A MILITANT PREACHER.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume VI, Issue 264, 24 October 1916, Page 3

A MILITANT PREACHER.

“MORE STEEL IN THE BLOOD.” Pastor Phillips, a well-known preacher of the Gospel in Berlin, writing in the Reichsbote. the leading Church organ, pleads for' “a sharper use of military weapons of destruction” on the ground that these weapons are not to be regarded exclusively as “murder engines.” but as instruments for the defence and salvation of the Fatherland. For the same reason, says the preacher, it is not only the right but the duty of the nation under certain circumstances at the beginning of a war to make scraps of paper of all those treaties and arrangements the destruction of which will help to save the nation. This is a question of convenience, not a question of principle. “War is the ultimo ratio of God, the last means which He employs to bring nations to reason when they are no longer inclined to follow’ the Divine paths appointed for them. War is God’s judgment court as well as God’s judgment in the history of the world, and just as in war the national powers in all directions are stretched to their greatest tension, it follows that, so long as the world lasts, those nations will be victorious whom God, the shaper of the world’s history, permits for a time to lead the world. And equally clear is it that it is God’s will that those nations into whose hands He has put weapons shall use them to the fullest, and hold assize as He would have it held.

“War in itself has nothing to do with Christianity. But when God allows the rule of the sword and its decisions to dominate, it means that he is not merely the Creator and Redeemer of the world, but its Judge as well. War decides the place of a nation in the world, the place which God appoints for it. and which it w ill hold so long as He thinks it is fit to hold it. Whether the nation is Christian or not has nothing to do with the matter.” The wives and mothers of fallen German heroes, he declares, must not regard the war and its sacrifices with a mawkish sentimentality . They must learn to say: “Whether our beloved stand or fall, no lamentations will escape from our lips.” “May God train us in iron energy of/will, and in the extreme exercise of our powers. Therefore. I say once more —more steel in our blood.” CATHOLIC OPPOSITION TO FRIGHTFULNESS. “It is certain that the Pope does not think of the unconditional defeat of one side, and is against a war of conquest,” remarks the German Catholic paper Petrus-Blatter. “As the press is not without its share in bringing about this awful war it is its duty now to lay the spirit which it has conjured up. Above ad else tho Catholic press should strive to conje into line with the wishes of the higher Church authorities, and avoid all advocacy of still greater bloodiness in the conduct of the war, and of the employment of still sharper weapons. It is inconceivable how so many newspapers, which lay stress on representing Catholic opinion, should, for example, join in the agitatory propaganda against the Chance.lor in consequence of his milder attitude regarding the employment of submarines.’