In this way, as the war went on, its ‘reasons’ expanded: the obligation of the pledged word; our national existence; the sanctity of public law; the continuity of civilisation. Yet even these reasons all put together are inadequate. There remains something in the war differentiating it from any other ever fought; some intangible and invisible element not easy to define. In his famous speech in the Guildhall Mr. Asquith expressed this by saying ‘This is not so much a material as a spiritual conflict.’ It is a conflict, in other words, not racial, political, dynastic, or a mere wrestle of political ideals. It is a battle of opposing ethical codes. We are fighting not merely a nation, but a doctrine—something that steel cannot pierce nor high explosives wreck. And it is a doctrine armed, disciplined, terrible; fighting with 17-inch howitzers and poisonous gases, with submarines. But what exactly is the ‘doctrine’ against which we are fighting? It is customary to quote Nietzsche at this point, and find in his teaching the germ of the ‘doctrine’ for which to-day Germany fights, and against which the rest of the world is in arms. But for one thing it is difficult to discover any single sustained and intelligible ‘doctrine’ in the structure of Nietzsche’s works. He died in a lunatic asylum, and had a strain of lunacy in his writings, if not in his blood, long before his insanity came under medical treatment. He had a touch of genius, but thin partitions divided his genius from madness. If Germany took its creed from Nietzsche it would be not only furiously anti-Christian and furiously atheistic, but even furiously non-moral. ‘Morality,’ Nietzsche said, ‘ought to be shot at. Pangs of conscience were indecent.’ In that dim realm into which his half-insane mind wandered—the ‘twilight of the gods’—evil and good had no existence. As for Christianity, he called it ‘the greatest of all conceivable corruptions,’ the ‘one immortal blemish of mankind.’ Jesus Christ, for Nietzsche, was ‘a knave, a charlatan.’ Everyone knows how Nietzsche took the Beatitudes and inverted them. His creed combined the theology of a lunatic asylum with the ethics of a gaol. Now the Germany against which the world is fighting to-day is certainly not atheistic, and it at least thinks itself to be intensely Christian.