Even if one lays aside that suspicion, and in many cases it is quite
unjust, the clergy must realise that the indictment of Christianity is
grave, and is almost unatonable. Those thousand years of conflict,
during which they sanctioned every variety of war and initiated many
wars in their own interest, have given the military system such root in
the hearts of men that it will require a supreme and prolonged effort to
destroy it. The proverbial visitor from Mars would not be so much amazed
at any feature of our life as at this retention amid a great
civilisation of the barbaric method of settling international
differences. He would ask in astonishment how an intelligent and
generally humane race, a race which raises homes for stray cats and aged
horses, could cling to a system which, on infallible experience, plunges
one or more countries in the deepest suffering every few years. He would
learn that there has not been a war in Europe for a hundred years the
initial cause of which would not have been better appreciated and
adjudicated on by a body of impartial lawyers; and that, if the quarrels
had thus been submitted to arbitration, we should have saved (including
the annual military expenditure and the cost of the present war) some
three million lives and more than L15,000,000,000--since the end of the
Napoleonic wars.
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