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Page 25
Turn away now from national economics and industry to international
politics. Does not its _real politik_ make the philosophical
naturalism of Spencer and Haeckel seem like child's play? For long
there has been one code of ethics for the peaceful penetration of
commercially desirable lands, for punitive expeditions against peoples
possessed of raw materials, for international banking and finance
and diplomatic intercourse, and another code for private honor and
personal morality. There has been one moral scale of values for the
father of his family and another for the same man as ward or state or
federal politician; one code to govern internal disputes within the
nation; another code to govern external disputes between nations.
And what is this code that produced the Prussian autocracy, that long
insisted on the opium trade between India and China, that permitted
the atrocities in the Belgian Congo, that sent first Russia and then
Japan into Port Arthur and first Germany and then Japan into Shantung,
that insists upon retaining the Turk in Constantinople, that produced
the already discredited treaty of Versailles? What is the code that
made the deadly rivalry of mounting armaments between army and army,
navy and navy, of the Europe before 1914? The code, to be sure, of
cunning, of greed, of might; the materialism of the philosopher and
the naturalism of the sensualist, clothed in grandiose forms and
covered with the insufferable hypocrisy of solemn phrases. There are
no conceivable ethical or religious interests and no humane goals
or values that justify these things. International diplomacy and
politics, economic imperialism, using political machinery and power to
half-cloak, half-champion its ends, has no law of Christian sacrifice
and no law of Greek moderation behind it. On the contrary, what
should interest the Christian preacher, as he regards it, is its sheer
anarchy, its unashamed and naked paganism. Its law is that of the
unscrupulous and the daring, not that of the compassionate or the
just. In what does scientific and emotional naturalism issue, then? In
this; a man, if he be a man, will stand above divine or human law and
make it operative only for the weaklings beneath. Wherever opportunity
offers he will consult his own will and gratify it to the full. To
have, to get, to buy, to sell, to exploit the world for power, to
exploit one's self for pleasure, this is to live. The only law is
the old primitive snarl; each man for himself, let the devil take the
hindmost.
There is only one end to such naturalism and that is increasing
anarchy. It means my will against your will; my appetite for gold, for
land, for women, for luxury and beauty against your appetite; until
at length it culminates in the open madness of physical violence,
physical destruction, physical death and despair. There can be no
other end to it. If men dare not risk being the lovers of their kind,
then they must choose between being the slaves of duty or the slaves
of force. What are we reading in the public prints and hearing from
platform and stage? The unending wail for "rights"; the assertion of
the individual. Ceased is the chant of duty, forgotten the sacrifice
of love!
The events which have transformed the world since 1914 are an awful
commentary upon such naturalism and a dreadful confirmation of our
indictment. Before the spectacle that many of us saw on those sodden
fields of Flanders, both humanist and religionist should be alike
aghast. How childish not to perceive that its causes, as distinguished
from its occasions, were common to our whole civilization. How
perverse not to confess that beneath all our modern life, as its
dominating motive, has lain that ruthless and pagan philosophy, which
creates alike the sybarite, the tyrant and the anarch; the philosophy
in which lust goes hand in hand with cruelty and unrestrained will to
power is accompanied by unmeasured and unscrupulous force.
It is incredible to me how men can take this delirium of
self-destruction, this plunging of the sword into our own heart in
a final frenzy of competing anarchy and deck it out with heroic and
poetic values, fling over it the seamless robe of Christ, unfurl above
it the banner of the Cross! The only contribution the World War
has made to religion has been to throw into intolerable relief the
essentially irreligious and inhumane character of our civilization.
Of course, the men and the ideals who actually fought the contest
as distinguished from the men and ideals which precipitated it and
determined its movements, fill gallant pages with their heroism and
holy sacrifice. For wars are fought by the young at the dictation of
the old, and youth is everywhere humane and poetic. Thus, if I may be
permitted to quote from a book of mine recently published:
"Our sons were bade to enter it as a 'war to end war,' a final
struggle which should abolish the intolerable burdens of armaments and
conscription. They were taught to exalt it as a strife for oppressed
and helpless peoples; the prelude to a new brotherhood and cooperation
among the nations, and to that reign of justice which is the
antecedent condition of peace.
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