46 THEOLOGY AND THE WAR 



The fact that God can extract some good out of evil does not 

 justify us in calling evil good, or in employing it as a means well- 

 pleasing to God. The Corsican vendetta is doubtless a better school 

 of bravery than our legal system, but we do not therefore propose to 

 introduce it into civilized countries. 



But, though Herr Foerster scoffs at the ordinary cheap 

 sophistries whereby war is reconciled with the goodness of 

 an all-powerful God, he does not tell us how he himself 

 proposes to effect the reconciliation. He does not tell us 

 because he cannot. The thing is impossible. Any such 

 reconcilement can only be a playing with words. It is no 

 extravagant optimism to hope that a certain amount of good 

 may result from all the suffering and horror of this war; but 

 how disproportionate is the price paid for it ! Some of us 

 may even venture to trust that mankind is learning a lesson 

 in this ordeal which human nature being -what it is could 

 have been learnt in no other way. But, then, whose fault is 

 it that human nature is what it is? It cannot be the fault of 

 an all-good and all-powerful God. If there is a God who 

 wills the ultimate redemption of human nature, but can bring 

 it about in no other way than this, then clearly he is not 

 all-powerful, but has to fight for his ends against a very 

 powerful obstacle call it matter, or Satan, or Ahriman, or 

 what you will. This brings us up to the Manichean theory 

 of a good and evil principle for ever at war in the world : 

 a theory which, so to speak, dramatizes the problem vividly 

 enough, but does not begin to solve it ; for to assume the 

 existence of Ormuzd and Ahriman is only to shift the real 

 difficulty a stage further back, and to leave as inconceivable 

 as ever the unity from which this duality must have emerged. 

 All our popular theology the theology, for instance, of 

 Paradise Lost is purely Manichean. Whatever phrases 

 we may use about the kingdom and the power and the glory, 

 we always think of it as a restricted kingdom, a divided 

 power, a glory sadly incomplete. In this there is no philo- 

 sophic satisfaction, but only a confession of mental impotence 

 in face of the mystery of existence. But, at any rate, a frank 

 and explicit acceptance of the theory of a benevolent, but 

 limited, power making for good, would be less harmful 

 than the self-contradictory assumption of an all-good and 

 all-powerful Will which employs Hohenzollern War-Lords, 

 high explosives, poison-gas, the Morning Post, and Mr. Leo 

 Maxse as means to its ends. 



There is no great practical harm in the belief that the 



