vengeance.… As late as 1813, the strength of moral conviction in the members of this sect was still so great that, despite the patriotic excitement of that year, so ruthless a soldier as York actually exempted them from Landwehr service, by a decree dated February 18th. But in 1915, H. G. Mannhardt, Mennonite preacher in Danzig, delivered an address glorifying feats of arms and martial heroes.”
“There was a time,” writes Nicolai, “when it was believed that Islam was inferior to Christianity. At that date the Turkish armies were threatening the heart of Europe. To-day the Turk has almost been driven out of Europe, but morally he has conquered Europe. Unseen, the green flag of the Prophet floats over every house in which there is talk of the ‘holy war.’”
German religious poems depict the fight in the trenches as “a test of piety instituted by God.” No one is now astonished at the absurd contradiction in terms involved in speaking of “Christian warfare.” Few theologians or churchmen have dared to swim against the stream. In his admirable book La Guerre infernale[1] Gustave Dupin has pilloried gruesome specimens of militarist Christianity. Nicolai gives other samples, which it would be a pity to leave unrecorded. In 1915, Professor Baumgarten, a Kiel theologian, placidly pointed out that there is opposition between the morality of bellicose nationalism and the morality of the Sermon on the Mount, but “at present,” he went on to say, “we ought to pay more attention to Old Testament texts”; thus deliberately, and with a smile, throwing Christianity overboard. Arthur Brausewetter, another theologian, made a remarkable discovery. War revealed to him the Holy Spirit. “Never, till this year of war, 1914, did we really know the nature of the Holy Ghost.…”
While Christianity was thus publicly denied by its priests and its pastors, the religions of Asia were no less ready to jettison the inconvenient thoughts of their founders. Tolstoi had already pointed this out. “The Buddhists of
- ↑ Jeheber, Geneva, 1913.
