The war does not encourage the chances of the Christian God.
A few modern religious thinkers seem to imagine that they have found
some relief by devising the formula that God's plan is to "co-operate
with man," and in those modern advances which I have freely admitted
they see indications of this co-operation. This new formula is not a
whit better than the other phrases which have, at various stages, been
regarded by religions people as profound thoughts. In the recent history
of moral progress we have, as a rule, a minority of high-minded men and
women struggling to impress their sentiments on the inert majority. The
new theologian is not daunted in the application of his theory by the
fact that a large proportion of these pioneers did not believe in God at
all, so I will not discuss that aspect; though no doubt the plain man
will find it interesting to trace how, in the earlier and more difficult
days of modern humanism, so few of the reformers were Christian
ministers and so many Rationalists. From the historical point of view,
however, we find this line of development quite intelligible. We find,
for instance, Robert Owen (a great Rationalist) advocating the
substitution of arbitration for war nearly a century ago, and we
discover the earlier sources of Owen's enthusiasm in English Radicals
like Godwin, who were affected by the early French Revolutionaries, who
had been influenced by Rousseau, and so on.
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