GIFT OF
HE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
THE OPPORTUNITY OF
THE CHURCH
BY
CHARLES GORE, M.A., D.D., HON. D.C.L-, Oxford
BISHOP OF OXFORD
AUTHOR OF "the PERMANENT CREED," "THE NEW THE-
OLOGY AND THE OLD RELIGION," "THE QUESTION
OF DIVORCE," "THE RELIGION OF THE
CHURCH," ETC.
GIFT
JUL. 23 19io
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
ice Ten Cents
*f 4'2'
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^
A^
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
THE OPPORTUNITY OF
THE CHURCH
Surely the Christian Church, in all its parts and
members, should welcome the project of the League of
Nations and organise itself into vigorous unanimity to
press it to the front in the attention of all civilised
peoples: both as a practical proposal made to us by
our most experienced and most trusted statesmen and
as a proposal profoundly congenial to the Christian
spirit. This is the thesis which I seek to maintain in
this paper.
THE PROPOSAL OF THE LEAGUE
The proposal, I repeat, comes not from wild idealists
but from practical statesmen, from President Wilson
and Mr. Taft, from Mr. Asquith, Mr. Lloyd George,
Lord Grey and Mr. Balfour, and from others in the
allied and neutral nations, to say nothing at present
about Germany and Austria. Such men cannot be
accused of seeking "peace at any price," or of failing
to appreciate the supreme importance of prosecuting
the war with unremitting energy to the furthest pos-
1
380048
2 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
sible point of success. But they will not be satisfied
with military successes. They demand also this pacific
measure — the organisation of a League of Nations.
They regard it, no doubt, as difficult of realisation but
not as impracticable. They speak of it as the most
hopeful, perhaps the only hopeful, basis of a just and
enduring peace.
Something will have to be said later about the details
of the scheme, so far as they have been formulated or
outlined. But let us take it now simply in its most
general idea — that of a League of Nations to maintain
and enforce peace, with an international tribunal to
decide "justiciable" disputes between nations — that is
such questions as having been embodied in treaties or
coming under the head of some accepted international
law admit of settlement by judicial process — and for
the greater matters of controversy an international
court of arbitration which must at least have all such
matters fully laid before it by the contending nations,
and have time allowed to it to make proposals and to
have them listened to and considered by both sides,
before either nation or group of nations could go to
war or mobilise its forces for war without becoming
the enemy of the whole League; and the authority of
the League is to have behind it the sanction of eco-
nomic pressure to be exerted by the whole League —
such as the boycotting of a recalcitrant nation — and,
at the last resort, the armed force of the whole League
to support its action.
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH
THE REACTION IN POPULAE PHILOSOPHY
Now it represents a great change in international
politics that our responsible statesmen should accept as
practicable such an embodiment of a supernational
authority. But it is not too much to say that this idea
of a League of Nations is, through the welcome these
statesmen have given it, taking the place formerly held
in men's minds by the idea of the Balance of Power.
The idea of the Balance of Power was rooted in the
principle of selfishness — the corporate selfishness of
nations. Every nation, it was assumed, would seek its
own ends undeterred by any consideration for its neigh-
bours' welfare. The only way to minimise the threat
of war, arising from jarring interests, whenever one
nation should have the strength to crush another, was
to organise such combinations of nations in rival alli-
ances as to balance one another and to produce an
equilibrium in which the chances on either side of vic-
tory or defeat would be so equahsed as to reduce to a
minimum the probability of any nation being willing to
take the risk of war.
There was here no appeal to any higher motive than
national selfishness. On the moral plane the idea of the
balance of power among the nations was of a piece with
the idea which was at work in the industrial world, the
idea of free competition between individuals or classes ;
each individual or class, or group of individuals or
classes, being supposed to have no motive which could
4 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
effectively be appealed to than the motive of unlimited
acquisitiveness, the desire to sell its goods or its labour
in the dearest and to buy the goods and labour of
others in the cheapest market. The good of the world,
it was imagined, would best be secured by this prin-
ciple of unrestricted competition, in which appeal was
made, in industrial or political life, to no other motive
except intelligent selfishness, individual or corporate.
Intelligent self-interest, science and commerce, without
any higher moral appeal, were relied upon as the in-
struments of progress and peace.
