THEOLOGY AND THE WAR 



BY WILLIAM ARCHER 



TN a letter from Germany which I read the other day no 

 ^ matter how it came into my hands the writer, a lady, 

 said : " If we should be defeated in this war, it would be a 

 terrible thing for religion, for no one would any longer 

 believe in God." I was reminded of the saying of a scholar- 

 soldier who fought in the American Civil War, on the side of 

 the South. " When the end came," he said, "there were 

 many of us who lost their faith in God, but not their faith 

 in the cause." But the question how we are to conceive of 

 God in the face of such a spectacle as Europe now presents 

 can scarcely depend, one would think, on the mere allocation 

 of victory and defeat. Will the victors, if there is anything 

 either of reason or humanity left in them, be able to sing 

 " Te Deum laudamus " with an entirely reverent and 

 unreproachful mind ? One can scarcely believe it. 



The theological aspect of the war is indeed so grotesque 

 that it would need the irony of Swift to do it justice. We 

 can scarcely open a paper without finding some pathetically 

 earnest, bewildered soul going through the most amazing 

 logical contortions in the endeavour to reconcile the plain 

 facts of the daily record with the theory of an all-good, 

 all-wise, and all-powerful Creator and Ruler of the Universe. 

 The effort to cling to our comfortable preconceptions is very 

 natural. No one wants to lose his faith in a Friend outside 

 and above the cruel and heartless concatenation of things 

 which we call life, precisely at the moment when its cruelty 

 and heartlessness are most apparent, and the divine Friendship 

 is consequently most needed. But the attempt to interpret 

 the motives and actions of the Friend in terms of friendship 

 and benevolence, as we understand them here below, is surely 

 the most hopeless of intellectual enterprises. 



War has always been cruel, but never, probably, so 

 infernal as to-day. High explosives and machine-guns, to 

 say nothing of poison-gas and liquid fire, have immeasurably 

 heightened its hellishness. The Germans themselves were 



39 



