war, as the workers are beginning to understand. It is a folly, a blasphemy, a wrong to man and an offence to God. Canon Scott Holland is right when he says: "Here was Christian Europe piling up the horrid preparations for war; taking every step toward war, except the very last. Can we be really surprised if the last step takes itself? Somehow, the war appears to present a new problem to Christianity, which had not been before our minds till now. In reality, war only forces to the front what was there already. War reveals what we have been in the time of peace. It is an outcome of the time before we were at war. It flings out, into dreadful relief, the thing that we are. We have been living at war with one another all the time. Every new gun, every new ship was an act of war. The nations were already in collision. They lived in distrust and fear and hate of one another. They carried on an existence of menace and wrath."
We will not think sanely about war. We talk as though the world had no Righteous Ruler, and reason as though order was not earth's first law. Whatever a nation sows it reaps. If it sows armaments, it reaps world-shaking wars. War is an effect of obvious causes ; and we must get at the causes in order to stop the effects; and one of them is the continuance of Europe as an armed camp. We must end somehow this infamous scandal of Christendom. The Churches ought to give themselves no rest until they have so organized the world for peace that those tremendous armaments shall become a thing of the past. Men make war and men must end war. Men have created the military state, destructive and maleficent; they must replace it by the citizen state, man-building, constructive, and beneficent. Brain invented gunpowder and forged the sword; brain and heart together must restrict the powder to mining the rocks, and turn the sword into a ploughshare that shall prepare the soil for the seed. Private trade in weapons of war must cease at once, and armaments themselves must cease to be anything else than relics of the savage state men have left behind them.
Another contested question is illuminated by this war; namely, that of "conscription" for the Army. The Times sees little else in all the happenings than reasons for conscription; even the German raid on Scarborough and Whitby is taken as a text, on which the same megaphonic Harmsworth Press preaches the necessity of adopting that Prussian militarism, which has devastated Europe and brought upon its
