world as it is when the garment of make- 

 believe with which pious hands have hidden its uglier 

 features has been stripped off." 



The Christian morality has been deliberately rejected by 

 the leaders of German militarism. We are fighting for the 

 triumph of that morality to make an end of the German 