Such a philosophy was at its zenith in the middle of
the last century. But we have seen its setting. Long
before the war the philosophy of selfishness had been
discredited alike in the internal life of nations and in
their mutual relations. Within the nations it had led
to the commercial exploiting of the weak by the strong,
and to disgusting extremes of poverty and wealth ; and,
in reaction from these abuses, it threatened us with civil
wars, the wars of labour against capital. Society
appeared to be tending to disruption. In the wider
relations of nations, it kept us perpetually on the edge
of the dreaded gulf of war, war made far more horrible
by the progress of science ; and the "Balance of Power,"
on which it had bidden us fix our hopes, had shown
itself quite powerless to deal either equitably or suc-
cessfully with the problems of insurgent nationality
such as presented themselves in the break-up of the old
Turkish Empire, which the great nations had taken
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 6
upon themselves to solve without war, and had con-
spicuously failed.
Thus, the philosophy of selfishness, the basis of the
theory of unrestricted competition in commerce or of
the balance of power in international politics, had be-
come widely and generally discredited. Commerce
and science had shown themselves at least as efficient
instruments of tyranny, injustice and war as of fra-
ternity and peace. The world was disillusioned. Its
nineteenth-century ideals were dimmed or discarded.
And then the dreaded thing suddenly happened. The
great war engulfed the world and holds it still in deep-
ening desolation and anxiety — "men's hearts failing
them for fear and for looking after those things that
are coming on the earth."
We simply cannot face the future without some
fundamental "repentance" or change of mind in the
nations — corporate repentance on the widest scale.
We cannot face the prospect of a peace, patched up
with whatever balance of success on one side or the
other at the end of this war, which shall leave every
nation to expend its resources again in piling up gigan-
tic armaments and entering into rival alliances, ready,
as soon as an interval of time has supplied a measure
of recovered strength, to break out again in renewed
war. Equally we dare not face the future in home
politics on the basis of class war. The two prospects
together threaten our civilisation with nothing less than
dissolution.
We have read skilful pictures drawn by imaginative
6 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
artists as from 3000 a. d. of another civilisation, a re-
cently recovered civilisation, looking back with horror
upon the dark ages which had followed the total break-
up of our present civilisation under the twin hammers
of social and international war. We could not be
amused at these cleverly drawn pictures. They had a
horrible verisimilitude. "The giant forms of empires
on their way to ruin" is indeed a familiar feature in the
world's history. We read of the decadence of civilisa-
tions in the past almost unmoved. But we had never
contemplated the dissolution of our own civilisation — a
relapse into barbarism after all its boasts of secure
progress. It is this terror which has frightened us out
of our old philosophy of unlimited competition. At
home we see that we must substitute the true ideal of
freedom — the welfare of the whole body and of each
individual member of it as dominant over the selfish
ambitions of its more capable members. In some broad
sense we have almost all become socialists.
But Mazzini has shown us that it is not enough to
think of the world in terms of nations. It is not enough
to secure the supremacy of the nation over the indi-
vidual or the family. And there is no logic in breaking
off at this point. As the individual is a member of the
nation and must subordinate himself to the welfare of
the whole, so is the nation to the whole body of nations
— to humanity. There, toe — in the international rela-
tions — ^we need a socialism to subordinate nations to
the good of the race. This is the great repentance —
the deliberate change of mind — asked of us.
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 7
It is true that during the dominance of the old
philosophy of selfish individualism there have been
prophets of a truer faith who showed how rotten was
the basis upon which we were seeking to rest our
civilisation. Such were Thomas Carlyle and John
Ruskin, and such was the man just mentioned, who was
truly the greatest prophet of democracy — Joseph
Mazzini. It is true, also, that there were good Chris-
tians, such as William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftes-
bury, who broke in upon the accepted assumptions of
our political and industrial life with the insistent and
imperious demand for mercy and justice. And a kindly
and Christian human nature was always and everywhere
mitigating the remorseless dogmas of philosophers and
economists even in the regions of trade or politics.
But the spirit of the age was against them. The
philosophy of individualistic competition was the domi-
nant spirit; and the most remarkable feature of the
whole situation was that the Christian Church, in the
main and in all countries, was content to be silent,
drugged by the dogmatic assurances of a false philo-
sophy into acquiescence in principles which practically
excluded the fundamental Christian maxims from any
application to the world of industry and to the relations
of nations to one another.
