fighting men to the Army as generously as the day labourer and the tradesman. It is therefore not altogether impossible that they might come to understand the immense opportunity that is given them by fate to promote a true, deep, and irresistibly potent national unity.
A further contribution to the establishment of a national unity of this truly Utopian degree might come from a changed attitude of mind towards his fellows in the individual. There would have to be an increased kindliness, generosity, patience, and tolerance in all his relations with others, a deliberate attempt to conquer prejudice, irritability, impatience, and self-assertiveness, a deliberate encouragement of cheerfulness, composure, and fortitude. All these would be tasks for the individual {154} to carry out for himself alone; there would be no campaign-making, no direct exhortation, no appeals. Towards the Army and the Navy the central fact of each man’s attitude would be the question, “Am I worth dying for?” and his strongest effort would be the attempt to make himself so.
That question may perhaps make one wonder why it has not been heard more often during the war as a text of the Church. There is little doubt that very many men whose feeling towards the Church is in no way disrespectful or hostile are conscious of a certain uneasiness in hearing her vigorously defending the prosecution of the war and demonstrating its righteousness. They feel, in spite of however conclusive demonstrations to the contrary, that there is a deep-seated inconsistency between war for whatever object and the Sermon on the Mount, and they cannot but remember, when they are told that this is a holy war, that that also the Germans say. They perhaps feel that the justification of the war is, after all, a matter for politicians and statesmen, and that the Church would be more appropriately employed in making it as far as she can a vehicle of good, rather than trying to justify superfluously its existence. A people already awed by the self-sacrifice of its armies may be supposed to be capable of profiting by the exhortations of a Church whose cardinal doctrine is