Chapter V: War and Hatred21

BY G. F. STOUT

What is the real attitude of those who call themselves Christians and profess to accept the teaching of the New Testament towards the Sermon on the Mount and especially towards such precepts as ‘Love your enemies’? That there is here a huge and startling divergence between theory and practice seems undeniable. It is equally clear that the divergence is not merely of the kind which unavoidably separates moral ideals from the actual conduct of imperfect human beings. For this only means that, because of the frailty of human nature, we cannot, even with our best endeavours, live up to the level of the moral ideal; it does not mean that we refuse sincerely to recognize the ideal as a practical guide—as a standard to which good men will endeavour to conform their actions as far as lies in their power. But the precept ‘Love your enemies’ does not seem to be generally recognized in this way as a practical guide amid the stress and strain of daily life. It is not even generally appealed to as a standard for approving or condemning the ordinary behaviour of men. It is not effectively sanctioned by public opinion and sentiment. If we inquire why this is so, there appear to be two answers, vaguely and confusedly underlying the position of common sense. The first is that any sustained effort to pursue the ideal under the actual conditions of human life is so impossible that it is useless to attempt it. The second is that if we did succeed in loving our enemies and in acting as if we loved them, the result would be disastrous; the good would be exposed without defence to the forces of evil and life would no longer be worth living. For one or both of these reasons it seems to be tacitly assumed that in practice we are justified in setting aside the precept ‘Love your enemies’ and in substituting for it the precept ‘Love your friends and hate your enemies’. At the same time it is generally granted that under conditions different from ours the rule of love would be universally applicable. But this concession turns out on examination to mean very little. For the state of things contemplated under which we might be reasonably expected to love our enemies seems to be one under which our enemies would be prepared to love us or might easily be induced to love us, and this almost amounts to saying that we can only be reasonably required to love our enemies when there are no enemies for us to love.

This conflict between theory and practice remains for the most part inarticulate and subconscious. There is latent uneasiness; but the problem is not definitely faced even by thoughtful men. To bring it into clear consciousness a special crisis is required. For many of us the present war with its painful incidents and complications has had this effect. Nor is it difficult to see why this should be so. In war, or, at any rate, in such a war as this, we devote all our energies to the task of inflicting hurt, loss, and destruction on the enemy, and he in his turn devotes all his energies to the task of inflicting hurt, loss, and destruction on us. Neither side, it would seem, can do this efficiently without being sustained by strong and enduring feeling. But this feeling can scarcely partake of the nature of love. It must, it would seem, be an emotion the reverse of this. Whether and in what sense there can be an emotion opposed to love which is yet not identified with hate, is a question which I shall have to discuss later on. In any case, it will scarcely be denied that the actual feeling generated even in good and well-meaning men by such conditions as those of the present war are to a large extent to be classed as feelings of hatred. When the enemy is held to have been guilty of cruel and inhuman conduct contrary to the recognized usage of civilized warfare, it seems to be still more impossible to make any pretence of loving the enemy or of doing anything but hate the enemy. How can we love the authors and perpetrators of the Belgian atrocities? Not only is this attitude regarded as inevitable in war but it is also felt to be justifiable in a special way by the special conditions. It is taken to be justifiable for reasons which are not in general applicable to similar relations between private individuals. One reason is that a private individual is in the main protected against the grosser forms of injury by the social order of the community to which he belongs, by its laws and institutions, and by public opinion and sentiment; to this extent he has no need to take the law into his own hands. In war this no longer holds good. We seem in war to be reduced to the position of animals who having directly to repel harm and aggression themselves, need for that end the primitive and instinctive emotion of blind anger which impels them to hurt and destroy indiscriminately the enemies who threaten their own destruction. It is true that in war there is some protection against certain forms of injury in what is called the established usage of civilized warfare. But as we know by recent experience, this safeguard cannot be safely relied on; and it is just when even this semi-legal protection fails, that we tend to give full play to the feeling of hatred or analogous feelings, with the sense that we are right in so doing. Another obvious reason why we naturally regard hatred of our enemies as especially justified in the case of war is that here it is not our own private injuries which we resent but injuries done to the whole community of which we are members. We are so much in the habit of connecting what is morally wrong with selfishness that when there is no selfishness, we tend to assume that there can be nothing wrong or at any rate nothing seriously wrong. Further, a benevolent disposition towards the common enemy is felt as disloyalty to our own people. It tends to awaken indignation or disgust as revealing a want of patriotism. On the other hand, the most unsparing hatred of the common enemy, though we may more or less condemn it on other grounds, is at least approved as an expression of patriotism; and patriotism is a virtue of all others most important and indispensable in time of war. Hence even though we condemn all hatred as such, yet if we cannot have the most intense and efficient patriotism without it we feel justified in preferring the two together.

