What is the code that made the deadly rivalry of mounting armaments between army and army, navy and navy, of the Europe before 1914?  The code, to be sure, of cunning, of greed, of might; the materialism of the philosopher and the naturalism of the sensualist, clothed in grandiose forms and covered with the insufferable hypocrisy of solemn phrases.  There are no conceivable ethical or religious interests and no humane goals or values that justify these things.  International diplomacy and politics, economic imperialism, using political machinery and power to half-cloak, half-champion its ends, has no law of Christian sacrifice and no law of Greek moderation behind it.  On the contrary, what should interest the Christian preacher, as he regards it, is its sheer anarchy, its unashamed and naked paganism.  Its law is that of the unscrupulous and the daring, not that of the compassionate or the just.  In what does scientific and emotional naturalism issue, then?  In this; a man, if he be a man, will stand above divine or human law and make it operative only for the weaklings beneath.  Wherever opportunity offers he will consult his own will and gratify it to the full.  To have, to get, to buy, to sell, to exploit the world for power, to exploit one’s self for pleasure, this is to live.  The only law is the old primitive snarl; each man for himself, let the devil take the hindmost.

There is only one end to such naturalism and that is increasing anarchy.  It means my will against your will; my appetite for gold, for land, for women, for luxury and beauty against your appetite; until at length it culminates in the open madness of physical violence, physical destruction, physical death and despair.  There can be no other end to it.  If men dare not risk being the lovers of their kind, then they must choose between being the slaves of duty or the slaves of force.  What are we reading in the public prints and hearing from platform and stage?  The unending wail for “rights”; the assertion of the individual.  Ceased is the chant of duty, forgotten the sacrifice of love!

The events which have transformed the world since 1914 are an awful commentary upon such naturalism and a dreadful confirmation of our indictment.  Before the spectacle that many of us saw on those sodden fields of Flanders, both humanist and religionist should be alike aghast.  How childish not to perceive that its causes, as distinguished from its occasions, were common to our whole civilization.  How perverse not to confess that beneath all our modern life, as its dominating motive, has lain that ruthless and pagan philosophy, which creates alike the sybarite, the tyrant and the anarch; the philosophy in which lust goes hand in hand with cruelty and unrestrained will to power is accompanied by unmeasured and unscrupulous force.

It is incredible to me how men can take this delirium of self-destruction, this plunging of the sword into our own heart in a final frenzy of competing anarchy and deck it out with heroic and poetic values, fling over it the seamless robe of Christ, unfurl above it the banner of the Cross!  The only contribution the World War has made to religion has been to throw into intolerable relief the essentially irreligious and inhumane character of our civilization.