Note 1 — Chapter II · RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND STATE

An explanation is to be found in a study of the normal results of guiding conduct by emotional leanings rather than by critical reflection. The former is peculiarly the process of evangelical religion. Hence comes the practical inefficacy of a love of peace derived either inertly through acceptance of a form of words declared to be sacred, or through an emotional assent to such words emotionally propounded. Emotions so evolved are of the surface, and are erased as easily as they are induced, by stronger emotions proceeding from the animal nature. Only a small minority of Christians, accordingly, are found to resist the rush of warlike passions; and some who call most excitedly for peace when there is no war are found among those most excited by the war passion as soon as the contagion stirs. It may be noted as a decisive fact in religious history that in regard to the war which raged while these pages were first being penned,1 the movement of critical opposition and expostulation succeeded almost in the ratio of men’s remoteness from the Christian faith. Among the Quaker sect, so long honourably distinguished by its testimony against war, there was a considerable reversion to the normal temper, as if the old conviction had been in many cases lost in the process of merely hereditary transmission. Among the Christian Churches so called, by far the most peace-loving is the Unitarian, which rejects the central Christian dogma. And among the public men associated with the protest against the war, the number known to be rationalists was proportionally as large as that of the supernaturalists was small. The personal excellence and elevation of moral feeling shown among the latter group is thus no warrant for seeing the cause in their creed. In such matters there is no invariable rule, every section exhibiting psychical divergence within itself; but it is now statistically clear that the standing claim for the conventional creed as being peculiarly helpful to the cause of peace is false. The title of “Bible-loving” had for a generation been applied to England by its pietists. The same title is confessedly applicable to the Boers of South Africa. Yet no consciousness of a common creed ever availed to restrain the hatred of the Christian mass in England towards their “enemy.”