There is probably
not a Catholic lawyer in the world who does not reject the old idea of
punishment as barbaric, yet he placidly believes that God retains it.
That is why we find a Catholic archbishop like Carr putting forth so
revolting an idea of the war, while Protestant preachers as a rule
shrink from mentioning God in connection with it. These things make it
impossible for one to understand how non-Christians can say, as they do
sometimes, that if they _were_ to accept a creed, it would be the Roman
creed.
Any theory of the war which proceeds on the lines of the hell-theory is
simply barbaric, and is beneath serious discussion. We know to-day that
both ethics and religion are in a state of constant evolution. We look
back over a stream of several thousand years of historically traceable
development; we follow that stream faintly through earlier tens of
thousands of years in the ideas of primitive peoples; and we see the
evolution going on plainly in the creeds and ethical codes of our own
time. But the practice of registering certain stages of this evolution
in sacred books or codes, which are then imposed on man for centuries or
millennia as something unalterable, has been and is a very serious
hindrance to development, both in ethics and religion.
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