Why Christianity did not prevent the war

Preface

THESE addresses were not a series. They were occasional. If they have not surface sequence, they do have essential connection in their purpose to give light and strength to our people as aids to victory. All of them were spoken as sermons at home. Then, being called for, were repeated and somewhat expanded. They were given to Preachers' Meetings in New York, and to various clubs, among them the Rotary Club, the New York Republican Club and the Lawyers' Club of New York. In March, 1918, several of them were spoken to the eight thousand public school teachers of Chicago, and at various times to numerous popular assemblies. Everywhere they were called for in printed form and it was urged that so prepared they would multiply their influence for good.

The Rotary Club of New York published one, circulating thousands of copies. My honored and generous friend, Mr. Edwin O. Grover, President of the Prang Art Publishing Company, New York and Chicago, out of patriotism vi ^Preface

and friendship, at his own expense printed some thousands of copies of three addresses.

The New York Republican Club prints another in its series for 1917-18; and the Lawyers' Club another in the Report of their Annual Meeting for 1918.

Now, the George H. Doran Company, whose devotion to the Allied Cause has given the world an unsurpassed contribution of invaluable patriotic books and pamphlets, undertakes to print these nine speeches together, hoping thus, as I also hope, to aid to victory.

This book is not prepared or sent forth as literature. These are War Discourses, to rouse the spirits of men, to assist correct thinking, to formulate clearly war issues and to inspire the stern justice of battle.

Every paragraph has been tested practically on uncommonly intelligent American audiences and approved by them in ways encouraging to the author.

With diffidence because of their incompleteness, with confidence as to their truth and with hope of their usefulness, the author gladly presents them to the larger public and invokes the blessing of God upon them as a force for Righteousness and Justice among mankind.

Contents

PAGE

I. Why Christianity Did Not Prevent the

War ii

II The Antagonism of German Political

Philosophy to Christian Truth and

Morals

THE action of Germany in precipitating this war greatly surprised and startled mankind. As the Teuton assaulted Belgium and France our wonder gave place to amazement and astonishment, succeeded by horror and execration, and these feelings continually intensified, have increased as the Germans have developed and fought to execute, through inhuman savagery, their long-prepared scheme of world domination. Such barbaric expression of the life and character of the German nation was totally unexpected by most of us. That a people whom we regarded with entire good will and credited with many kindly virtues should deliberately make such war, should be so immoral and unfeeling, so treacherous and cruel, so egotistical and rapacious, so religious and so pagan, we could barely credit and cannot yet understand. Our good will for them has not been wholly destroyed. We have condemned but do not hate them as we try to understand their contradictions and misdeeds.

In seeking to account for their conduct and to justify against them the most universal antagonism of mankind, we feel that we accomplish little by merely giving way to violent denunciation of their actions, though these deserve our severest condemnation; and consistent with our former good opinion of the German people, we seek explanation, if any there be, for actions which, by every law of morals and humanity, we execrate and abhor. In the spirit of fairness, not to be destroyed by our unequivocal hostility to their behavior, we have sought to account for their misdoings. May I detail some of the assumptions which we have made in our endeavor to place in an intelligent light our explanation of the actions of which Germany has been guilty ?

We at first assumed that this brutal, bloody, inhuman savagery is the work of the purely military party. These we discriminated from the people at large. They might have dragged the nation unwillingly into the war. But from the first the nation has been at one with these military leaders. The state as a whole is entirely military and has never hesitated to adopt and execute the policy of its General Staff, lending its full and united strength to all their plans and deeds.

Then we assumed that the rulers are responsible and that they deserve all the condemnation, supposing that the people had not formulated or agreed to their policy; especially has the Kaiser been held responsible, as the incarnation of evil, the inspirer of war. But the nation at the beginning and ever since, and now, has unitedly supported its rulers, and this support has been given by Germans of all classes. The political philosophers have honored and defended their rulers; the theological faculties have endorsed them; the most distinguished university professors and scholars have commended them ; masters in science have lauded them; the whole body of writers and artists have praised their course. These various leaders have issued manifestoes to the world fully upholding their rulers and applauding the national action. Spiritual leaders like Eucken, intellectuals, a numberless host, the Socialists, who previously denounced the war, have given steady and uncompromising support to their rulers without excusing or apologising for them in any particular.

We have assumed that the people were blindly and ignorantly following these leaders and that when once their eyes should be opened they would revolt and withdraw. But we must remember that the German people are the most educated in books and by schools of any nation of the world. They have given to many lands systems of learning, from kindergarten to postgraduate universities ; they are not ignorant and blind for lack of schooling. They are a learned, not an ignorant people.

