THEOLOGY AND THE WAR 47 



world is directed by the will of God, so long as we clearly 

 recognize that its good ends can be attained only through the 

 active and enlightened co-operation of the will of man. The 

 theory of the " will of God " becomes positively noxious only 

 when it is made an excuse for the endurance and perpetuation 

 of manifest evil. But if we want to think clearly, and see 

 things in their plain outlines, unwarped by the mists of 

 mythology, we shall have to admit that the only intelligent 

 and purposive will of whose existence we have one jot or 

 tittle of evidence is the will of man. It is to that will, and 

 none other, that we must look for the amelioration of mundane 

 conditions, towards which the abolition of war is only the 

 first step. When we are asked : " What actuates the will of 

 man ? Whence comes that slow-moving, but irresistible, 

 bias towards the good to which we owe all the progress that 

 has been achieved from the days of the cave-man onward ? " 

 we can only answer that, though the natural history of the 

 idea of Good can be, to some extent, traced, the ultimate 

 origin of the bias remains the one great mystery of the moral 

 world. Is it the work of God? It is certainly the most 

 plausible evidence we possess of the existence of some well- 

 meaning power at work behind the framework of things. 

 Kant's saying about the starry heaven and the moral law may 

 be accepted without demur, if by " moral law " we understand 

 no external code, but simply the bias towards good. It is the 

 most godlike thing of which we have any real knowledge ; 

 but it does not point to the omnipotent personal God, the 

 " magnified and non-natural man " of the theological creeds 

 and formularies. 



