that this, and not the long-futile teaching of Christianity, is the hope of the future. Christian preaching of virtue has been individualistic. Even in our time the clergy hesitate and are divided in face of social problems which plainly involve moral principles. But the humanitarian ethic is essentially social, and this passion of sympathy is its chief root.
We wish, then, not to substitute any creed or organisation for Christianity, but to sweep away these primitive or medieval speculations about life, and let the human mind and human heart increasingly devote themselves, directly, to human interests. In discussing the question of peace and war, the application is obvious. We enclose or dispatch the murderer, lest some fresh grave act of violence be perpetrated. We agree that the violent and premature termination of a life is the most serious transgression of social law that a man can perpetrate. Next to it we put rape, mutilation, the destruction of a man's home or fortune; all acts, in a word, that come nearest to it in threatening or causing the greatest desolation. Yet we have suffered, age after age, that every few years all these acts should be gathered into one mighty outrage and showered upon whole populations. The time will come when men will read with bewilderment the things that have been written about warfare in the nineteenth, and even the twentieth, century. The men of clear judgment and sound emotion of some coming age will see anguish rising, as vapour does from some tropical sea, from our vast battle-fields. They will read of Cats' Homes, and Anti-Vivisection Societies, and Homes of Rest for Horses, and a hundred such institutions, and they will find contributors to these institutions stirring not one finger when hundreds of thousands of men writhe
