Theological doctrines such as the Trinity, the Atonement, and the like
are not the essential doctrines of Christianity. The essential doctrine
is that life is a struggle for others as well as for self; that in this
struggle every one owes a duty to his neighbor, and the stronger he is
and the greater the need of his neighbor the more imperative is his
duty; that as the father and the mother care for, educate and govern
their child until he grows able to care for, educate and govern himself,
so always the strong men and women owe the duty of protection,
education, and, in some measure, government to the weaker of the human
race until they have outgrown the need for it.
In so far as autocracy is the rule of the few for the benefit of the few
it is paganism. In so far as democracy is the rule of the many for the
benefit of the many it is Christianity. He who believes this will
perhaps believe with me that in a true sense this is a religious war,
the war of conscience, honor, the moral sense against the rule of the
bayonet and the bullet.
The cynic who thinks this war demonstrates the failure of Christianity
should not forget such facts as the heroic struggle of Belgium to
maintain her neutrality, the resolve of England at every cost to
maintain her pledges to Belgium, the Red Cross following the armies in
the field and ministering to the sick, the wounded and the suffering,
regardless of their nationality, the general kind treatment to
prisoners, accentuated by some very horrible exceptions, and all this
contrasted with the enslaving, torturing, the crucifying, the flaying
alive of prisoners captured in war by barbaric nations before the dawn
of Christianity.
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