Such considerations as these seem to make a strong case for regarding hate, or at least some emotion essentially akin to it, as an attitude which may be often both unavoidable and justifiable in dealing with our enemies, and more especially with the enemies of our country in time of war. None the less it remains true that this attitude is, prima facie, very hard to reconcile with the spirit and tendency of Christian morality, and particularly with such precepts as ‘Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that despitefully use you and persecute you’. Hence all of us who, whatever may be our view of the dogmas of Christian Theology, agree in accepting the moral teaching of Christ as expressing the highest human ideal, are placed in a difficult position. It looks like a mere evasion and not a solution of this difficulty to content ourselves with saying that the Christian ideal, though it is in itself the highest, cannot and ought not to be pursued under the actual conditions of human life. There are not two relatively independent and separate kinds of truth, the theoretical and the practical. What is false in practice must, to that extent, be false in theory also. The highest ideal is the ideal which we ought to endeavour to pursue under all relevant conditions. There is evidence that this is recognized by some Christians who entertain no misgiving as to the righteousness of the present war, and who are convinced of the necessity of prosecuting it with the utmost zeal and energy, and yet, at the same time, feel that it is hard or impossible to do so while retaining for the enemy anything akin to a Christian disposition. We have here, perhaps, the most fundamental reason why some conscientious men who, in general, believe in prayer and in the efficacy of prayer, none the less shrink from praying for the defeat of the enemy in war. Other grounds are put forward, but they seem valid in this particular case only if they are valid against prayer in general. It is urged, for instance, that God controls the course of events in accordance with His own wisdom and goodness, and that it is therefore a futile impertinence to attempt to direct His activity to what we erring mortals think best, however sincere and well-meaning we may be. Any petition, it is said, which is for our own ends is condemned in advance, in so far as our own ends are not His ends; and in so far as they do coincide with His the petition is superfluous. Taken strictly, this argument would cut at the root not only of all prayer but of all human activity. For whatever ends we pursue and by whatever means, it is always possible that our aim does not coincide with the divine purpose. It would follow, if the argument were sound, that the truly religious attitude would be to sit still with our hands folded and let events take their course. The fallacy lies in the assumption that what is best in matters which concern human beings is determined independently of the thoughts and feelings of the human beings themselves. In particular, it lies in the assumption that what is best for us and for the world must be determined quite independently of whether we pray for it or not.

Another reason urged against praying for success in war is that good men on the other side are praying for their own success and for our defeat with a clear conscience and full belief in the righteousness of their cause. What has been called ‘the spectacle of serious men in opposite camps raising their competitive prayers to the one God’ may well appear to reduce to an absurdity the prayers on both sides. Yet I do not see that this consideration has any real weight. For it is not asserted that good men ought to refrain from using _other_ ways of pursuing what they are sincerely convinced is a good end, merely because other good men with equal sincerity are opposed to them. I can find no cogent reason for making an exception in the case of prayer. The use of prayer in a proper spirit can, at least, do no harm. Further, it is to be remembered that when prayer is offered in a right spirit, all special petitions have behind them that general attitude of mind which is expressed in the words ‘Thy Will be done’. So far as this is so the agreement is more fundamental than the opposition. The real difficulty felt by tender consciences in praying for success in war seems to me to be of a different nature. What holds them back is their sense that they cannot pray in that spirit which would alone make their prayers acceptable, and that they cannot even prevail on themselves to make a sincere effort to attain this spirit. They feel that they cannot appeal to God to be on their side unless, in so far as lies in their power, they in the same act endeavour to place themselves on the side of God, to conform their will and their whole mental attitude to His will as directed to what is highest and best. But how is this possible when they not only continue to harbour in their heart fierce and embittered emotions, which appear irreconcilable with the precept ‘Love your enemies’, but cling to them in such a way that they cannot without hypocrisy pretend to try to lay them aside or even pray for deliverance from them? They feel that under such conditions they would be appealing not to the true God but to some partisan deity such as the Kaiser must have had in view when he spoke of God as ‘the constant ally of Prussia under the Great Elector and the Great King’.