We have assumed that when the German people had received knowledge of American aims, of the motives of the Allies, of what free government really means, they would fall away from their governing bodies. The President of the United States in a long and able message fully assumed this ; so that multitudes of men declared : "If only this Presidential message can be placed before the German people they will be severed from autocracy, will revolt and establish free government and so end the war." But now, after three years of war, there is scarcely a trace of such revolution, nor is there any reliable information, however much we may desire it, showing signs of ferment or revolution in political Germany. This dream of ours is a vain dream. Germany is not on the verge of uprising or of revolution any more than Britain and France have been in their cabinet changes.

We have assumed, and sometimes declared, that the Germans are insane; that they are obsessed by hallucinations which sanity would repudiate ; that they are running amuck ; fanatics among the nations; a mad dog in the streets of the world. But we know that despite their atrocious wickedness, this is not true. They are not insane according to any proper definition of insanity. It has been suggestively said, and with some truth, that the German scholarly mind "begins by assuming a large premise which has no foundation, and then reasons with irresistible logic to a preposterous conclusion." This may describe a mental habit, but it does not describe the insanity recognised by experts as mental irresponsibility. We do not believe the German nation to be intellectually insane.

We have assumed that autocracy as a scheme of government is now making its last stand against the world flood of rising democracy, and that this war is to bring the end of kings, at least of autocratic kings. But we, not the Germans, have assumed this. They revere their autocracy, they have had great material prosperity under it, as we have had under democracy. Their history is a record of remarkable advance under the government which we condemn. Since Frederick William, ruling from 1713 to 1740, and Frederick the Great, from 1740 to 1786, they have made their gains, and almost unprecedented gains they are, under the very form of government which now controls them and for which they now unitedly stand and heroically die. That government has held to the theory of the State as the army, the army as the State, and the reigning house claiming divine right to rule is honored and revered, if not loved, with all sincerity to-day.

Besides, in our assertion that democracy is the only form of government suited to popular advantage, we really have not chosen a popular watchword. First of all, most of the people of America when they think of democracy mean not the general definition, but think of the American Democratic Party. They do not objectise the idea of the rule of the people. Besides, we do not define democracy clearly. We declare as if it were final, that "all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." By this we justify popular government. Do we mean the consent of all those under its sway? There is no government, no republic, where all the people in it consent to its sway. Do we mean then that in a democracy, government derives its just powers from the consent of a majority? But a majority is only a part of those governed. It may be but slightly over one-half; it may even be a minority that administers the affairs of the republic. The truth is that no government has just powers unless they come from those universal and eternal laws, not made by majorities or voted or amended by legislatures, made and announced by the eternal God; laws which no legislature dare assume to amend or repeal ; laws of morals and humanity ; of universal duty and benevolence. So, then, our expectation of the complete passing away of autocracy before democracy is not an intelligent conviction or an adequate clarion with which to arouse our republic to battle against overthrow. And, remote from democracy, the autocracy of Germany has always been and now is a powerful form of government.

We have broadly assumed that now the end of kingly rule is near at hand. But Great Britain, Belgium and Italy are not contemplating this as a result of the war. They have kings now and expect to have them hereafter.

We have made much of the assumption that military preparedness was the cause of the war. We must, however, face the fact that nations wholly unprepared are in the war, battling for life and liberty, conspicuously ourselves. America has evidently proceeded on wholly false theories of Germany's action until this day, of which those assumptions which I have sketched are among the most prominent. None of them, nor all of them, satisfactorily account for the war. Yet what is more necessary than to penetrate to the exact causes which have created the present world-wide catastrophe and which are threatening destruction and chaos at the present time? What has made Germany a pirate among states, a murderer, a monster?

ii

Allow me to assume and later prove that German political philosophy, into the acceptance and full belief of which the German nation has been drilled for many years, is the actual and adequate cause and explanation of its actions, apart from which it is neither adequately understood nor properly antagonised. To simplify it so that I may discuss it clearly in the time allowed, let me affirm and later demonstrate that this is a strife between two philosophies, two systems of thought, two codes of morals, mutually exclusive and irreconcilable; two views of humanity and of religion, of man and of God.

I ask you to consider the antagonism of German political philosophy to Christian truth and morals, as indicating what we fight and what for.

So long as Germany holds the theory which created this war, so long she will fight to carry it out. The theory begins and ends in the avowed right and purpose of Germany to subjugate all other nations and to dominate the world. Let me disclose their theory by a concrete presentation of it.

