Our
preconceived ideas act like magnets on the material of evidence which is
submitted to us, instinctively selecting what bears in their favour and
declining to receive what they cannot utilise. Nowhere is this more
conspicuous than in the field of religious inquiry, nor is it confined
to either believers or unbelievers. There has been too much mutual
abuse, and too little attention to the fact that the mind no less than
the mouth has its palate, its impulsive selections and rejections. One
can meet the difficulty only by a patient and full examination of the
pleas of both parties to a controversy.
And the first plea which it is material to examine is that, since it is
claimed that all the nations engaged in the war are Christian nations,
one may accuse them collectively of moral failure. From the earliest
days of the Christian religion it was the boast of those who accepted
it that it abolished all distinctions of caste and race. In the little
community which gathered round the cross there was neither bond nor
free, neither Greek nor Roman. This cosmopolitanism was, in fact, a
natural feature of religious movements at the time, and was due not so
much to their intrinsic development as to the political circumstances of
the world in which they spread.
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