Let it be fully understood that I am not here expressing any view concerning the justification of prayer or the efficacy of prayer, or concerning Christian doctrine or Christian morality. But if we leave such questions entirely on one side, the conception of prayer at least supplies us with a useful mode of approaching our present problem. For no feelings can be right feelings which in the case of a man who really believes in prayer would rightly debar him from seeking in his extreme need the help of a Power whom he regards as all wise and all good. We may, then, put our question thus: How far is it true that feelings of hatred or feelings in any way akin to hatred ought to present a barrier of this kind? It is true that what we gain by this mode of stating the question is only a point of view which helps us to grapple with it earnestly and thoroughly without indulging in weak and illogical compromise. It does not directly bring us any nearer to a solution. For in order to determine what is acceptable to God we must first determine what is good. Our course would indeed be plain if we could take such precepts as ‘Love your enemies’, so to speak at their face value and treat them without further discussion or interpretation as finally authoritative. But even theologians, as such, for the most part refuse to do this. Still less is it admissible that I should do so. For I am trying to deal with the problem on its own intrinsic merits without appeal to authority. This being so I can proceed only in one way. I must begin by asking what reasons there are for holding that hatred and kindred emotions are evil; then in the light of these reasons I must attempt to determine in what sense and without what limits, if there be any limits, the general principle holds good. Here we may look for some help to the great philosophers. For some of these have maintained, on independent grounds, the Christian doctrine in its general spirit and tendency. Plato, for instance, holds firmly that the maxim is entirely wrong which bids us do good to our friends and harm to our enemies. The righteous man, he insists, will in all cases aim only at doing good, whether to enemies or friends. Spinoza, too, lays down the principle that ‘all hatred is evil’, and even attempts to demonstrate it like a proposition in Euclid. There is a Christian philosopher, Bishop Butler, who has given us an admirable discussion of the whole subject on rational grounds.

At this point I must prepare the ground for further advance by expressing more exactly the nature of the problem. So far, the question I have raised is whether hatred and kindred emotions are in all cases evil. But the tendency of ordinary language is to associate the very word, hatred, with some form of bad feeling. From this point of view, to ask the question, Can hatred ever be good? sounds like asking whether what is bad can be good. But the real issue can easily be stated so as to avoid this paradox. There is a certain primitive and instinctive emotion called anger, common to man and animals; in animals, it tends to be excited by such conditions as overt or threatened attack, painful wounds or blows, and often by any kind of opposition or interference, or by the threat of such opposition or interference, or even by the mere presence of a natural enemy. The real or threatened injury may be either to the animal itself or to its young or its mate, or, in the case of gregarious animals, to the community of which it is a member. There is a modified and restrained form of this passion which arises between animals closely connected by social ties, as when the mother slaps her young or the mother cat boxes the kitten’s ears. But where the emotion is aroused by an outsider there is in general no such limitation. The impulse is blindly and indiscriminately directed to damage and destroy. By preference, of course, to damage and destroy the enemy, and in the next place, whatever is in any way associated with the enemy, but also beyond this there is a general destructive impulse which vents itself on whatever may encounter it. Consider, for instance, the behaviour of a raging bull or of a man who in his fury destroys furniture and breaks crockery. Now, so far as animals are concerned, this passion is not the subject either of moral approval or disapproval. It is simply a natural endowment like the teeth and claws of the cat, or the venom of the snake, or the malodorous secretion of the skunk. It has the biological function of preserving the individual and the species in the struggle for existence; but it has no moral significance. The same holds good also for a man, so far as he merely reacts like an animal in a sudden and trying situation which takes him by surprise. But it is quite otherwise with complex human sentiments which are developed from the primitive emotion of anger and remain to the end essentially akin to it. In the animal, the emotion occurs as a transient reaction to a transient situation. In human beings it passes into a variety of more or less permanent dispositions or sentiments, which permeate and control complex systems of thought and conduct. Indeed, in some instances, such a disposition may be the mainspring of organized thought and action throughout a lifetime, as we see in the case of Hannibal’s attitude to the Romans. Now the question we have to deal with is this, Are all these developed sentiments which have their root in the primitive emotion of anger to be condemned as evil; and if not, on what principle are we to draw a distinction? If by the word _hatred_ we agree to mean all bad passions of this kind, then the question will be, Are all angry sentiments and dispositions to be classed as forms of hatred? In dealing with this problem we have especially to consider the state of things generated by war.

