The Kingdom of God is Within You

CHAPTER 6

ATTITUDE OF MEN OF THE PRESENT DAY TO WAR

People do not Try to Remove the Contradiction between Life and Conscience by a Change of Life, but their Cultivated Leaders Exert Every Effort to Obscure the Demands of Conscience, and Justify their Life; in this Way they Degrade Society below Paganism to a State of Primeval Barbarism – Undefined Attitude of Modern Leaders of Thought to War, to Universal Militarism, and to Compulsory Service in Army – One Section Regards War as an Accidental Political Phenomenon, to be Avoided by External Measures only – Peace Congress – The Article in the Revue des Revues – Proposition of Maxime du Camp – Value of Boards of Arbitration and Suppression of Armies – Attitude of Governments to Men of this Opinion and What they Do – Another Section Regards War as Cruel, but Inevitable – Maupassant – Rod – A Third Section Regard War as Necessary, and not without its Advantages – Doucet – Claretie – Zola – Vogüé.

The antagonism between life and the conscience may be removed in two ways:  by a change of life or by a change of conscience.  And there would seem there can be no doubt as to these alternatives.

A man may cease to do what he regards as wrong, but he cannot cease to consider wrong what is wrong.  Just in the same way all humanity may cease to do what it regards as wrong, but far from being able to change, it cannot even retard for a time the continual growth of a clearer recognition of what is wrong and therefore ought not to be.  And therefore it would seem inevitable for Christian men to abandon the pagan forms of society that they condemn, and to reconstruct their social existence on the Christian principles they profess.

So it would be were it not for the law of inertia, as immutable a force in men and nations as in inanimate bodies.  In men it takes the form of the psychological principle, so truly expressed in the words of the Gospel, “They have loved darkness better than light because their deeds were evil.”  This principle shows itself in men not trying to recognize the truth, but to persuade themselves that the life they are leading, which is what they like and are used to, is a life perfectly consistent with truth.

Slavery was opposed to all the moral principles advocated by Plato and Aristotle, yet neither of them saw that, because to renounce slavery would have meant the break up of the life they were living.  We see the same thing in our modern world.

The division of men into two castes and the use of force in government and war are opposed to every moral principle professed by our modern society.  Yet the cultivated and advanced men of the day seem not to see it.

The majority, if not all, of the cultivated men of our day try unconsciously to maintain the old social conception of life, which justifies their position, and to hide from themselves and others its insufficiency, and above all the necessity of adopting the Christian conception of life, which will mean the break …