religion.  The bishops, priests, and deacons are set up for the populace to revere, and when the robber-classes need a blessing upon some enterprise, then is the opportunity for the bishops, priests and deacons to earn their “living.”  During the Boer war the blood-lust of the English clergy was so extreme that writers in the dignified monthly reviews felt moved to protest against it.  When the pastors of Switzerland issued a collective protest against cruelties to women and children in the South African concentration-camps, it was the Right Reverend Bishop of Winchester who was brought forward to make reply.  Nowadays all England is reading Bernhardi, and shuddering at Prussian glorification of war; but no one mentions Bishop Welldon of Calcutta, who advocated the Boer war as a means of keeping the nation “virile”; nor Archbishop Alexander, who said that it was God’s way of making “noble natures”.

The British God had other ways of improving nations—­for example, the opium traffic.  The British traders had been raising the poppy in India and selling its juice to the Chinese.  They had made perhaps a hundred million “noble natures” by this method; and also they were making a hundred million dollars a year.  The Chinese, moved by their new “virility,” undertook to destroy some opium, and to stop the traffic; whereupon it was necessary to use British battle-ships to punish and subdue them.  Was there any difficulty in persuading the established church of Jesus to bless this holy war?  There was not!  Lord Shaftesbury, himself the most devout of Anglicans, commented with horror upon the attitude of the clergy, and wrote in his diary: 

I rejoice that this cruel and debasing opium war is terminated.  We have triumphed in one of the most lawless, unnecessary, and unfair struggles in the records of history; and Christians have shed more heathen blood in two years, than the heathens have shed of Christian blood in two centuries.

That was in 1843; for seventy years thereafter pious England continued to force the opium traffic upon protesting China, and only in the last two or three years has the infamy been brought to an end.  Throughout the long controversy the attitude of the church was such that Li Hung Chang was moved to assert in a letter to the Anti-Opium Society: 

Opium is a subject in the discussion of which England and China can never meet on a common ground.  China views the whole question from a moral standpoint, England from a fiscal.

And just as the Chinese people were poisoned with opium, so the English people are being poisoned with alcohol.  Both in town and country, labor is sodden with it.  Scientists and reformers are clamoring for restriction;—­and what prevents?  Head and front of the opposition for a century, standing like a rock, has been the Established Church.  The Rev. Dawson Burns, historian of the early temperance movement, declares that “among its supporters