Our first step will be to examine the grounds for regarding hatred as necessarily evil. We may then proceed to inquire whether these grounds apply to all forms of angry emotion which compel us to hurt or destroy our fellow men. The reasons for regarding hatred as evil seem all capable of being brought under one head. Hatred is evil inasmuch as it is blind, inasmuch as it perpetuates at a higher level the original blind and undiscriminating character of the primitive emotion of animal anger. So far as this is the case, it is incompatible with the development of the higher nature of man as a rational being. The most fundamental ground for this position is, perhaps, most clearly stated by Spinoza. The supreme good for human beings, he asserts, is to be found only in their union and co-operation with each other. ‘Nothing is more useful to a man than a man.’ It is only with other men that a man can enter on that sort of union which is necessary at once for his own existence and development as a human being and for theirs. ‘Except man we know of no particular thing in nature in whose Mind we can rejoice. With nothing else can we unite in friendship or in any kind of social life’ (_Eth._ V. 14, App. § 26). Hence there is a fundamental distinction between our relation to human beings and to other things. In the case of anything else, ‘A regard for our own welfare does not require us to preserve it, but leads us either to preserve or destroy it, or to adapt it to our wants in any way according to the varied uses of which it admits’ (ibid.). It is otherwise in the case of human beings. To seek to destroy them is virtually to seek to destroy ourselves. But the passion of hatred blinds us to all this; it blinds us to the fact that the essential good of man is to be sought in union with his fellow men and impels us to maintain disunion with them and to seek our highest good in hurting and destroying them. Nor is it only in its consequences that hatred as such is evil. As contrary to the rational nature of man, as blinding him to his true good, it works like a disease or a cancerous growth in the soul of those who feel it. ‘Nothing can be so good for a man as such a temper of mind as will unite him with’ his fellow men and them with him; while nothing on the contrary can be so bad for him or in him as that which sets him and them at variance. All hatred, then, is evil and there can be no greater evil.