The greatest and most influential political philosopher of Germany during the last century is Heinrich Von Treitschke. He, more than any single character in German political life, was responsible for the intense anti-English sentiment that flamed out in the Boer War and he is ruling the thought of the German nation, as developed at the present time. His ideals and theories, his hatreds and persuasions precipitated this war. Born in 1834, his father a soldier, Von Treitschke was destined for the army. An illness in his youth, which deprived him of his hearing, diverted him to scholarship and the study of politics. His heroes were the heroes of Prussia, and having distinguished himself in the schools of learning, at twenty-five years of age, he delivered his first course of political lectures at Leipzig in 1859. Out of this grew his treatise on the State.

From the beginning he was impressively popular. Later, at the great universities of Freiburg, Kiel, Heidelberg and Berlin, he was followed by admiring crowds of students, and always, from his beginning at Leipzig in 1859, to his death in 1895, a period of thirty-six years, his lecture rooms were thronged as those of no other professor in Germany; the concourse attending them reminding one of the great gatherings to hear Abelard in the Middle Ages. They all heard him extol the greatness of Germany, the unexampled dynasty of the Hohenzollerns, the glory of the army.

In person Von Treitschke was a man of high character, of marked intellectual aspect, of great mentality, of utmost sincerity of purpose and of surpassing eloquence. Generations of German students came under his sway and acknowledged his power. He was a friend of Bismarck, the apologist of the Hohenzollerns and the ardent and eager supporter of the bureaucracy of Germany.

In his conviction the State was supreme, and from the State there was no appeal. The individual counted for nothing save as the creature of the State. The State was an army; the army the State. This theory was far older than Von Treitschke, having been that of Frederick William and Frederick the Great in the eighteenth century.

Foremost among the fundamental principles taught by this remarkable man was the stoutly affirmed belief that the Hohenzollerns, by divine right, should rule Prussia, and that Prussia, for the good of Germany, should rule Germany. It was a small step from this proposition to his next main assertion that Germany, for the good of the world, should dominate the world. He came to this conclusion partly through the theory of atheistic evolution, so prevalent in German thought, and partly on account of his exalted idealisation of the German character and culture. He believed that in "the struggle for life," followed by "the survival of the fittest," Germany had won in the struggle, and Germany of all was the fittest. This led him to regard with ill-concealed contempt all other nations and led him to the belief that it would be for their welfare if Germany dominated over them.

He particularly hated and despised Great Britain. Throughout his whole career he regarded it with scorn, antipathy and hatred, and he poured out contempt, rancor and insult continually upon the English character and upon the English nation. He called them the "robber among the nations," affirming that they held their undeserved sway over about a fifth of the world on account of their insular position, the supineness of the other nations, the duplicity of their diplomacy and the hypocrisy of the English character. His denunciation of the English people and government was a sort that, applied to an individual, it would be insulting to the last degree, and he evermore looked forward and worked toward the day when Germany, assailing England, should beat her down in war and become the master of the world.

If we have raised a question as to the amazing conceit of Germany as expressed in many a pompous phrase since the beginning of this war, let it be said that this is a proper consequence and expression of the philosophy of Treitschke and his associates, the great school that grew up around him, followed his leadership, and developed his ideals.

Germany was to dominate the world for the good of the world, and for the domination of the world by Germany, the army was the great instrument. This army was to be conterminous with the State, and the State with the army ; the entire State a military power, and war the method of its supremacy. Nowhere in the seventeen volumes of Von Treitschke's collected works, not in his great history, which is regarded with the utmost respect in Germany, did he ever say a word against war, never calling it the scourge of mankind or deprecating its existence, but, like his influential disciple, Bernhardi, if not in the same words, he regarded war as a biological necessity, indicating the virility of the nation and leading to the highest good of mankind. Any attempt to abolish war was unwise and immoral.

In order that this theory of conquest might be carried out by an invincible army it was necessary to regard as brothers only those dwelling within the German State. Outside of those boundaries there was no fraternal obligation. The theory of the way the war was to be carried on demanded that it be ruthless to the last degree. I am not now averring that Von Treitschke himself elaborated every detail of the system now being carried out ; but he originated it, inspired it and was followed by a great multitude of intellectuals who gave their assent to his leadership and more fully worked out his theory.

