[Footnote 16: The paragraph is worth preserving in its entirety: "Mr. W. N. Ewer, who lectured at Finchley for the Union of Democratic Control, has explained that the report which we published of his speech is unfair, and that he is really in substantial agreement with Mr. Asquith. This is disingenuous, and Mr. Ewer knows it is. He has not repudiated the correctness of the report, which stated that he dilated on the danger of British navalism, and declared that we must give up singing 'Rule Britannia!' nor has he repudiated his remarks as to the pleasure which the tune of the Austrian National Anthem gave him. Does he think that Mr. Asquith would substantially agree with that? Or the country?"--_The Evening Standard_, July 26, 1915.] Sec. 4 The "Moral Test" The theory that war is beneficial as a moral test, a furnace in which character is proved--_ut fulvum spectatur in ignibus aurum_--is that generally adopted by the Christian Churches, who may be said without disrespect to have taken every advantage of their founder's unique reference to the sword. I cannot help thinking that there is something fundamental in this ecclesiastical advocacy of war; that some psychological theory could be outlined to correlate this almost uniform advocacy with the facts that such religious men as Tennyson and Ruskin were among the loudest in their support of the Crimean War, that such a militarist as Rudyard Kipling in his best work (in _Kim_, in _Puck of Pook's Hill_ and the intercalated poems, in the most successful of his short stories) shows himself to be at heart a deeply religious mystic; and that in France the very active Clerical party, one consequence of a disestablished Church, is always closely supported by the Chauvinists. In many cases, however, I have no doubt that the pious Christian, finding himself confronted with war, and not having the moral courage or the political detachment to condemn it, only applies automatically to its justification the arguments which he habitually uses to explain the existence of evil and pain. It is certain at least that the theories of war as a Moral Test or a School of Character bear a strong resemblance to the commonplaces of religious consolation which almost any good Christian will offer to the bereaved and afflicted. Any one who has seen an innocent friend slowly tortured to death by some vile disease will know the futility of the Christian defence (for these religious consolations amount theologically to a defence) that pain ennobles the character and "proves" the moral courage of the sufferer.[17] The leading fallacy of the defence that war, or pain, is valuable as a moral test is akin to the common misunderstanding of the word "prove" in the saying that "the exception proves the rule"; the truth being that a strong and noble character, one of whose corollary qualities is a capacity to bear pain, is not less strong and noble if it is never called upon to exercise that capacity.