All this applies to hatred of the enemy in war. Indeed the evil is the greater because the hatred is between great and highly organized communities instead of between individuals. There is, however, one fact which tends to veil and disguise the evil of hatred in this case. War disunites nations, but within each nation it strengthens union and mutual co-operation. Now this in itself is good. But it is not good, if and so far as the source of unity is participation in a common hatred. To this extent the nation is in the position of the individual hater and is blinded as he is to its own true good. Speaking broadly, just in so far as war leads a nation to treat what is good for it as essentially separate from and opposed to what is good for other nations and for mankind in general, war does that nation harm. The history of Germany illustrates this sufficiently. The root of the mischief is to be sought far back in the horrible Thirty Years’ War. But subsequent wars have served to keep it alive—the Seven Years’ War, the Napoleonic War, and above all, that process of cementing the German Empire with blood and iron which Bismarck artificially and violently substituted for the natural development which was leading to the same result in a better form. The Franco-Prussian War belongs to the same series. It is an easily intelligible and even an excusable result of the course of German history that national sentiment in Germany has come half-unconsciously to treat even peace as if it were a state of suppressed and disguised warfare, and to feel no security for its national existence and national development unless the mailed fist is continually shaken in the face of its enemies in the East and in the West, and unless it is continually prepared to pounce on them before they can pounce on it. It has now actually pounced in what is called a preventive war. The temper and attitude which led to this result is essentially what I found some thirty years ago generally diffused among the common people of Berlin and especially among old soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War: men’s minds were dwelling on the necessity of a reckoning with Russia, and of a renewed humiliation of France; there was deep hostility to England mingled with contempt for our ways of thinking and acting and with jealousy of our undeserved riches and prosperity. This attitude of mind has in one way had its reward. In the present struggle the Germans started better prepared for war than their opponents. But for this advantage they have paid and are likely to pay very dearly. You may be inclined to say ‘Serve them right’. But if this is taken to imply that the German people is much worse by nature in this respect than other peoples I must disagree. I doubt whether under like historical conditions any people would have done better.

Hatred, we have said, is bad because it is blind; and fundamentally the blindness consists in failure to recognize the true good of man in mutual union and co-operation. But there are many other subordinate ways in which its essential blindness is manifested. To hate is to view the actions and characters of others through a medium which falsifies and distorts. To quote Bishop Butler, ‘the whole character and behaviour of those we hate is considered with an eye to that particular part which has offended us, and the whole man appears monstrous without anything right or human in him’. Hatred in fact seeks only its own appropriate food and disregards or rejects whatever does not sustain its own life and development. We can see this clearly enough in the attitude of our enemies towards ourselves. We can see, for instance, how hard it is for the German mind, at the present moment, to think anything that is good of England and Englishmen; how hard, for instance, they find it to admit that we are really patriotic, that our soldiers are anything but hirelings, actuated by merely mercenary motives, or that they can fight efficiently, or that even our fleet is anything but a pretentious sham. But to the reflective observer it is plain enough that a similar disposition prevails, though not, I hope, in the same degree, among ourselves. Are we prepared to consider fairly the possibility that the Germans in entering on the present war were actuated by motives which were not wholly bad, or that they really feared and believed that the neutrality of Belgium would be violated by France, or in general that they feared and believed with what seemed to them good reason that unless they took the initiative by a preventive war, they themselves would be attacked and taken at a disadvantage?

Hatred not only blinds us to what may be favourable to the enemy; it also blinds us to whatever may be wrong in our own feelings and behaviour towards them. It tends to place the blame all on one side. This, as we know, is very rarely the case. It is very unlikely to be the case in a war between great civilized nations. The present war is, I am fully convinced, most just and necessary. Yet I also believe that faults on our side have indirectly contributed in some degree to prepare the way for it.[22]

I shall mention only one more of the manifold ways in which hate leads to blindness. It shrinks from any serious and impartial endeavour to trace the evil which offends it to the conditions which may account for it and render it intelligible. The impulse of hate is not to understand, but to destroy. To inquire into conditions and to seek an explanation would only divert and distract it. It prefers, therefore, to concentrate itself on the persons hated as if they were the sole ultimate sources of the evil, as if the evil were due merely to their intrinsic and spontaneous badness. It is this attitude of mind which leads us to turn away with impatience from any attempt to explain, for instance, the Belgian atrocities so as to make it intelligible how they could be committed or condoned by a people who in their original human nature are not so very different from ourselves. The attempt to explain is treated as an attempt to explain away, and resented as if it were a justification or defence or denial of fact.

