I am not unaware of the small movements among the clergy for cultivating
international clerical friendship, or of the extent to which individual
clergymen have co-operated in the various arbitration movements. That is
only a feeble discharge of a small part of their duty. Had Leo XIII or
Pius X issued a plain and explicit Encyclical on the subject, and
directed his vast international organisation of clergy to labour
wholeheartedly for its realisation, who can estimate what the result
would have been? Had the clergy of Germany issued a stern and collective
denunciation of the Pan-German and Imperialist literature which was
instilling poison into every village of the country, can we suppose that
it would have been without avail? Had the Archbishops and Bishops of
England, and the leaders of the Free Churches, definitely instructed
their people that the pacifist ideal was not merely in accord with
Christian principles, but was one of the most urgent and beneficent
reforms of our time, would the English people have passed as
inobservantly as it did through the five years of preparation for a
great war?
It is no part of my plan to analyse this deplorable failure of the
Churches as moral agencies.
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