Editorial October 12, 1918 Issue

The Humbling of Moloch

William P. McKenzie

Of course there is no Moloch any more than there is a misleading personality named Jack-o'-lantern lighting people to destruction in swamps and morasses. Nor is Wotan in his Wild Hunt and Valhalla banquets with the slain in battle anything that he should have servitors and worshipers. But mortal mind is a claim to intelligence apart from and opposed to God, and so it has invented "gods many, and lords many." The potency of any thus invented or imagined god is the equivalent of the belief in his power cherished by human beings.

The invented god is proclaimed by his priests and worshipers, and as the prestige and also the actual living of the priests depends on the devotion of the worshipers whereby they can be taxed for the support of the worship, it is evident that priests must be active in enlarging the circle of worshipers or believers in the god. Part of the propoganda will be to induce disregard of other religions and bring their votaries into contempt. When Christianity, for instance, holds to the beatitude, "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy," the devotees of a false god will cry out that mercy is weakness and that those who are merciful are failures. Power expressed in cruelty is the barbaric ideal of such worshipers. Tannenberg puts the ideal succinctly when he says: "War must leave nothing to the vanquished but their eyes to weep with. Modesty on our part would be purely madness." Hence to decimate an opposing nation, to kill its citizens by any and every means until its power to resist is broken, then to enslave as relentlessly the helpless residue, is looked upon as the true philosophy for action.

By such philosophers the words of him whom many in the world have called and now call Master will be scoffed at, of course. He said, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Interpreting this Paul said, "If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink." To feed an enemy because he is hungry, in recognition of common humanity, is at least some acknowledgment of a common fatherhood; whereas the barbaric ideal of torturing an enemy prisoner because he is helpless seems to be inspired by something lower than even animalism.

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