My general position is that hatred is bad inasmuch as it is blind, and I am unable to discover anything else which justifies us in treating it as necessarily evil. The question is whether all sentiments and emotions partaking of the nature of anger are to be condemned on this account. Ought we to set before us, as our ideal, freedom from all such emotions and sentiments, and the substitution of other motives for them? Let us provisionally suppose that this is the ideal, and examine how it would work if it were consistently followed. In the first place we must consider how we should proceed in attempting to realize the ideal. It may be suggested that we should follow invariably in all cases the rule ‘Overcome evil with good’. Now there may be a sense in which this rule is universally applicable and ought to be universally applied. But in the common and obvious interpretation of it, this is plainly untrue. As commonly interpreted, it means that we ought not to hurt or destroy the evildoer, and that instead of this we ought to appeal to his better nature by showing goodwill and kindness towards him. This is, of course, infinitely the best way where it can be followed effectively and followed effectively without incurring greater evils than it has any reasonable chance of curing. But these limiting conditions are very important. They would clearly apply, for instance, in case of an attack by scalp-hunting Red Indians on a family of peaceful settlers. In general, the words ‘Overcome evil with good’ are to be taken as qualified by the preceding words ‘Be not overcome of evil’. If and so far as we can overcome evil without being overcome of evil, it is our duty to do so, otherwise it is not. It may, however, still be maintained that, though it is admittedly often right and necessary to inflict pain, hurt, and destruction on evildoers, yet we ought not to do this in the spirit of anger. We ought rather to act purely out of regard for the highest attainable good, and we ought to inflict pain and damage on evildoers only as a necessary means to this end and not out of any angry emotion we may feel towards them.

This is the general position of Spinoza when he asserts as a universal principle that all ‘hatred is bad’. It may seem a lofty and noble position. But it is not enough for a moral ideal to appear lofty and noble when we contemplate it vaguely in the abstract. It must be in such direct contact with the actual conditions of human life as to afford constant practical guidance in dealing with these. Judged by this standard the proposed principle seems to break down. It requires us in dealing with the malevolence of human beings to be actuated merely by love of good, not at all by resentment against the evildoer. Our mental attitude ought, on this view, to be always that assumed by the Quaker in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ who pushed the slave-driver over the precipice and explained his action by the words ‘Friend, thou art not wanted here’. The fundamental objection to this is that love of anything implies and includes a corresponding feeling of aversion to whatever is recognized as opposed to what we love or destructive of what we love. The love of health, for instance, implies and includes aversion to disease wherever we meet disease and recognize it as such. It does not, of course, imply that we must be angry with disease, but that is because we do not love health in the same way as we love what is good in human beings and in the personal relations of human beings to each other. Just as the sentiment of love varies in its nature with the nature of its object, there is a corresponding difference in the aversion which is its counterpart. Where the evil is malevolence, where it is an evil will directed to injustice, cruelty, and selfish aggression, the appropriate correlate of love to the good is some form of anger with the evil. And this must mean anger with the evildoer. It is not satisfactory to say that we may feel aversion to what is evil in a man and only kindness towards the man himself. This is to overlook the central fact that the evil in this case is an expression of the man’s personal will and character which cannot be separated from himself. Nor can we substitute sorrow for anger. Sorrow is appropriate to misfortune, but intentional injury is not merely a misfortune which happens to befall the person who inflicts it. To feel towards it as if it were merely a misfortune is to be more or less blind to its true nature. In consequence, when sorrow takes the place of anger, it fails to give rise to efficient action; the tendency is to mourn over the offender where rebuke and punishment are required by the situation.

