obviousness. They ignore its organic nature, which makes it imperative that its living realities be placed before the theories about it. They make man shut his eyes to actual conditions, and persist in genuine evils, because of some fixed notion that things are not what they really are. They make the Pacifist stultify himself with the corrective Resist not evil, and blind himself to Jesus the non-resistant raiding the merchants and bankers of the temple. They make the meekness of Jesus a universal, invariable rule in all junctures, which for Jesus himself it positively was not.

Yet Christianity is made interesting by the perennial efforts of man to fix generalizations upon the picturesque and passionate work of its master. It is pertinent to point out how the traditional gentleness of Jesus has developed a deplorable feminization of his character. In the same way the love of God has proved so comfortable to our generation that his justice is forgotten; and no longer a firm and loving father, exercising vigorous guidance over the aspirations of his children, he has become a sort of indulgent aunt, nursing the pettishness of whining or optimistic sentimentalists.

It is then not merely an error of abstraction to make of Jesus a colorless specialist in meekness and love. It is an error of sentimentalism as well. Jesus grieved for man's misery, but he never told man it was the fault of somebody else or of the environment. He put the responsibility on man himself. He had no trust in any spontaneous goodness of the human heart, as proclaimed later by Rousseau, but held that man was innately weak and prone to sin, and must call on God for moral strength. He had no interest in the softness of this life, nor in the fancied abstract right of Mr. LaFollette's young men to save their lives for the sake of the things of this world. That is because Jesus believed that this existence, as I said toward the beginning, at most is no more than an episode in a larger life, and that its miseries are not to be counted in the

struggle on behalf of eternal righteousness. Accordingly, "whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it." Indeed, sacrifice is central to the ideas and actions of Jesus. True living is giving, not receiving; and the greater the gift, the nobler the life. But of course the sentimental Pacifist, anxious as he is to support his case with Christianity, forgets all this, and his Pacifism is essentially not religious or Christian, but materialistic.

Besides making an unreal generalization of the meekness and love of Jesus, and sentimentalizing away the essential austerity of his teaching, the so-called Christian Pacifist has also much to say of the Peace of which Jesus is Prince. But the peace of the Bible is only political possibly in the famous phrase of Isaiah's ninth chapter, regarding the Prince of Peace. And even then it refers certainly to the tranquil welfare of the nation within itself. The "peace of God which passeth all understanding," the "peace which I give unto you," the "peace which the world cannot give," is not anything external, but rather is purely a state of soul. Now although international peace was an ideal about two thousand years unborn when Jesus lived, it is still true that such peace, in so far as it depends on allaying men's ungenerous hatreds and self-seekings, is by construction thoroughly Christian. But international "peace at any price," which means compromise with any possible evil, is flatly un-Christian, since it puts acquiescence with the ways of the world before the duty of sacrifice and struggle on behalf of eternal righteousuess.

Of course, it will be objected that this eternal righteousness is itself an abstraction. But since that objection will come from some scientific Pacifist, I shall refuse to be drawn from the object of my attack - sentimental Pacifism. And the sentimental Pacifist cannot deny the reality, however ineffable, of eternal righteousness, without repudiating Christianity. He can only say that

eternal righteousness, known to him through his conscience, is not supported but hindered by war. But war is not in itself a thing good or bad; it is a large-scale sacrifice of life and comfort for some cause. The conditions which make the war as a whole right or wrong are antecedent to it, and bear upon its cause. Its cause is a moral issue. Every moral issue is more or less important. If less, great sacrifice on its account is inexpedient. If more, sacrifice to the very uttermost is not only expedient but spiritually mandatory. To refuse the sacrifice of war, in any and all events, is to degrade all moral issues to the level of expedience and convenience, which is immoral and un-Christian.

Again it may be said that my argument has over and over justified the most shameless enterprises. This fact only indicates that every moral issue has an intellectual character. Conscience alone cannot decide all things. The wise, it has been said, are kept busy undoing the evil done by the good. But to refuse a moral decision upon the evidence in support of some wars, notably this one, is not only to renounce intellection before a moral issue; it is to make conscience utterly puny. Moreover if any argument works both ways and justifies evil as much as good, it is Pacifism itself. For peace in itself may be good or bad, as war in itself may be good or bad. Certainly neither war nor peace, as things in themselves, interested Jesus: he dealt with the personal evil which might be in any institution, which might therefore be in peace or in

war.

But it will be said war is un-Christian for the reason that it involves taking life, and therefore inevitably breeds that personal evil that Christianity seeks to overcome. In the first place, I answer that the taking of life, however deplorable, is not incompatible with Christianity, since it may be expedient to righteousness, to say nothing of wellbeing. In the second place, I answer that war affects personal character wholesomely as much as it does viciously,

just as does marriage, or music, or travelling abroad. If it brutalizes, it also spiritualizes; if it depraves, it also purifies. Indeed, the consistent Christian opinion will be, as I have said in other words, that human character only, not institutions or abstractions or environment, is the real moral entity. It is with it that Jesus dealt, and with it he would deal to-day.

In this discussion, I repeat, I have made no attempt to support Christianity against the Pacifist who is consistently a scientific humanitarian. I have attempted to make plain, however, what seems to me the utter inconsistency of Prince of Peace Pacifism in supporting itself with Christianity. Of course, the Pacifist, like anybody else, will attempt to stand on as many legs as possible. And in this country's strange mixture of materialism and uncritical religion, he has as popular and plausible a leg as can be found. We must realize that with its support, the sentimental Pacifist, whether sincere or pro-German, can keep annoyingly in the way of the American majority that is warring for peace and for the right as God gives us to see the right. Abstract Pacifism we may be sure will never bring us peace. No more did abstract tolerance bring toleration. Furthermore, though sentimental Pacifism is a special phenomenon of war time, it is but one manifestation of a spiritual debility only less noticeably disturbing in time of peace. A nation need not be militaristic, nor even very military, to be just, intelligent, free, and idealistic. It will take wisdom, however, to avoid the former without also missing the latter.

A LOST IDEAL

ERHAPS one of the most disheartening observa

PER

tions forced upon the student of history is man's fatal propensity to become the victim of formulæ. Every definition, it has been said, is the grave of an idea, and it does seem as if it were well-nigh impossible to get any conception, or ideal, once clearly and strikingly expressed without its immediately being bandied about by those who have but the slightest comprehension of its real significance. As a natural result of this tendency, history is strown with the wreckage of abandoned ideals, that have lost their power to inspire, because their inner spiritual significance has been obscured; and it has usually been the rediscovery of the meaning of some unfulfilled but abandoned ideal, that has marked the beginning of the great forward movements of thought. Yet in the face of this recognized fact, we find individuals to-day impatiently turning away from the past, under the delusion that because many of its ideals have failed, there is nothing to be learned from them But the abandonment of an ideal does not necessarily imply the passing of its usefulness: its failure may, instead, be due to a lack of proper comprehension, or to the loss of some fundamental principle that animated its early framers; and the way to be benefited by such an ideal is not to neglect it, but clearly to understand its meaning and the cause of its failure.

In none of the practical arts is this unwillingness to learn from the accumulated experience of mankind more manifest to-day than in the case of the most difficult of them all, namely, education. Our educational leaders might, if they would, be much edified by a study of the experience of the builders of Babel. But instead, the yearly quota of patent methods for making learning easy