As we contemplate the history of the world during
what may be called the period of industrialism, which
is the period also when the idea of the balance of power
held sway amongst nations, the silence of the Christian
Church — the absence of any corporate protest in favour
8 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
of the fundamental principles of human fellowship and
peace — the acquiescence of the Church in economic
selfishness and a narrow patriotism appears as one of
the most remarkable instances of moral blindness which
history presents to us, at least as remarkable as the
earlier blindness of the Church to the sinfulness of per-
secution and torture as instruments for disseminating
or defending the religion of Jesus Christ, or again as
remarkable as the blindness of the post-Reformation
Church to the iniquity of slavery. But it is not too
late for the Christian Church to recover its true voice.
The old dominant notes are now hushed. A great
change of mind and ideals has come over the world, both
the world of industry and the world of international
politics.
With the former region — ^the world of industry — we
are not here concerned. But in the latter region the
change is marked by the rise of the demand for the
League of Nations. It affords the Christian Church
the greatest opportunity it has had, since the war
began, to make its distinctive contribution to the
influences telling upon the nations and to show the
special quality of true Christian patriotism.
But is it really the case that there is a distinctive
kind of patriotism which is Christian by contrast to
the patriotism which commonly possesses men? Has
Christianity really anything to do with international
politics? That is the question, and the reasons for an
affirmative answer are profound and convincing.
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 9
CHRIST AND PATEIOTISM
1. That Jesus Christ was a patriot, who felt in His
blood the passion of the love of country, is apparent in
His agonised cry over apostate Jerusalem. Let it be
taken for granted that He gave His sanction to
patriotism, as a divine instinct, like the love of home.
But like every "natural" instinct it is full of self-asser-
tion and sin ; and Jesus of Nazareth stands at the head
of the great succession of Israel's prophets in claiming
that patriotism shall be purged and curbed and re-
formed. This is evident in His whole relation towards
that intense patriotism which characterised the Jew.
It was an acute form of what we now call "national-
ism," the demand for national independence and, beyond
that, for Jewish supremacy in the world. Such an
arrogant claim on the part of so insignificant a people
as the Jews in face of the Roman Empire is to be
accounted for by the religious faith which lay behind
it. The prophets had foretold the supremacy of Israel,
The world was to find its centre in Jerusalem and its
temple; and from that centre the authority of the
sacred law was to be supreme over all the nations. It
is true that, as the prophets were interpreted by Jesus
Christ and His Church, it appeared that their meaning
had been misunderstood and perverted by Jewish
patriotism. Still the common interpretation lay on the
surface of the prophecies.
When our Lord came into the world the Pharisees
10 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
had indeed settled down to acquiesce in the supremacy
of Rome — all the more readily because they had been
badly used in the period of Jewish independence by the
Hasmonean priest-kings. The Sadducees, in like man-
ner, were content that their ruling family should hold
a position of local administration under Roman control.
But the heart of the people never acquiesced. The
spirit of nationalism still dominated them. Of this
nationalist movement the Zealots were the fanatical
leaders. And we can best understand the attitude of
Jesus towards this movement if we think of one of the
twelve, Simon the Zealot.
We can understand quite well how he would have
interpreted the proclamation of the Kingdom and the
coming of the Christ, when it began to be whispered
that the new prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, was "he that
should come." If the awful majesty of Rome seemed
to make Jewish pretensions ridiculous, doubtless the
Zealot expected the miraculous arm of God to be bared
to effect the impossible upheaval. Was "anything
too hard for the Lord".'' But when he joined the
company of the disciples of Jesus, he found himself
subjected to a bitter disillusionment. Nothing, it ap-
peared, was further from our Lord's intention than to
head a movement of Jewish emancipation. Nay, when
it became evident that the people of Israel was, in bulk,
rejecting Him, it appeared also that in His eyes Israel
was doomed, and the most solemn and definite announce-
ments came from His lips that Jerusalem and its temple
were destined to immediate and complete overthrow at
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 11
the hands of the Gentiles. The judgment of God, awful
and irreversible, was upon them.
This did not mean that the purpose of God would
fail. As our Lord's intention made itself gradually
manifest, it appeared that a catholic church, in which
Jews were to have no prerogative position, was to take
the place of the Jewish nation-church. The "whole
world" was the horizon of Christ.
