There has been one moral scale of values for the
father of his family and another for the same man as ward or state or
federal politician; one code to govern internal disputes within the
nation; another code to govern external disputes between nations.
And what is this code that produced the Prussian autocracy, that long
insisted on the opium trade between India and China, that permitted
the atrocities in the Belgian Congo, that sent first Russia and then
Japan into Port Arthur and first Germany and then Japan into Shantung,
that insists upon retaining the Turk in Constantinople, that produced
the already discredited treaty of Versailles? What is the code that
made the deadly rivalry of mounting armaments between army and army,
navy and navy, of the Europe before 1914? The code, to be sure, of
cunning, of greed, of might; the materialism of the philosopher and
the naturalism of the sensualist, clothed in grandiose forms and
covered with the insufferable hypocrisy of solemn phrases. There are
no conceivable ethical or religious interests and no humane goals
or values that justify these things. International diplomacy and
politics, economic imperialism, using political machinery and power to
half-cloak, half-champion its ends, has no law of Christian sacrifice
and no law of Greek moderation behind it. On the contrary, what
should interest the Christian preacher, as he regards it, is its sheer
anarchy, its unashamed and naked paganism.
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