One
thinks that God sent the war; another attributes it to German rebels
against God. One regards it as a spiritual agency devised for our good;
another says that it is an unmitigated calamity sent for our punishment.
One sees in it the failure of Christianity; others find in it precisely
a confirmation of Christian teaching. Some think it will draw men to
God; others that it will drive men from God. Unity, perhaps, we cannot
expect; but the empty rhetoric and utter sophistry of most of these
utterances reveal the complete lack of defence. On the main indictment
of the Christian Church, its failure to have condemned and removed
militarism long ago, all are silent; or the one preacher who notices it
can only dejectedly confess that it is true.
CHAPTER IV
THE WAR AND THEISM
In the leading Catholic periodical of this country there has been some
nervous discussion of the attitude of the Pope. A new man, a strong and
enlightened man, happens to have mounted the chair of Peter in the midst
of the war. For more than a century his predecessors have bemoaned the
increasing wickedness of the world: Pius VII, tossed like a helpless
cork on the waves of the Revolution; Leo XII and Pius VIII, the
associates of the Holy Alliance; Gregory XVI, eating sweetmeats or
mumbling his breviary while young Italy sweated blood; Pius IX, grasping
eagerly his tatters of sovereignty; Leo XIII, the unsuccessful
diplomatist; Pius X, the medieval monk.
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