Religion: For Peace

The seventh Armistice Day passed. On the Sunday before it, earnest men, in tens of thousands of pulpits, urged world peace.

Said a noted “Liberal”: “The club, the spear, the bow and arrow, the gun, the bomb, the gas, the germ. . . . Get that picture! . . . Let us make no pious pretenses of being shocked. This is the logical development of war. . . . America, secluded, secure, satisfied, is tempted to forget. …”

Said a noted Rabbi: “The six years following the War have not been six years of peace, but six years of a truce, during which the nations of the earth have been building new war machines.” The Rabbi believed the U. S. had “grievously erred” in not lending support to “the one effort to build a machine of peace,”

Said the Acting Dean of a great cathedral: “War cannot go until the sweatshop goes. War cannot go until the opium dens and bucketshops go; war cannot go until the fevered cruelty of much business competition goes . . . until churches learn to tolerate each other without jealous rivalry. . . . The seed of war lies in the soil of the soul.”

A College President advocated courses of study in “human brotherhood” for the universities.

A Unitarian declared that there was no moral superiority in a policy of nonresistance, that war could be outlawed only by recognizing it as a crime.

A Methodist prescribed for the U. S. “as rigid precautions against the germs of fear and hate as against the germs of typhus. “They must,” said he, “be kept out of our histories and our text books.” Should they be left in, “this insures the perpetuation of national grudges and the danger of war.”

In Manhattan, it rained that Sunday. None the less, long queues of people waited to enter the church where Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick was to preach. When these people came out, they talked among themselves of how Dr. Fosdick had said that, sooner than lift a finger to aid another war, men of his cloth would go to Leavenworth.