Perhaps no harder claim was ever made upon the
heart and mind of a man than was made when Simon
the Zealot was bidden by Jesus Christ steadily to con-
template the irretrievable ruin of his nation and its
sacred shrine, and then, instead of bursting into tears
and wringing his hands, to be so detached from the
anguish of his nation that he could look out with an
eager joy for the fulfilment of the purpose of God —
the coming of the Kingdom of which the ruin of Israel
was but the necessary prelude. "When these things
begin to come to pass, then look up and lift up your
heads, for your redemption draweth nigh."
This piece of imaginary biography, which cannot
be far from the truth, can effectively show us how far
the patriotism which Jesus sanctions is from common
patriotism. The patriotism which is common is always
narrow or selfish. It always claims God and His
power for its own nationalist ends. It is a spirit of cor-
porate selfishness. But the patriotism which Jesus can
bless always sees the nation as the instrument of a
divine purpose wider than itself. The nation is the
12 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
servant in a cause which is to minister impartially to
the good of all mankind.
Thus it is hardly possible to exaggerate the restraint
and the claim of sacrifice which Christ laid on the in-
stinct of patriotism. It is true, indeed, that no such
claim is now made on us, British or Germans or French-
men or Serbians or Belgians, as was made on Simon
the Zealot and on his Jewish brethren. We are not
required to contemplate as lying in the purpose of God
the extinction of our national independence and the
ruin of all that we associate with the name of our
country. For that we thank God, indeed. But it is a
severe yoke that is laid upon our popular patriotism.
We are required to humiliate its arrogance and to
banish its selfishness. We are required to value our
nation as an instrument for ends that are wider than
our nation. We are required, practically, to remember
that in the sight of God, in the judgment of Christ,
no nation has any prerogative right, that He cares
equally for every race of every colour or capacity,
and that He lays it upon each nation alike to make
the most of itself and its resources in order that it may
better minister to the needs of all mankind, and main-
tain the universal and impartial interests of justice
and freedom and peace.
CHKIST AND CATHOLICITY
2. This impartiality of God in the face of all that
divides men was at the heart of the teaching of Jesus
(
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 13
Christ about the fatherhood of God. He has no special
regard for the important people — the rich, or the
learned, or the powerful. He cares for all alike with
a solicitous, exacting and particular love. He makes
on all the same claim for a universal and particular
care for others. Even the barrier of nationality goes
down. It was true that He was sent only "to the lost
sheep of the House of Israel" — that His direct mis-
sion was only to Israel. He even spoke a word which
savoured of contempt in the hearing of His disciples
to the woman of Canaan, when He was beyond the
borders of the Holy Land. But we cannot but believe
that He, who had so wonderful a power of reading
men's hearts, saw that she would bear the strain of this
rebuff, and that He spoke the word of seeming scorn in
view of the welcome into which it was to break. He
found the essential quality of faith in the Canaanitish
woman, as in the Roman centurion. And this in His
eyes was the only essential quality. He anticipated
the judgment that "with God is no respect of persons,
but in every nation he that feareth God and worketh
righteousness is accepted of Him." He talks about
"the whole world" and not Israel as the sphere of the
Gospel. Finally, He sends His disciples to "make dis-
ciples of all the nations." Thus St. Paul, the apostle
of Catholicism, was true to the spirit of his Master,
and expounded truly His inner mind. And St. Paul's
glorious assertion of the principle of Catholicism marks
an epoch in human thought.
It is true that a certain conception of the unity of
14 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
humanity gained possession of the Roman Empire,
apart from Christianity. But it involved the inclusion
of all races under a single government. Again, a cer-
tain cosmopolitan ideal is represented by Stoicism. But
Stoicism never showed any signs of power to convert
the world. It was a "monastic" philosophy for the
elect "wise man." Its ideal was detachment, not love.
But St. Paul proclaims a jubilant gospel of universal
brotherhood in Christ without distinction of race or
class or sex — a fellowship of all mankind in a catholic
church.
When you come to work out the realisation of this
idea in history you see how ingrained in the heart of
man is the pride or narrowness which resists it and
often appears to defeat it. St. Paul faced the full force
of this resistance. The church in Jerusalem, which
seems in the early chapters of the Acts to be aflame
with love, so as to ignore the limitations of private
property and to have "all things common," exhibits
this power of love only so long as all the brethren are
Jews who "keep the tradition," and breaks out into
resentment and active hostility, hardly to be restrained
even by James, the Lord's brother, as soon as it appears
that Gentiles and Jews are to be on equal terms in the
Church of Christ. This reaction of Jewish narrowness
failed of its baneful effect upon the Christian develop-
ment on the whole, partly through the influence of
St. Paul, but even more because the small strictly
Jewish element in the early Catholic Church was swal-
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 15
lowed up in the inrush of Gentiles, and was obliterated
in the destruction of Jerusalem.
Then there was no further difficulty about the catholic
idea within the Roman Empire and its vast power. It
is true that from very early times Christianity got
beyond the Roman Empire, as at Edessa, and Chris-
tianity outside the Empire showed separate tenden-
cies. It is true also that within the Roman Empire,
before it broke up, racial jealousies and distinctive ten-
dencies showed signs of being formidable disruptive
forces within the church. The theological animosities
represented by the Nestorian, Donatist and Mono-
physite schisms owed more than has been commonly
suspected to nationalist feeling in Syria and Africa and
Egypt.
Later, as the Eastern and Western Empires drew
apart, theological and ecclesiastical divergencies fol-
lowed the political separation. And, when the great
schism occurred, it was at least as much due to political
jealousies as to theological questions. It was the first
great and conspicuous failure of the principle of
Catholicism within the church. Still, in the half-con-
verted West, where the new Europe was in the making,
amid the seething life of the new nations, the idea of
the catholic, supernational fellowship, centring in the
Papacy and thence wielding authority, was a majestic
and dominant influence, showing at times splendid
capacity, but making also, consciously or unconsciously,
tremendous concessions to unregenerate human nature,
16 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
as in the matter of war or the use of force for the
interest of religion.
Athanasius had thought it certain that there could
be no war among Christians and that a converted race
would at once "beat its swords into ploughshares."
To his mind the abolition of war between Christian
nations was so much a matter to be taken for granted
that it could be urged as an incontrovertible argument
for the divinity of the Christ who showed this pacific
power. And other fathers had thought it inconceiv-
able that force could be used among Christians in the
promotion of truth or suppression of heresy. Such a
use of force they held to be flatly contrary to the
fundamental Christian method of moral persuasion.
These anticipations were sadly falsified. The fact
is that the "conversion" of Europe was at best a
lamentably incomplete and superficial process. The
use of civil force and military violence to "convert" or
destroy heretical or non-Christian individuals or
peoples became the accepted and consecrated method.
And within the catholic nations the Church showed
little effective power to prevent wars. This was in part
because Christianity inevitably compromises in the
matter of war. It has never refused, it never can
refuse, to allow to an unjustly attacked nation the
right or duty of self-defence. And what constitutes the
justice or injustice of an attack always remains an am-
biguous question on which national feeling is hotly
enlisted. But no doubt the main cause of failure was
the natural love of war. In the books of Samuel "the
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH ITi
time that kings go out to battle" is a mere synonym
for the spring, when the restraint of winter upon mili-
tary expeditions is over. War was the natural occu-
pation of kings. And it remained so in the mediaeval
period. Religion, embodied in the Catholic Church
and centring in the Papacy, had not influence enough,
even in the zenith of its power, to restrain the mutually
aggressive ambitions of mediaeval monarchs.
Later the Holy Roman .Empire became a shadow.
The political power of the Papacy declined. The mod-
em nations formed themselves with all their separate
tendencies and interests. Then when the Reformation
came, though it was at the start a religious rebellion
against enormous abuses in the Catholic Church, yet
it fell in with the disruptive tendencies of developed
nationalism. Separate national churches formed them-
selves in Germany, England, Scotland, Switzerland, and
Scandinavia. Russia had already its national church
owning no connection with any Western church.
Thus over the greater part of Europe the separatist
national tendency almost obliterated the very idea of
the catholic, supernational religion. Even within the
limits of the Roman Catholic Church, after the Re-
formation period, the idea of church-fellowship ceased
to have any considerable influence on the conditions of
war or peace. Political interest determined the rela-
tion of one nation to another with very little reference
to whether the rival nation was of the same religious
communion or no. And so we come down to the present
world-war, when the nations of Europe and America
18 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
and Asia and Africa are waging terrible war with one
another, without any question having been raised at all
whether those who are being attacked and destroyed
are Catholic or Orthodox, or Anglican or Protes-
tant, or whether they are Christian, Mohammedan, or
heathen. The very idea of the restraining, pacific power
of catholic fellowship seems to have vanished from the
earth.