Inhumanity in war, as the world understands inhumanity, is one of the fundamental conditions of war, as this school of philosophy holds it. It stopped at nothing. It knew no mercy, hesitated at no atrocity, deliberately proposed to massacre, murder, deport, torture, starve to death those who stood in its way. Such is the theory and such the practise.

Quite as visibly as this philosophy repudiates humanity it despises morals; particularly those morals which relate to truth. Astonished, we have heard the statement of the German Chancellor that treaties were only scraps of paper. But it is a definite part of their theory that there are no moralities which should stand between the nation and the development of its ideals.

Having repudiated morality and humanity, the question arose: how should this attitude of leading minds be made that of the entire German nation, of whom great multitudes were both moral and humane? Modern morality and humanity, as we understand them, are distinctly Christian in their spirit and purpose. To fulfill, therefore, the purpose of Germany to dominate the world by an army engaged in ruthless war, unrestrained by morality and humanity, it became necessary to dispossess the German people of the Christian ideals of morals and humaneness which had possessed them. Therefore, this political philosophy deliberately gave itself to the most violent attack upon Christianity. Until they could rid the German people of the ideals of Christianity, their philosophy could not penetrate or control the nation.

The attack upon Christianity was deliberately made, toward a hundred years ago. When, about the middle of the last century, Strauss assailed the Gospel and the life of Christ as mythical, he was following out the lines of this policy, and at that time not a few were led away by his theories. But later the development became much more widespread, intense and more sweepingly antagonistic.

Many of the German political philosophers affirm that the greatest mistake which Germany has ever made was in accepting Christianity from the Roman Empire in the fifth century. They declare that the Roman Empire was then effete and in a decline; that Galilee, from which the Roman Empire took the Christian faith, was also a decadent nation, and that it has always been a dreary spell cast upon the mind of Germany, that they accepted this religion. For thirty generations, some of them declare, Germany has struggled to rid itself of an alien religion; of a vision which it did not respect ; of a God that it would not adore; of a system of religion which was foreign to the German genius. Germany's native instinct for playing a creative role in religion had been stunted and thwarted. Germany, they declare, should exercise creative powers in the matter of religion, repudiating all but its own creation. That religion they called "The Religion of Valor." One of its mottoes is to "Live dangerously."

Von Treitschke's thought of the State was the State controlled by nothing but its own ideals. Those who followed him reaffirmed this with additional energy. Napoleon was their ideal rather than Christ; Corsica rather than Galilee, became to them the seat of the ideas which they would espouse. They travestied and do now the Beatitudes. Instead of saying "Blessed are the peace makers" they say "Blessed are the war makers, for they shall conquer the earth and shall receive the applause, if not of Jehovah, of Odin, who is greater than Jehovah." They repudiated the beatitude on the meek, and blessed the valiant rather than the teachable; and instead of commending the poor in spirit, they commended the exalted and heroic in spirit who have no sense of humanity. They prepared to found a world empire and also a world religion.

This "Religion of Valor" had in it no place for Christian virtues and was to be substituted for the Christian faith. Sympathy, kindness, humanity were labelled weaknesses.

But now, as the Christian religion, especially in the mind of the German people, was dependent upon the Bible, which Luther had so greatly exalted in the sixteenth century, it became necessary to the scheme of German philosophy and German conquest, to break up the foundations of Christianity by weakening the authority of the Bible. They, therefore, set about this systematically, and during recent years have been urgent to propagate what is called popularly "The Destructive Criticism." The whole strength of German scholarship, with few exceptions, has been turned to the effort to destroy the authority of the Bible as related to Christianity, to morals and to humanity. So doing, they still retained their self-created religion and morals, which they called "The Religion of Valor."

The evil influence of their destructive work passed to other nations, and many who called themselves scholars surrendered to the assumptions of German so-called scholarship. When, therefore, they came to the moment of war upon the whole world, their theory, link by link, could be stated thus: The Hohenzollerns, for the good of Prussia, should dominate Prussia; Prussia, for the good of Germany, should dominate Germany; Germany, for the good of the world, should dominate the world. Germany should dominate the world because it was superior and the nations of the world contemptible.

The agency of German domination should be the army. The army should perform its work with a ruthless disregard of all the so-called laws of war, of morality and of humanity. To sweep away the reverence of the German people for morality and humanity it was necessary to get rid of the Christian religion, which was the foundation of these virtues, and to substitute therefor, as they did, another, which was anti- Christian, called "The Religion of Valor," as pagan as Attila's.

