This is the real parting of the ways; it is fundamental. Christianity, based upon the personal example and teaching of Christ, is too individualist to be in accordance with Society as at present constituted. Institutional Christianity, on the other hand, has obviously transferred its allegiance in certain matters of moral guidance from Christ to Cæsar; and claims that those matters have been left for Cæsar to decide. I heard it argued, for instance, quite recently, by a Roman Catholic, that as Christendom in all ages had tolerated war, all question of conscientious objection thereto by a Catholic falls to the ground. The answer of the Christian individualist, I conceive, would be, that Christendom also tolerated torture for the extraction of truth, and slavery for the extraction of labour; and that, nevertheless, the conscientious objection of resistant minorities succeeded, in spite of the supineness of Christendom, in placing those monstrosities outside the pale of civilized convention. No doubt while those devices flourished under the countenance of Mother Church, Christians opposed to their abolition would have cried then, as they cry now about war, “How are you to do without them? How can you extract truth from an unwilling witness, or labour from a subjugated race, except by compulsion and force?” The answer to that apparently insoluble problem now stands written in history--a history which has not eliminated untruth from the witness-box, or indolence from the labour market; yet torture and slavery alike have ceased to be practical politics, except where the State still answers with regard to war as it used to answer with regard to these: “I cannot do without.” There, in their last real stronghold, unaffected by Christian ethics, slavery and torture still stand. But we have to remember that the State’s claim, if we accept it as a binding principle, comes much closer home to us than it would do if it arose only in time of war. Military service, once we are in it, involves us in such things as the firing at Peterloo on defenceless citizens, in the murder under superior orders of Sheehy Skeffington; in the shooting, if we are ordered to shoot them, of conscientious objectors--men who are themselves sworn not to take life. Military service, loyally rendered in Tsarist Russia, involved the riding down, the sabring to death, and the drowning of those meek crowds who stood before the Winter Palace in January, 1905, asking for their “Little Father” to come and speak to them words of comfort. These are things unfortunately which Christians cannot do with a good conscience, but which the State for its safety may say that it requires. Let those of us who agree with the State’s claim to our personal service, irrespective of conscience, do our utmost to separate it from the weakening effects which true and genuine Christianity is bound to have on it. THE SALT OF THE EARTH (1918)