Article June 19, 1915 Issue

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with contributions from W. E. Orchard, Samuel Zane Batten, John Wright Buckham

[Rev. W. E. Orchard, D.D., in The Christian Commonwealth]

We have been accustomed in the calmer atmosphere of earlier times to recognize that society as a whole is responsible for many of the crimes for which it was content to punish individuals. The social solidarity of sin had become a new discovery to us. Whether it meant that only some abstraction, such as the social order, was the subject of sin, and that the individual was never responsible, we had not all decided. We had come to take the iniquity of each and lay it upon all. But whatever this discovery was worth, it was becoming clear to some that its corollary was, nevertheless, that no social advance was possible until the sins of society came to be felt by the individual conscience.

Can we suddenly repudiate these hardly won gains of ethical consciousness? Can any one of us dissociate himself from some responsibility for this war? . . . Especially if we belong to Christ's church, does heavy blame rest upon us. It must be evident that if Christ's church had been really united and alive, if it had taught its members not to bear arms, this war and many another would not have happened. The world does not believe that there is any other way than the resort to force, because it has not had the example before it which we ought to have provided. Our long trifling with the ethics of Christ, our unwillingness to take up the cross and follow him, our attempt to worship God and mammon, —these are our sins. The penalty of them is being paid by the bright young life of Europe, dying in the trenches for the sins of the world.

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