shuddering as the ghastly picture is daily unfolded before it, and they will see that same generation in a few months grow dully indifferent to, if not actively supporting, the military system which invariably brings these horrors every few years upon the world. They will read of social aspiration spreading through our civilisation, and statesmen regretting that want of funds alone prevents them from remedying our social ills; and they will read how Europe in one year wasted in butchery the resources that might have renovated its disfigured civilisation, and the next year complacently shouldered its military burden, its annual waste of a thousand millions sterling, with the prospect of a costlier war than ever. In face of this situation the question, What would you put in place of Christianity? is a mere mockery. One can see some pertinence and use in the question: How shall we induce the Christian Churches to employ their still great resources in helping to bring on the reign of peace? But it is not to them that we now look for redemption. It is to the humanitarian spirit, the clearer reason, of our age. I have described the situation in terms of emotion, because thus it spontaneously rises before me; but it may be recorded in terms of pure reason. We maintain in Europe a machinery for settling international quarrels which costs us more than a thousand millions sterling annually, while we could erect at a cost of a few thousands annually an efficient machinery for dealing with those quarrels, and for a few millions we could add the machinery for carrying out its decisions. We boast that our civilisation is founded on justice; yet, of the two types of machinery for adjusting quarrels, we retain the one that is the least possible adapted for securing the triumph of justice and discard the one that is pre-eminently fitted to secure it. We flatter ourselves that we rise above the savage in enjoying security of life and property, and we retain this system though we know that, periodically, it will invade life and property on a scale that surpasses the experience of the savage as much as a Dreadnought surpasses a canoe. It is just as easy to state our situation in terms of reason as in terms of sentiment: it would not be easy to say in which guise it is ugliest. Let us talk no more nonsense about needing religion to help us to get rid of this atrocious nightmare. It drives both reason and sentiment to the brink of insanity. Both protest against it with every particle of their energy. Why Christianity failed to protest against it in fifteen hundred years may or may not be obscure; but there is no obscurity whatever about the probable effect on militarism and war of a cultivation of reason and sympathy.[3]