Religion and the WarYale University. Divinity School
Religion
Religion and the War
Yale University. Divinity School
World War, 1914-1918; World War, 1914-1918 -- Religious aspects
die to create, indicates that Christ has not yet brought life and
immortality to clear light for humanity. Such differences are not to
be desired. If Christianity is to be the religion of the present eager
and pressing hopes of mankind and give these hopes elevation, truth,
and victorious endurance and enthusiasm, Christians should be clear
and united in the contents and character of their hope.
Among these hopes of mankind there can be no doubt which one has the
first place in the minds of the intellectual leaders and the actual
rulers of the allied nations. Never before has a truly prophetic note
been so clearly sounded by leading men of affairs, and by the press
and the leaders of public opinion, as well as by the poets and
preachers to whom prophecy naturally belongs. From all sides we have
expressions of a hope which four years ago was judged to be the dream
of impractical idealists, the hope for a new order of human life, in
which good will and mutual coöperation shall take the place of
suspicion and competitive struggle. We need not be blind to whatever
motives of self-interest may have entered into the action of this or
that one of our Allies in undertaking the war. The outstanding fact
remains that while the German Government appeals to the self-assertion
of the German State and seeks its aggrandizement through force at the
expense of its neighbors, the allied governments appeal to national
self-sacrifice for the sake of international redemption. It is to this
appeal on behalf of the rights, the freedom, the happiness of mankind,
that our soldiers respond; for humanity, not for national gain, that
our peoples are prepared to give and to suffer. This hope takes
concrete form in the word Democracy, and in the idea of a League or
Federation of free, democratic nations, bound together for the defense
of human rights, for coöperation in all that concerns human welfare
and progress, and the repression of every attack upon the peace of the
world. So viewed the war becomes definitely a war to end war, and as
such it is engaged in and supported by peace-loving peoples, against
the nation that glorifies war and would perpetuate it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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