The responsibilites of the League online

feeling in the writings of a few chaplains at the
front, he finds there a consciousness, not so
much that the Church has something to offer,
as that it has lost something that it ought to
have.

But, baffled as he is, it is this last note of
failure that perhaps attracts him most strongly.
It voices exactly his own present instinct of
helplessness in face of the " conquest of the
world," but with this one significant difference,
that it seems to strengthen rather than weaken
the corporate sense of the Church and appears to
be coupled with an equal confidence in the
eventual recapture of the lost secret. And
herein lies the special reason why anyone who
has had some personal experience of the making
of peace is bound to close any survey of it by
an appeal to other hopes and other remedies.
He has seen many who arrived in Paris with
confidence, enthusiasm and well stocked
armouries of reform, leave it bewildered and
stunned, and among these, for one whose dis-
appointment turns to anger with the selfishness
of statesmen or contempt for inefficiencies
of organisation, there are ten who have simply
learnt to distrust their own abilities and the
whole system of hopes and methods on which
political civilisation had taught them to rely.



318 RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE LEAGUE

Such disillusionment will accept leadership from
none so readily as from those who were the
first to confess their weakness. But that leader-
ship can only be based on a clearer and more
comprehensive declaration of faith than any
to which disillusionment has access to-day.

Here, on the threshold of the subject, we
must leave the honest inquirer whom we have
followed thus far because we believe him to
represent a large part, perhaps the bulk, of
the citizens of the new family of nations. The
declaration for which he waits can only come
from the Church as an organic body, through
those whom he can recognise as representing
it before the world. But there is no doubt
to what manner of claim the Church is com-
mitted, however modestly laid by in a napkin
in deference to the appeals of social service or
the lure of temporal authority. It claims to
represent in itself the only hope of peace ; it
claims that this hope cannot be attained by
the operation of political power, whether auto-
cratic or democratic, not even by the combined
power of all nations in a League or of all
civilised men in a universal state, nor yet by the
power of a complete system of Christian govern-
ments, inspired with the life and blessed with the
co-operation and guidance of the Church of
the missionary's dream, embracing all mankind.
Yet it claims also that this peace, springing from
sources beyond the reach of political reform
or theocratic usurpation, is nevertheless to be
realised, not in any Nirvana of the soul, beyond
the " gold bar of heaven/' but as an actual state



THE PROBLEM RESTATED 319

of corporate human society ; that it is in a very
real sense a present process and policy, not a
" social myth." And the language which it has
employed to describe that process and define
that policy points to no mere exercise of healthy
influence, no mere result of the progress of
innumerable generations, for it is the language
of a " new creation/' not of the progressive
modification of conditions by the slow education
of the human will.

So much we may say ; the rest lies beyond the
scope of an essay such as this. Only let it be
remembered that to many men to-day these
things are not the dreams of tradition but the
concrete hope of the future, the only possible
answer to the passionate questionings which
now convulse the world. Science and criticism
have touched them less than experience and
reason have shaken the systems of political
philosophers. And if to-day some are content
to uphold the claims of commonwealth and
union against the aspirations of the social
revolution and to found a League of Nations
directed mainly to the modest task of satisfying
immediate and pressing needs, it is because they
look beyond such labours to a more fundamental
union and see in no remote region of the clouds
another city into which the nations shall indeed
bring their glory and their honour.



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