Calendar: 1927-1928 Page 487

ii OX THE USES OF THE STUDY OF WAR For time this last lesson overwhelmed all others Our insular position our long freedom from commitment to great war on land our trust in our supremacy at sea the separation of our small professional army from the national life had all tended to close our minds to the dangers which threatened us and the shock when they came was the greater There were few amongst us who had even conceived the possibility of so tremendous cataclysm as the Great War Naturally enough then the first tendency of the nation was to regard everything connected with the war with horror and to consider every attempt to study its lessons as form of militarism But kindly time is now beginning to dull the keen edge of horror and we are becoming more and more able to review the events which led up and followed August 4th 1914 with calm and judgment We are begin- ning to see that the loss and sacrifice which it involves are not in themselves good reasons for shrinking from war do not think that better reply to that attitude of mind has ever been given than was made by my grandfather nearly eighty-five years ago when he was professor of this College There is much in the worst feelings of men especially in our day which sympathises with the Quaker language respecting war and punishments There is cowardly shrinking from mere physical suffering great disposition to talk about the expensiveness of national honour because money is visible honour an invisible thing there is an unreasonable uncharitable and superstitious notion that soldier so far as his profession is concerned is of this world and that man who dies on the field of battle is necessarily less prepared for his change than one who dies in his bed All these feelings which have tended sadly to degrade and impoverish the mind of modern Europe to cultivate the trade temper to make armies what they are told they must be and therefore to make them dangerous by depriving them of any high restraining principle have been greatly encouraged by the tone which religious men of our day have adopted from the Quakers What is such language doing for the promotion of permanent and universal peace It is the greatest hindrance to any high understanding of the words to any hopeful expectation of the thing For whoever translates the holy name Peace' by carnal security or luxurious ease desecrates it and makes every scriptural application of it unmeaning Whoever teaches civilians to love their pelf above all things or military men to believe that they have no vocation but murderous one helps to make the one so weak that they must be ready to quail before any physical force the other so wicked that they must be ready to exert it And the loss of all national spirit will lead as it has ever done not to golden age of Christian fraternisation but to military despotism Far otherwise as we have seen already has the Church of Christ worked in the world It has been the instrument of putting down military despotism the instrument of evoking national feeling Maurice The Kingdom of Christ 1st edition vol II 301