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
Education, democracy, religion--these three, we have long professed
and more or less fully believed, belong together. The full life of
each of the three is bound up in that of the other two.
Education without religion is incomplete and abortive; it falls short
of that life more abundant which is education's goal. Religion without
education lacks intelligence and power, and condemns itself to what
Horace Bushnell called conquest from without, as contrasted with
growth from within.
Democracy without education cannot long hold together or be saved from
mediocrity and caprice. Education without democracy perpetuates caste
divisions, or else breeds discontent and class hatred.
Democracy without religion is doomed to fail; and religion without
democracy cannot realize the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of
man.
These, I say, are familiar convictions. They are natural to
Protestantism; they have entered into the very making of America. Yet
just these old convictions are gaining a new force and a deeper
meaning in and through the experiences of these years of war. The
struggle for democracy is not only leading us to a new comprehension
of the meaning of democracy itself; it is helping us to understand
better both education and religion.
It does not lie within the limits of this paper to canvass the wider
and deeper meaning of democracy which is opening before us. The
messages and addresses of President Wilson have interpreted that
meaning not simply to America but to the world. No one yet knows the
full promise of life after the war, when Pan-Germanism shall have been
not only balked but destroyed. The democracy for which we fight to
make the world safe will be a chastened, changed, completer democracy.
It will be a democracy between nations as well as within nations, for
the doctrine of the irresponsible, beyond-moral sovereignty of the
state must return to the perdition whence it came. It will be a
democracy applied more fully to the whole of life, social, economic
and industrial as well as political. It will be a democracy of
completer citizenship, that gives place to women as to men. It will be
a democracy of duties as well as of rights.
The world is acquiring a new conscience. Just as the nineteenth
century made slavery abhorrent to the moral sense of men in general,
the twentieth century will likely be looked back to as the time when
the world's conscience decided that the exploitation of man by man is
wrong. The general moral sense of men has not been over-tender on this
point hitherto. They have checkmated the exploiter if they could, as
they did checkmate Napoleon, but they have not always, or even
usually, looked upon him as a wrong doer. It required Germany's
attempts at conquest and subjugation to wake the world to the absolute
wrong of that monstrous thing--that one man should use another as a
mere means to his own pleasure or aggrandizement, or that one people
should so determine the destiny of another people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account