For this incapacity, this widespread inertia, this blundering idea that there is some serious intrinsic difficulty in the matter, the Churches are responsible. If they had directed to war the smallest particle of the ardent rhetoric they have poured on disbelief in dogmas which they are to-day abandoning, the public mind would have awakened long ago. There is no intrinsic difficulty in substituting arbitration for war. There are technical difficulties which the great lawyers and statesmen of the peace-movement have given ample promise of surmounting, but the overwhelming obstacle is merely this--the peoples of Europe do not insist on the reform. Of all the large problems which confront the modern mind this is incomparably the simplest. We are hopelessly divided as to the nature of the remedy for most of our social ills. Here the remedy is acknowledged: the plan has been elaborated almost in entirety: the international tribunal already exists, and awaits only its executive, which the nations of Europe could supply to-morrow. It is the will, the demand, that is wanting. For that lack we charge the utter failure of the Churches during the ages of their power to enunciate a plain moral lesson, and their positive encouragement of an evil system. That is the real indictment. It affects the Christian Church in every nation. CHAPTER III THE APOLOGIES OF THE CLERGY Any person who cares to read the reports of the utterances of our clergy in the current religious periodicals will recognise that they are painfully conscious of the reproach which this war implies. One constantly finds them repeating that in this year of tragedy "Christianity has failed" and "the gospel has broken in our hands." It had been their boast that Christianity had civilised Europe, and none of them has the audacity or indecency to claim, as some writers have done, that such a war is in harmony with the principles and ideals of civilisation. They have preached brotherhood and peace, and the greater part of Christendom is engaged in a strife of the most terrible nature. It is not a struggle of Christian and infidel; it is a struggle of Christian and Christian, and one or several of the Christian nations involved are guilty of a crime greater in magnitude than all the murders in Europe during a decade. Above all patriotism, above all immediate anxiety, above all argumentation about responsibility, this grim fact stands out and reproaches them: after fifteen hundred years of Christian preaching Europe is locked in the bloodiest struggle of all time.