The good Cardinal would have made a good lawyer.He had as little to say about God and the general righteousness of things as the Bishop of London.But he got in some smug reminders of the severance of diplomatic relations with the Vatican.Perhaps now France will be wiser.He pointed out that the Holy See in its Consistorial Allocution of January 22nd, 1915, invited the belligerents to observe the rules of war.Could anything more be done than that? Oh!--in the general issue of the war, if you want a judgement on the war as a whole, how is it possible that the Vatican to decide? Surely the French know that excellent principle of justice, /Audiatur et altera pars/, and how under existing circumstances can the Vatican do that...? The Vatican is cut off from communication with Austria and Germany.
The Vatican has been deprived of its temporal power and local independence (another neat point)....
So France is bowed out.When peace is restored, the Vatican will perhaps be able to enquire if there was a big German army in 1914, if German diplomacy was aggressive from 1875 onward, if Belgium was invaded unrighteously, if (Catholic) Austria forced the pace upon (non-Catholic) Russia.But now--now the Holy See must remain as impartial as an unbought mascot in a shop window....
The next column of /Le Journal/ contained an account of the Armenian massacres; the blood of the Armenian cries out past the Holy Father to heaven; but then Armenians are after all heretics, and here again the principle of /Audiatur et altera pars/comes in.Communications are not open with the Turks.Moreover, Armenians, like Serbs, are worse than infidels; they are heretics.Perhaps God is punishing them....
/Audiatur et altera pars/, and the Vatican has not forgotten the infidelity and disrespect of both France and Italy in the past.These are the things, it seems, that really matter to the Vatican.Cardinal Gasparri's portrait, in the same issue of /Le Journal/, displays a countenance of serene contentment, a sort of incarnate "Told-you-so."So the Vatican lifts its pontifical skirts and shakes the dust of western Europe off its feet.
It is the most astounding renunciation in history.
Indubitably the Christian church took a wide stride from the kingship of God when it placed a golden throne for the unbaptised Constantine in the midst of its most sacred deliberations at Nicaea.But it seems to me that this abandonment of moral judgments in the present case by the Holy See is an almost wider step from the church's allegiance to God....
3
Thought about the great questions of life, thought and reasoned direction, this is what the multitude demands mutely and weakly, and what the organised churches are failing to give.They have not the courage of their creeds.Either their creeds are intellectual flummery or they are the solution to the riddles with which the world is struggling.But the churches make no mention of their creeds.They chatter about sex and the magic effect of church attendance and simple faith.If simple faith is enough, the churches and their differences are an imposture.Men are stirred to the deepest questions about life and God, and the Anglican church, for example, obliges--as I have described.
It is necessary to struggle against the unfavourable impression made by these things.They must not blind us to the deeper movement that is in progress in a quite considerable number of minds in England and France alike towards the realisation of the kingdom of God.
What I conceive to be the reality of the religious revival is to be found in quarters remote from the religious professionals.
Let me give but one instance of several that occur to me.I met soon after my return from France a man who has stirred my curiosity for years, Mr.David Lubin, the prime mover in the organisation of the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome.It is a movement that has always appealed to my imagination.The idea is to establish and keep up to date a record of the food supplies in the world with a view to the ultimate world control of food supply and distribution.When its machinery has developed sufficiently to a control in the interests of civilisation of many other staples besides foodstuffs.It is in fact the suggestion and beginning of the economic world peace and the economic world state, just as the Hague Tribunal is the first faint sketch of a legal world state.