To make sure that they could rid themselves and the German people of the Christian religion, they deemed it necessary that they should destroy the authority of the Holy Scriptures. This they did, among themselves, and considerably among the nations of the world. But while they had a religion left, which, though pagan, was powerful, those of other lands who accepted their anti-Christian and anti-Biblical theories, had nothing left except the sentiment of religion, and found themselves in this country, and to a considerable extent also in Britain, without an authoritative and divine religion and corresponding conviction; but holding an emasculated, nonauthoritative sentiment, many among us even questioning whether it was consistent with Christianity to fight for faith, for humanity and for morality. So the German philosophy worked to its own strengthening, for its own purpose, and to the weakening of all those nations on whom they proposed to fall. The Germans became ruthless warriors. Many so-called Christians became sentimental pacifists.

You have wondered why the German Emperor is making so many appeals to God and nevertheless seems to lack Christian moral sense and Christian humanity. I have given you the reason. The God of Germany is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is not the God of the Christian Scriptures, but the manufactured patron of German conquest and world dominion.

Many will now inquire, "How could a theory like this, being taught, dispossess a nation of the fundamental principles of Christianity?" My answer is easy. Most singular illusions sweep over and possess myriads of mankind. For example, in the United States of America we have the delusion known as Mormonism. It is alleged by its devotees that in 1827 one Joseph Smith discovered plates of gold on which, in "reformed Egyptian" — whatever that may be — were the statements which he afterward made to the world. It matters not that Joseph Smith was a person of low and vile character, notorious for falsehood, for idleness, for immorality. It matters not to those who follow him that the stories which he told of the possession of these plates are totally unbelievable and contradictory. There are now hundreds of thousands of followers of this man in America, whom they revere as a prophet and a saint.

He said, for example, that these golden plates were given him in a supernatural way; but no such golden plates have ever been seen or known. He declared first that they were given him by a man of Spanish aspect, whose throat was cut and blood running down. He afterward declared that they were given to him by an angel. He affirmed that whoever looked upon these plates would die. He afterward promised that he would show them, which he never did, to a very large circle of friends. The theology which they developed was fantastic; the history fictitious; the morality outrageous ; and yet, from that time to this, there have been gathering more and more people to the standard of Mormonism, following Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, until to-day they hold the balance of political power in several States of the American Union. They are a financial force which is recognised among the powerful forces of the nation and is looked upon with awe and fear. They declare their purpose to rule the nation. They send forth more missionaries, in proportion to their numbers, than any other body which calls itself religious. They obtained their statehood by perjury to the national government, declaring that they had abandoned polygamy, which they never abandoned and which their head declared afterward before a committee of Congress, he still practised; and so, in unnumbered ways, they have given the lie to their pretensions and shown the utter folly of those who accept their theories. If all that could be done in America within less than one hundred years by an ignorant, dishonorable, superstitious and degraded leader, what may you not expect when you see the forces which operated in Germany to supplant Christianity, humanity and morality, and to send the nation forth on a plan of world conquest? Behind the German purpose were nearly two hundred years of very great material prosperity under their form of government. Their rulers, a powerful family deserving well in many respects of their people, their theory of superiority and dominion highly satisfactory to the self-consciousness, the pride and the ambitions of the German people; their teachers, the foremost philosophers of their time, the chief theologians, the leading scientific and literary men. And bear in mind that all these German teaching forces were the creatures of the State; they were selected by the State ; they received their salaries from the State, from the foremost to the least in the lowest schools. They were discharged if they failed to please the State ; and so they flung the sum total of the forces of a powerful government and an immense force of highly trained teachers into the work of justifying and leading this great empire on a course and career of world conquest. Such an appeal so fathered, fostered and taught, is adequate and ample to produce the results we now behold.

It is plain enough that this is a rational accounting for the results of their theory upon the German nation, creating a solidarity as remarkable as that of any nation in human history.

This purpose is "inspired by the pulpits as religion; taught by the universities as philosophy; disseminated by the press as policy and political necessity; embodied in the army as national loyalty and duty, and focused on the Kaiser as the minister of the Almighty." Blasphemous, fundamentally narrow and inhuman as it is, you can see how it became an obsession, a very devil of pride in the breasts of seventy million Germans.

And here let me present additional proofs of the truth that this is the base and beginning, as well as the strength of this war on the German side, by calling your attention to certain collateral historical evidence. All that I have presented is absolutely consistent with everything that the German powers have done in the three years since the beginning of this war. Do we declare that they have violated all principles of Christianity, of humanity or morality? The evidence is before the whole world, written on the bloodiest pages of human history. Let me dwell upon it briefly to show how really this is true.