OF THE WAR ON RELIGIOUS LIFE IN GREAT BRITAIN. 199 



Mission, will be still more ecclesiastical, and less national, than 

 she is now. That this alienation of the Church from the people 

 may be spiritually a gain as well as a loss, I do not deny; but 

 beyond all questions it will be the fact. 



For myself, I cannot refuse or forgo the conception of the 

 Church as a leaven permeating the whole national and, in the 

 end, the whole international, life of Christendom. The general 

 sentiment of Christendom has, I think, risen, and will rise still 

 more highly after the war, against the teaching of Treitschke 

 and Bernhardi, that Christianity possesses no rightful place in 

 the history of the nations. Christians, far from agreeing with 

 these German writers, will see more clearly, and feel more 

 acutely, that the only hope of the nations lies in obedience to 

 the Will of Jesus Christ. But if the Church is entitled or 

 qualified to control the international relations of mankind, she 

 must first vitally Christianize the spirit and the conscience of 

 the several nations themselves. 



It seems, then, that the war will afford the Church an oppor- 

 tunity such as she has not enjoyed for many years, but that, at 

 the same time, it will impose upon her a responsibility more 

 searching and more trying. It will turn the hearts of all men 

 and classes of men, and of women too, in Great Britain, but 

 especially of men who have served at the Front, to the eternal 

 strength and solace of religion. But at the same time it will 

 create a strong intellectual anxiety as to the function or value 

 of religion, and still more of Christianity. It is natural, although 

 it is not, perhaps, wholly reasonable, that men, when they are 

 occupied with religious questions, should closely and almost 

 fiercely scrutinize the example of the clergy. There will be 

 need of a highly educated clergy; for the Church is called to face 

 the serious fact that, while education is rising in the nation 

 generally, the number of highly intellectual men who take Holy 

 Orders has been, for nearly half a century, and still is, diminish- 

 ing. There will be even more need of Christians, and above all, 

 of clergymen and ministers, who will evince, by the sacrifice 

 and the sanctity of their lives, that the truths which they 

 officially teach are, to them, the supreme verities. The Church 

 of the greatest holiness and the largest self-sacrifice is the 

 Church which will probably win the day. 



It is certain that the experience of the war has raised, and 

 will raise, a demand for a religion at once more practical and 

 more spiritual. The eager, impatient world will refuse to 

 tolerate a Church which occupies herself, in any large degree, 

 with other questions than such as immediately affect the 



