conspicuous than in the field of religious inquiry, nor is it confined
to either believers or unbelievers. There has been too much mutual
abuse, and too little attention to the fact that the mind no less than
the mouth has its palate, its impulsive selections and rejections. One
can meet the difficulty only by a patient and full examination of the
pleas of both parties to a controversy.

And the first plea which it is material to examine is that, since it is
claimed that all the nations engaged in the war are Christian nations,
one may accuse them collectively of moral failure. From the earliest
days of the Christian religion it was the boast of those who accepted
it that it abolished all distinctions of caste and race. In the little
community which gathered round the cross there was neither bond nor
free, neither Greek nor Roman. This cosmopolitanism was, in fact, a
natural feature of religious movements at the time, and was due not so
much to their intrinsic development as to the political circumstances of
the world in which they spread. All round the eastern and northern
shores of the Mediterranean a great variety of races mingled in every
port and every commercial town, and it was the policy of the powerful
Empire which extended its sway over them all to overrule their national
antagonisms. When, in the earlier period, Jew and Greek and Egyptian had
maintained their separate nationalities, hostility to other races had
been a very natural social quality, an inevitable part of the spirit of
self-preservation in a race. When the great Empires had conquered the
smaller nationalities or the decaying older Empires, this mutual
hostility was moderated, and, as the vast movements of population which
marked the end of the old and the beginning of the new era filled the
Mediterranean cities with extraordinarily mixed crowds, mutual
friendship became the more fitting and more useful social virtue. A good
deal of the old narrow patriotism had been due to the fact that each