blood-red fields of Jahveh when the politicians give the word, and into the green pastures of the Nazarene only when there is no national scheme of murder and robbery afoot.... The churches as they are today can not prevent war. Their palsied lips can not echo, however feebly, the words of the master, ‘Put up again thy sword into its place!’ There is not spiritual power left in organized Christianity to insure the substitution of reason for brute force.... Alas! it has hitherto been impossible to get Christianity to obey Christ.”[295] That is the language of a brave Christian preacher. In connection with the reverend Doctor Walsh’s chastisement of the church in the morning of the twentieth century it is interesting to read on the same subject the words of a philosopher of the eighteenth century, Voltaire.[296] “This universal rage which devours the world.... The most wonderful part of this infernal enterprise [war] is, that each chief of murderers causes his colors to be blest, and solemnly invokes God before he goes to exterminate his neighbors.... A certain number of orators are everywhere paid to celebrate these murderous days.... All of them speak for a long time, and quote that which was done of old in Palestine.... The rest of the year these people declaim against vices.... All the united vices of all ages and places will never equal the evils produced by a single campaign. Miserable physicians of souls! you exclaim for five quarters of an hour on some pricks of a pin, and say nothing on the malady which tears us into a thousand pieces.... Can there be anything more horrible throughout nature?” And now let us get at this matter from the point of view of a political economist, a really great economist, John A. Hobson—who puts the case thus:[297] “When has a Christian nation ever entered on a war which has not been regarded by the official priesthood as a sacred war? In England the State Church has never permitted the spirit of the Prince of Peace to interfere when statesmen and soldiers appealed to the passions of race-lust, conquest and revenge. Wars, the most insane in origin, the most barbarous in execution, the most fruitless in results have never failed to get the sanction of the Christian Churches.... _There is no record of the clergy of any Church having failed to bless a popular war, to find reasons for representing it as a crusade._” The following lines from a British philosopher, Frederic Harrison,[298] are to the point for the workingman’s instruction: