The spiritual sanctions of a league of nations

The Spiritual Sanctions

of a

League of Nations

BY THE .
BISHOP OF WINCHESTER

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

+

LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK

TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY

HUMPHREY M1LFORD

1919

Price Threepence net

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The Spiritual Sanctions

of a

\

League of Nations

BY THE

BISHOP OF WINCHESTER

\
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PR^SS

LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK.

TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY

HUMPHREY MILFOAD

1919

PRINTED AT OXFORD, ENGLAND

BY FREDERICK HALL
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Ensrn u, CAUFOR;

SAM'A BARBARA

THE SPIRITUAL SANCTIONS OF A
LEAGUE OF NATIONS

PT^HE proposal of a League of Nations, now upon
-*- every one's lips, is evidently beset with difficulties
of very serious kinds. Some of them are due to the
mere complexity of the subject-matter ; and these can
only be lessened and overcome by the patient work
of experts, supported and impelled by a deepening
intelligence in the peoples as to what is at stake, and
a strengthening determination that the way should
be found. But other difficulties are of a different
kind. They have to do with the sources and amount
of motive which can bring about so great a change ;
and which can not only supply the steam to work a very
complex machine, but also compel its construction.

The present enthusiasm for the idea is much
more than merely sentimental or rhetorical: it is
serious and moves serious men ; and this in itself is
hopeful. But it does not make the prospect easy ;
and those who see most what is at stake will be most
desirous to convince themselves that there is, indeed,
behind the movement the strength of those moral
motives which ultimately prevail.

It should not be very difficult to do this, and to do
it satisfyingly, if we put the case for the League of

4 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

Nations sufficiently high, and detect the real prin-
ciples which underlie it. It will not be enough, though
it will be very well in its way, to invoke the motive
of humanity, and (with the evils of war present as
they are to the minds of all) to claim acceptance for
the League of Nations as giving at the worst a chance,
and at the best a bright prospect, of preserving peace
where otherwise war will recur, perhaps in annihilating
forms. For so great a gain the League would be well
worth trying as a mere diplomatic experiment, and it
might be rather confidently expected to rally an
increasing amount of prepossession, and even of
enthusiasm, to assist its successful working.

But in its essence this would still be more a
mechanical than a moral improvement. The forces,
remaining what they were, would be adjusted to run
with less risk of friction and more skilful com-
pensations.

What we want is more than this. We want a moral
change, with a political development which will both
answer to that change, and by exercise stimulate and
strengthen it.

Take the latter first. The curious course of human
history which seems to have promiscuously engendered
with no chronological order states of the most various
sizes and values, such as unchanging nomad or pastoral
tribes, vast empires, little highly organized independent
cities, may perhaps disguise from us a real trend
in the affairs of men, from the particular to the

SPIRITUAL SANCTIONS 5

more universal, from simpler to more complex and
larger systems. The ancient history of the West gave
striking evidence of this trend. The Roman Empire
with its ' peace ' was perhaps the best result of it ;
great in actual effect, and great in its permanent
imaginative influence. Its ultimate failure was due
to its want of real citizenship, and of the virility
and defensive force which this creates.

But through it men's minds gained an intuition of
a true all-embracing state.

After the crash of the barbarian invasions, the same
trend working its way out of the early mediaeval chaos
produced the nation as we know it in the kingdoms of
the West. Internally these states have become, in diffe-
rent forms, fine unities of human life, with much in-
ternal harmony and subordination. But their mutual
relations have been frankly elementary. The name
of international law stands for something of whose
extent and reality the ' layman ' can hardly judge ;
but the associations of the name are largely ironical.

Remembrance of the Empire and Christian aspira-
tion made men feel for some more inclusive ideal, but
vaguely and without effect.

This is the stage which we have reached. But it
must be a very stubborn believer in the dull creed that
what has never been will never be, who thinks that
there we must stop. The older among us remember
the sound constantly in our ears of the ' Concert of '
Europe '. Clumsy, halting, and ineffective, it was not

6 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

wholly powerless, and it was significant of the
current's trend. Along with it went attempts such
as the Berlin Convention to bring the Native Races
within the shelter of European corporate guarantees.
In other words, to acknowledge a common European
responsibility for world welfare.

But since then at what a pace things have
moved ! Colonies or Settlements building up, as in
Australia, Africa, and Canada, into Dominions or
Commonwealths ; the British Empire yielding more
and more of its prerogatives, but only to find itself
' enlarged ' in a more complex unity better named
a Commonwealth or else a thing which waits for
a name. And then the War, with its extraordinary
co-operative results — its unprecedented unities of
command and the like in economic matters, in finance,
in matters of supply and transport, and the whole
habit of intimately interwoven actions with inde-
pendent states.

' Out of the eater has come forth meat.'

The War, in accustoming four great Powers and
some twenty smaller ones to act together for a common
cause, has been training its own antidote. And the
increasing perception that such combinations must be
used in the interests not only of the partners but of
the world, gives to the combination double measure
both of dignity and of raison d'etre.

Thus we are brought, by tracing political develop-
ments which have all of them constructive promise,

to the patent need for a moral change which can
supply binding power, and can quickly but steadily
tune into a higher key of unity the current common-
places, and the accepted conventions, and the accredited
sentiments which have such power in human affairs.

Will any supply meet the demand ? The answer,
I submit, is to be found in the influence of the. War
upon human morale ; its creative moral power. For
profoundly uncertain and speculative as forecasts of
the moral effects of this convulsion may be — and we
may seem to be laying a path of progress as upon
mists — it is at least clear that the War has brought
out new capacities in character and new standards of
value, in a way which we are all occupied in trying to
understand. Among such changes, matters of com-
monest observation are increased sense of service to
a cause, and' increased satisfaction in the comradeship
both of men and of nations.

But above all these is the revealed contrast, colossal
and lurid, between two alternative Spirits or Ways.
Against the Way which Germany (or the men who
speak for her) has been persuaded to make her own,
the way of selfishness growing ever more brutal
and ruthless, the other Way, the way of unselfishness,
of common service and sacrifice, stands out in all the
dignity and effectiveness of a true ideal.

Now the principle thus recognized cannot be less
than cosmopolitan in its reach and strength ; the wel-
fare of humanity comes out more and more distinctly

8 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

and inevitably as the one adequate object towards which
the human conscience drives. The manner in which
Germany has stiffened itself in conscious antagonism
to milder ideals has been the testimony of a true
instinct as to the real enemy which her ideals of
force had to face. The final issue, Christ or Anti-
christ, has been more distinctly seen, and the enthu-
siasm with which the victory has been greeted has
sprung in its depths from the sense of what the real
issue has been. That sense, burnt into us during the
years of war, became articulate and undeniable when
the great neutral Republic came in for the right
under the guidance of its President.

It has been wonderfully dramatic that the man
who had the handling of the machine should also
have had the insight to see clearly and steadily what
the action of his nation meant and must mean, and to
discern that behind the supremely important crisis of
national policy there was the even more important
crisis of opportunity for a world -change. It is no
disrespect to Mr. Roosevelt to illustrate this by
contrast with what he could have done. He could
have brought America in with a fine chivalry, an
indomitable energy, a righteous rage. And no doubt
he would have used its success kindly and well. But
he would not have discerned, as his successor has, how
the action of himself and of his people has done more
than decide a situation, however prodigious ; how it has
inaugurated an epoch of which the characteristic is

SPIRITUAL SANCTIONS 9

that its horizons are ultimate. The world may never
fill them out; there may be follies and weaknesses
among those who mean to do well, and there will be
abundance of treacheries and persistent sinister com-
binations of interests, intent on serving themselves
at humanity's expense. But the ideal has been declared
once for all.

It is perhaps to say the same thing in another way
if we claim as a moral support of the League of
Nations a quickened belief among us that there is
behind the world a real meaning — a Purpose with
power.

Without referring again to the German contrast,
we may do well to remind ourselves that the inter-
national sphere has been, especially in our later know-
ledge of it, the region in which it was hardest to see
more than the tangle of forces, the pulls and counter-
pulls of a thousand powers, national, fiscal, com-
mercial, of revenges and resentments and antipathies.

Across all this the crisis of the great War and the
great Victory has cut like a flash of blinding revela-
tion. It did matter, then, what the standards of
diplomacy were ! A condition in which states were
assumed to act like the economic men of the old
Political Economy, by the one motive of self-interest
or self-protection^ proved a rotten condition ! You
arrived that way at a terrific crisis which every one
feared but no one could avert. The whole system
shared responsibility for the result which its most

10 THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS.

unscrupulous and violent member precipitated. On
a vast scale the ancient Righteousness has been
vindicated ; and the lineaments and trend of an
age-long purpose of love for humankind are seen, and
men of goodwill answer to its challenge.

They will have no illusions of a sudden inter-
national Utopia. They will know how long and
treacherous the path to be trodden is. They will be
aware that the effort of humanity to follow it may,
unless God avert, stagger down into failure.

But the opportunity is in a most true sense new.
For never before have the issues been at once so
simple and clear and yet so grandiose ; never have
antagonistic opportunist ideals been so discredited ;
never before has the way been so clearly revealed
down which humanity might drive, delayed only by
its own blind follies and grievous faults, towards
the goal of a human brotherhood, existing to give
fullest expression to the life in humanity, and to
bring the variety of its gifts and products into the
wealth and beauty which Unity secures. That is the
League of Nations, of which such League as we may
know will only be the green and crude shoot, yet
that from which alone the summer's flower can spring
to its perfection.

It will be plain to my readers that for myself the
issues of the future (and implicitly of the League of
Nations) depend on the consent of mankind to travel
Ghristo duce et auspice Christo. Nor have I any doubt

SPIRITUAL SANCTIONS 11

that the security for this will be in the number of those
who definitely follow His acknowledged Captaincy in
sacrifice and service. But it is the Christian faith
that in Christ all that is true in human wisdom, and
effective in moral and spiritual capacity, comes to
self-recognition. In the realm of principles and of
the forces, economical, social, ethical, by which human
affairs are leavened and moulded, Christ has also
a secret sway, and leads, whether or no they are
conscious of His leading, all men of goodwill.

EDW. WINTON.

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