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
The world war seems like a violent contradiction of the truth of such
prophecies. It seems for the time to have made love inadequate as a
summing up of morals and religion. We almost feel that the Sermon on
the Mount must be kept in reserve for other times. The war has made
love itself a hope. We renounce it for a time that we may resist a
power that threatens to destroy it altogether and put selfishness and
cruelty on the throne of the world. But the war has not in fact
disproved the faith that God is love and that love is the supreme law
and power among men. It has made mankind more conscious of its ideal
of community and fellowship, and seems to be carrying us faster toward
the realization of human brotherhood than peace and prosperity were
doing. The greatest and most widely approved sentences of President
Wilson's war papers are those that give expression to "what the
thinking peoples of the world desire, with their longing hope for
justice and for social freedom and opportunity." On the anniversary of
our entering the war, Gilbert Murray declared that England needed our
help in battle, but even more in upholding their true faith.
"Americans instinctively believe ... in freedom, peace, democracy,
arbitration, and international good will.... When the war is over
there will be a world to rebuild, and the only principles on which to
rebuild it are these principles." Germany denies the truth of these
principles, but in doing so it denies human nature and derives from
physical nature a state-ethics of struggle and the survival of the
strong. It denies the prophet of Galilee, and looks for its example to
Rome. Sometimes it has seemed as if the German denial of humanity and
affirmation of material and brute force were in danger of justifying
itself by the only test they admit, that of physical success. Where
can we look for help toward a living faith in liberty and brotherhood
over against the powerful demonstration we are offered of faith in
material force and in the progress of nations through aggression and
tyranny? We must look no doubt first of all to our own souls and
oppose to the faith in physical and animal nature a faith in human
nature and in the truth of its best instincts and ideals; and then to
those who know best and most worthily express the human soul and the
reality of its spiritual possessions. Not from the Bible alone, and
not only from Christ are such reassuring testimonies to be gained; and
we are not renouncing the unique value of the Christian religion when
we find that the faith and hope which it teaches are the faith and the
hope of the universal heart of man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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