That question may perhaps make one wonder why it has not been heard more often during the war as a text of the Church. There is little doubt that very many men whose feeling towards the Church is in no way disrespectful or hostile are conscious of a certain uneasiness in hearing her vigorously defending the prosecution of the war and demonstrating its righteousness. They feel, in spite of however conclusive demonstrations to the contrary, that there is a deep-seated inconsistency between war for whatever object and the Sermon on the Mount, and they cannot but remember, when they are told that this is a holy war, that that also the Germans say. They perhaps feel that the justification of the war is, after all, a matter for politicians and statesmen, and that the Church would be more appropriately employed in making it as far as she can a vehicle of good, rather than trying to justify superfluously its existence. A people already awed by the self-sacrifice of its armies may be supposed to be capable of profiting by the exhortations of a Church whose cardinal doctrine is concerned with the responsibility that attaches to those for whose sake life has voluntarily been given up. One cannot imagine an institution more perfectly qualified by its faith and its power to bring home to this people the solemnity of the sanction under which they lie to make themselves worthy of the price that is still being unreservedly paid. If it were consciously the determination of every citizen to make himself worth dying for, who can doubt that a national unity of the sublimest kind would be within reach? {155}