At first sight there appears to be no real analogy between the case of the conscientious objector to war, as we have recently known him, and that propounded by Newman. Newman postulates a conflict of loyalties to two societies whose requirements are at a given point antagonistic, before invoking the arbitrament of conscience. The conscientious objector is conceived as setting his own private judgment against the will of the only society to which he owes allegiance. That is, at least, how it looks on the surface. But in point of fact, the conscientious objector as a rule bases his action on the ground of loyalty to a certain view of human relationships, that is to say, to a social ideal; and in the case of a man like Stephen Hobhouse whose social idealism has been validated by a unique realism of self-renunciation and sacrifice, it would be idle to deny that the conflict of loyalties was very concrete and authentic. The Socialist conscientious objector who sees in the International, if not the city of God, at least its threshold, and who does not conceive himself absolved from his loyalty to it even though the German socialists betrayed it, is moved by no personal eccentricity, but by a real social emotion. A sympathetic study of the conscientious objector brings him according to his measure into the same category as the historical leaders of dissenting movements. The decisive moral surrenders which quicken and ennoble life are acts of obedience to a social vision; and the only really moral attitude to men who make these surrenders, however variously they may make them, is that of the dedication of a recent volume—“To all who are fighting for conscience’ sake, whether in the trenches or in prison.”[29] It is well for the community that it should have those within it who are ready to endure obloquy and imprisonment rather than be guilty of what is to them a moral apostasy. Footnote 29: Dr. Orchard’s fine _The Outlook for Religion_. The conscientious objector—whatever the subject matter of his dissent—has always been an exasperating figure to his orthodox contemporaries. This is, of course, largely due to the inertia and the dislike of dissent which settle upon middle-aged communities; but at the present time it is probable that the impatience with the conscientious objector springs from other and more respectable sources. Yet by a curious paradox the two principal sources are logically antithetical.