THE OPPORTUNITY FOR THE CHURCH
But man's necessity is God's opportunity. The
world's despair is the church's hope. Some way of
peace for mankind must be found, or the whole slowly-
built fabric of human civilisation, after all our self-
confident boasting of our science and our education,
will dissolve into ruin.
The expedient is proposed of the League of Nations.
It will rest, confessedly, on no religious basis and will
have no authoritative religious sanction such as the
Middle Ages would have provided or professed to pro-
vide. Nevertheless, it will rest upon the idea of a fel-
lowship of humanity, supreme in its interests over all
separate national claims, a fellowship based on justice
and the rights of weaker as well as stronger nations
— an idea which has mainly had its origin in Christian
thought or imagination, and which is the product of a
civilisation at least deeply leavened by Christianity
and to which the name of Christ is still the name above
every name.
Let the Church of Christ, then, marshal all its
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 19
divided forces to welcome and keep to the front in the
attention of mankind this League of Nations, based on
the recognition of the fellowship of nations, and force
it into practical realisation. So it may give new life
to the idea of a catholic supernational fellowship. So
it may revive the longing for a catholic church worthy
of the name. So it may not only make the nations feel
that Christ is the Prince of Peace, but also make the
greatest possible contribution to the widely-revived
aspiration after religious reunion amidst the separated
fragments of Christianity. A conference of free nations
to determine their disputes may be the harbinger in
the remoter future of a really ecumenical council of
Christendom.
And for the purpose of promoting the League of
Nations, Christendom, even a divided Christendom, can
already act as if it were, what in its central being it
still is, one body. I have long been persuaded that the
best immediate way of promoting religious unity in our
own country is for all the fragments of the Christian
Church to act together, as if they were one, on the
moral and social questions of the day. Let us join to
attack the questions of housing, wages, fellowship of
employers and employed, commercial dishonesty, secret
commissions, intemperance, and sexual morality, so far
as they affect public policy. In the country as a whole,
and in each town and district, let Anglicans, Roman
Catholics, and Protestants sit together in common
council, and act together and bring the weight of their
combined moral influence to bear on these grave ques-
20 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
tions of public policy. So far as their religious prin-
ciples admit, let them join in prayer together on neutral
ground. So they will learn to know one another and
act in common. This will be the best basis for religious
reunion of a deeper kind.
So, on the wider field of international relations, let
us adopt the same method. The Head of the Roman
Catholic communion and the Anglican Bishops of the
Province of Canterbury, acting with unanimity in their
convocation, and the leaders of the Free Churches, have
all given the weight of their support to the proposal
of the League of Nations. Let them not be content to
act apart. Let them combine in England and America
for the same purpose. Let them organise themselves
for a propaganda.
Cannot the same be done by the Roman Catholic
Church in the countries of its communion, under the
leadership of the Pope? Let the same be done in the
small remnant of neutral Christian nations. If we
cannot, as I feel sure we cannot under present circum-
stances, have an Ecumenical Christian Conference, such
as the Archbishop of Upsala proposes, let us have co-
ordinated action in all Christian countries, by aU por-
tions of Christendom on behalf of the League of
Nations.
The difficulties of the proposal are no doubt por-
tentous. Let us consider at least briefly the conditions
involved in the formation of the League, that we may
Dot appear to underrate the difficulties.
1. What is needed is that the League of Nations
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 21
should not be left unarranged and undefined, as a remote
prospect somewhere beyond the peace ; for if the peace
is arranged on some other basis, the moment for a fresh
organisation is not likely to arrive. What is needed
is that the League shall be the central article of the
peace, the basis and guarantee of the whole new situ-
ation. This will be possible only if the nations, as well
as their leading statesmen, are already prepared and
well informed as to the principles of the League. This,
again, requires an active propaganda to begin at once ;
and, for my own part, I do not see why, within the Alli-
ance, progress should not be made at once with the
formulation of its terms.
2. The League will fail of great part of its effect if
Germany and Austria do not enter into it. But here
we encounter a gigantic difficulty. A profound sus-
picion attaches itself in the mind of the Allied states-
men and nations to all the pledges or promises of the
German Powers. Nothing at present can restore con-
fidence in the intentions of their rulers. Thus the
greatest promoter of the League would be such measure
of military success on our side as would permanently
and publicly discredit the militarist party in Germany,
and bring to the fore the pacific and democratic ele-
ments in German opinion which really favour the cause
of human liberty. That such elements of opinion exist
in large force there seems to be no doubt. But the
League asks that they should become dominant. The
League should be, as President Wilson called it, a
League of Free Peoples. But the change in the balance
22 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
of forces in Germany is only likely to be brought about
by the failure of the military projects of the ruling
class. To bring this about is the military problem of
the immediate future. Only let it be observed that
so far is the promotion of the League of Nations from
being antagonistic to the vigorous prosecution of the
war that to all appearance its success depends upon the
war being not only vigorously but successfully carried
on, to the point of fundamentally discrediting German
militarism.
3. On the other hand, we have in Russia a lamentable
spectacle of the failures and crimes of liberty. We do
not despair of an emergence in Russia of ordered lib-
erty. But undoubtedly the prospect is dark. And the
present failure of Russia has not only enormously weak-
ened the Allied cause, and the cause of liberty in Ger-
many, but it has added a quite fresh difficulty to the
formation of a League of Nations which should include
Russia. The other nations cannot make a league with
chaos.
4. The idea of the League which subsists in the minds
of the statesmen draws a distinction between minor or
"justiciable" causes of dispute between nations — what
one may call questions of detail — and the greater ques-
tions in which those vast but vague interests, the honour
and security of nations, are involved. The former are
to be submitted to an International Tribunal for settle-
ment ; the latter to an International Conference or Court
of Conciliation for discussion and mediation, the terms
of the League requiring that each nation should be
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH 23
willing to give time for the Court or Conference to meet
and review the situation, and make suggestions— time
also for the suggestions to be considered — before war
is declared or the forces of either party mobilised.
Here the weight is thrown upon the value of delay.
But no one can fail to see that where so inflammable
a quality is concerned as national honour, delay, though
it affords valuable assistance, may not suffice to subdue
the storm.
5. The League cannot, of course, come into effective
existence unless it has behind it sanctions which are
sufficiently formidable. The sanctions proposed are the
use by the whole League of an economic boycott of any
nation which either refuses to submit to arbitration in
the case of justiciable disputes, or refuses the required
delay in the greater causes. Again, behind this eco-
nomic boycott would be the use of armed force. An
international agreement must bring into existence an
international force to be used at the last resort against
the offender. Now all this is a novel machinery, involv-
ing, no doubt, innumerable difficulties of detail and
principle. It is necessary especially that free com-
merce and free passage by sea and land should be the
normal principle between the nations, only to give way
to the principle of exclusive dealing where the situation
has arisen which requires and justifies weapons of war-
fare against an unduly aggressive nation. It is neces-
sary again that the whole question of organizing an
international force for land and sea should be studied
24 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
and brought out into effective solution by the time of
peace-making.
6. It is hardly possible that there can be an effective
League of Nations without some principle for the reduc-
tion of armaments being agreed upon. Here again we
touch a matter of tremendous difficulty.
7. Finally, the whole question of the representation
of nations great and small on International Courts and
Conferences bristles with difficulties. It is probable I
should only betray my ignorance if I were to venture
on this ground. But it is manifest to all that there
is a real danger of the great nations, if they are repre-
sented proportionately to their power, overwhelming
the weaker nations and acting to their detriment. It
will be very difficult to secure the rights of the smaller
nations as they exist at present, and of national groups
which emerge into nations in the future. In all these
matters, as in others, the entrance of America into the
war — detached as America is over European questions
^ — is an immense advantage. But no doubt the difficul-
ties remain portentous. As we confront any careful
statement of them by an expert hand we feel like
Plato's Socrates, when he was propounding his ideal
republic and trembling before the expected waves of
obloquy and ridicule which his proposals would excite.
Apart from difficulties of organisation and difficulties
of detail, there is no question that any proposal, how-
ever moderate, to limit by international or superna-
tional control the judgment of a nation about what its
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CHURCH ^5
own honour and interests require will excite against it
a very deep and widespread passion of national pride.
THE GROUNDS OF HOPE
Upon what, then, can we rely for hope and resolu-
tion? I think upon three main considerations: —
1. The first is the despair of the future which fills
the minds of the people of all kinds when they contem-
plate the tendencies of national rivalry as they existed
before the war and led to its outbreak, unless they can
be profoundly modified or effectively restrained. We
simply cannot bear to think of making a peace, how-
ever just a peace, and then leaving the nations, after a
period of exhaustion, to watch one another with the
old jealousy, and build up armaments, the one against
the other, with more than the old lavishness of expense,
and a scientific ingenuity sharpened tenfold by experi-
ence, and form alliances as of old, one against another,
until another world-war breaks out. If this be all that
can be looked for, I say, despair possesses us. Noth-
ing less confronts us as the inevitable issue than the
ruin of a civilisation which it has taken so many cen-
turies to build up : both its economic ruin and the ruin
of its culture and its freedom. I suppose that it is this
dread that has made the greatest practical statesmen
in many countries propound and support a project
which seems to vulgar eyes so idealistic as the League of
Nations. It does demand a vast change of mind in the
sentiment of nations towards one another. But our
26 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
practical statesmen recognise that nothing else than
such a world-wide repentance can save the situation
from ruin.
2. Our second ground of hope is the progress and
the international sympathies of democracy. In his
splendid "Complaint of Peace" Erasmus, in 1517,
ascribes wars to kings and peaceful tendencies to *'the
people, the ignoble vulgar." "If the military trans-
actions of old time are not worth remembrance, let him
who can bear the loathsome task only call to mind
the wars of the last twelve years; let him attentively
consider the causes of them all, and he will find them
all to have been undertaken for the sake of kings; all
of them carried on with infinite detriment to the people ;
while, in most instances, the people had not the smallest
concern either in their origin or their issue." ^ "As to
the people ; in all these countries the greater part of the
people certainly detest war, and most devoutly wish
for peace."
I cannot but think that this represents still the truth
as it is in general. It is possible to imagine a mili-
tarist and bellicose democracy; and certainly where a
nation has been robbed of its territory a republic will
be as determined to recover it as a monarchy. But, on
the whole, it remains true that if there were nothing
but really democratic nations, whether republics or
constitutional monarchies in form, the warlike tenden-
cies of the world would be enormously reduced; and
^C<ym'plaint of Peace. English translatioo (Headley Bros.. 1917), pp.
43, 100.
THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE CitURCH ' ^T
the more international sympathy and intercourse came
to prevail among democracies, the less chance there
would be of war. In England we believe that, on the
whole, the working people will give the readiest welcome
to the League of Nations, and will be the least afraid of
what it involves.
Now all appearances point to the progress of demo-
cratic feeling and the democratising of institutions as
the tendency of the future. The violence of the Rus-
sian reaction is not likely to terrify the masses of the
people. Thus our second hope lies in the strengthen-
ing of the principle of democracy; and, if we cannot
get rid of secret diplomacy, yet we can feel a rational
confidence that, the more democratic nations become,
the more afraid will their statesmen be of contracting
any serious obligations on behalf of the people of which
the people are not cognisant.
3. But in the last place — and this is the point of
this paper — we look with a profound hope to the Chris-
tian Church. True, there is no rapid road to heal the
divisions of Christendom. But there is no reason why
in welcoming and promoting the League of Nations the
Christian Church should not even now act as if it were
one. The same agreement to act together is feasible
on all social and moral questions so far as they affect
public policy. In the case of the League of Nations
the heads of the Roman, the Anglican, and the chief
Protestant communions, both in the British Empire
and in America, either have spoken in assent already or
are likely to do so very soon. Why should not all the
its'- THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
portions of Christendom in every nation combine into
a single body to welcome and to propagate the prin-
ciple of the League? For, indeed, it is its own voice
that the Church hears echoed back by the statesmen
who propose it. True it is we are a long way off a
reunited Christendom — such a supernational fellowship
of men as the Catholic Church should be. True it is that
the League of Nations will be on no professedly religious
basis, and will exclude no nation on account of its
religious beliefs. Nevertheless, there can be few prac-
ticable measures which would be so strong a witness
to Christian principles as the formation of a League
of Nations to promote and maintain peace, and nothing
would make the peoples of the world understand what
Christianity stands for better than the spectacle of a
divided Christendom reunited at least to promote this
purpose.
Thus we can face all the grave difficulties involved
in a League of Nations with resolution and courage,
relying on the hope which springs out of the heart of
despair and finds in the dissolution of the old order
the promise of the new — on the sound instinct of demo-
cracy triumphing over dynastic ambitions — and on
the reviving spirit of Christianity, the idea of catholic
fellowship. It is the will of God.
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UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA LIBRARY
