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
Is this great hope Christian? Is Christianity the religion which a
hope so high and so difficult needs if it is to keep its height amid
the many influences that tend to lower it, and if it is to prove
possible and become actual in spite of powerful forces that work
against it? It is not self-evident that Christianity will prove equal
to this which is clearly the greatest task that the present imposes
upon it. There are many who doubt its adequacy; many who see that it
has brought division and warfare, and think it unfitted to create
unity; many who see that it has withdrawn from the world, and think it
unadapted to provide the moral principles and spiritual energies of
the new social and political world-order. It is for us who believe in
the sufficiency of Christ to prove that he alone provides those
religious and moral principles and forces without which no democracy,
still less any federation of democracies, can stand.
The ideal of human brotherhood which the war has revealed as the
deepest desire and faith of men and has put before us as a goal that
we must now set out to reach is of course old in its beginnings, and
for a generation it has been taking ever stronger hold on the minds of
men. Prophetic utterances of this ideal could be quoted in abundance.
A striking example is a saying of Alexander Dumas in 1893: "I believe
our world is about to begin to realize the words 'Love one another,'
without, however, being concerned whether a man or a God uttered
them.... Mankind, which does nothing moderately, is about to be seized
with a frenzy, a madness, of love." And Tolstoy's comment on this at
the time of the Russian revolution, in 1905: "I believe that this
thought, however strange the expression, 'seized with a frenzy of
love,' may seem, is perfectly true and is felt more or less clearly by
all men of our day. A time must come when love, which forms the
fundamental essence of the soul, will take the place natural to it in
the life of mankind, and will become the chief basis of the relations
between man and man. That time is coming; it is at hand."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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