Meantime a persistent,
comprehensive, intensely earnest propaganda of peace is needed. Since I
wrote a little work on those lines in 1899 I have had fifteen years'
experience of preaching the gospel of peace, and know well how
convincing are its arguments and how little it has to overcome except
inertia. We need only to help the imagination of the mass of people; to
put clearly before them the comparative easiness and the incalculable
value of the change. Christianity has not tried and failed; it has not
even tried. It has wasted its resources in generalities which have
proved wholly futile. We must speak as men to men; and men will be more
open to conviction when we plead that, not the supposed commands of a
Galilean preacher of nineteen hundred years ago, but their own highest
and most sacred instincts, bid them lay down their arms and inaugurate
the age of international peace.
[Footnote 1: _The Service of Man_ (_6d._ edition), p. 16.]
[Footnote 2: As I write, the Press describes Canon Green of Burnley as
saying that "the war is a divine judgment on the world--England for the
last ten years has been God-forgetting, drunken, immoral."]
[Footnote 3: Let me again guard myself against misrepresentation.
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