one.  The man who does not believe he is to be blotted out when his body ceases to breathe, who holds all history for his heritage and the wide present for his battle-ground, believes also the future is no repellent void but a widening and alluring world.  If in his travel he is scrupulous in detail, it is in the spirit of the mariner who will neither court a ship-wreck nor be denied his adventure.  He cannot deny to others the right to hesitate and halt by the way, but his spirit asks no less than the eternal and the infinite.  Yes, but many good religious people are not used to seeing the issue in this light, and those who make a trade of fanning old bitterness will still ply their bitter trade, crying that anarchists, atheists, heretics, infidels, all outcasts and wicked men, are all rampant for our destruction.  It may be disputed, but, admitting it, one may ask:  Is there no place among Christian people for those distinctive virtues on which we base the superiority of our religion?  When the need is greatest, should the practice be less urgent?  It is not evident that the free-thinker is obliged by any of his principles to give better example.  It is evident the Christian is so obliged.  Why is he found wanting?  If human weakness were pleaded, one could understand.  It is against the making a virtue of it lies the protest.  How many noble things there are in our philosophies, and how little practised.  No violent convulsions should be needed to make us free, if men were but consistent:  we should find ourselves wakening from a wicked dream in a bloodless and beautiful revolution.  We are in the desert truly and a long way from the Promised Land.  But we must get to the higher ground and consider our position; and if one by one we are stripped of the prejudices that too long have usurped the place of faith, and we find ourselves, to our dismay, perhaps lacking that faith that we have so long shouted but so little testified, and tremble on the verge of panic, there is one last line that gives in four words with divine simplicity and completeness a final answer to all timidity and objections:  “Fear not; only believe.”

CHAPTER XIV

MILITARISM

I

To defend or recover freedom men must be always ready for the appeal to arms.  Here is a principle that has been vindicated through all history and needs vindication now.  But in our time the question of rightful war has been crossed by the evil of militarism, and in our assertion of the principle, that in the last resort freemen must have recourse to the sword, we find ourselves crossed by the anti-militarist campaign.  We must dispose of this confusing element before we can come to the ethics of war.  Of the evil of militarism there can be no question, but a careful study of some anti-militaristic literature discloses very different motives for the campaign.  I propose