In actual life, we find some who, owing either to their nature or to their circumstances and education, are but little susceptible of angry emotion; in such persons we find also a corresponding failure to understand or believe in the malicious attitude of mind in which intentional injuries have their source. They turn aside from the evidence or interpret it in their own one-sided way. An extreme instance is that of Charles Lamb’s friend, George Dyer, who, as Lamb tells us, could find nothing more severe to say about the worst criminals than that they must have been very eccentric. So far as I can make out, I belong myself to this class, though not to the same extent as Lamb’s friend. I naturally skip such passages in the newspapers as these which describe German atrocities in Belgium. I refuse to read even official reports. I put myself off by hoping that in the main they are not true, or that they are greatly exaggerated, or that they can be explained so as to cast another light on them. Yet I have been gradually forced to believe in their reality by evidence which I cannot reasonably resist. Persons of this type do very well so long as they live a sheltered life, spent, for instance, in study. But they are unfit to grapple effectively with certain forms of evil or really to appreciate their nature or fully to recognize their existence. There are other men who, though they are by nature fully susceptible of angry sentiments, suppress them on principle, because they regard them as wrong and especially because they are afraid of giving way to hatred. So far as concerns those whom they recognize as their personal enemies or as the enemies of the society to which they belong, their mental attitude and behaviour tends to resemble more or less those of the type of men who are naturally deficient in angry sentiments. But they are likely to differ from these in an important respect. In their anxiety to be fair and benevolent to enemies, they are likely to be unfair and harsh to their friends. In opposing the natural tendency to regard the faults all on one side, that of the enemy, they tend to run to the opposite extreme and to make out that it is their own side which is wholly or mainly or at least equally to blame in cases where an impartial consideration of the evidence would show the contrary. Thus, with them natural sentiments of anger tend to creep in, as it were, by a back door. The phrase ‘friends of every country but their own’ is often most unfairly applied. But there are cases in which it is more or less applicable; and it applies appropriately to the type of persons I have described.

My conclusion, then, is that some developed forms of the primitive emotion of anger are necessary and right. But how are we to determine what these are? How are we to draw the line between them and these forms of angry passion which are condemned under the general head of hatred or malevolence? After the previous discussion, there need be no difficulty as regards the principle upon which we have to proceed. Hatred is bad only because it is blind and in so far as it is blind, just as the weakly amiable spirit is bad for the same reason. On the other hand, what we call just resentment or righteous indignation, though it is akin to hatred as being, like it, developed from the primitive emotion of anger, is good inasmuch as it is enlightened—inasmuch as it is free from the various forms of blindness which characterize hatred. Here, of course, the fundamental blindness, which we must do all that in us lies to avoid, is blindness to the highest good of humanity as consisting in union and co-operation. Righteous indignation or just resentment, as felt against the enemy of social order, ought to be merely the obverse aspect, the necessary counterpart, of the spirit which pursues union and co-operation as its supreme end. So far as we are willing and able to follow this principle, we cannot go wrong.

This does not imply that justifiable resentment is necessarily weaker or less intense than hatred. The distinction is not one of degree. Justifiable resentment is not a fainter form of hatred. It is not, so to speak, hatred watered down. So long as it is not blind, there is no general limit to its strength, persistence, or intensity. This must be proportioned to the varying conditions. In any case, just resentment will cease when it is no longer required by the actual situation. Hatred, on the contrary, tends to persist blindly.

The theoretical principle on which we must proceed may be defined in this way. But its practical application is, of course, very difficult. It is hard to ‘be angry and sin not’, to be righteously resentful and yet to avoid the blindness of hate. Yet, however far we may be compelled to fall short of our ideal, we should consistently endeavour to keep this ideal in view as our supreme practical guide and as the measure of our failure and success. Here a great help ought to be found in prayer by those who believe in prayer and who realize that in prayer they are approaching a Being who is completely good and wise. In any case we must here, as elsewhere, be willing to take risks; and though the converse is more usual, it may sometimes be better to run the risk of being actuated by hatred than to run the alternative risk of not feeling due resentment.

Let us now turn to a question of fact. How far is it true that we hate the Germans and that the Germans hate us? As regards the Germans there would seem to be no room for doubt. They loudly tell us that they hate us and make a parade of their hatred. But it is easy to attach too much importance to this self-conscious and deliberate working up of an emotion and theatrical display of it. The best comment is supplied by the picture in _Punch_ of a German family practising hatred of England before breakfast with appropriate attitudes and grimaces. The same holds good for the song of hatred. It is a spirited composition. But I am not inclined to take very seriously the kind of hatred which finds lyric expression of this sort. In such manifestoes we come upon the sentimentality so characteristic of the Germans, the romantic side of the German character. The more serious forms of hatred are rather those which do not fully examine and express themselves in this fashion. The real question is, How far have our angry passions a blinding influence in practice? Certainly there is abundant evidence that the Germans are blinded in this way. The belief is widespread among them that the key to our conduct is throughout to be sought in one master motive, the love of gain. They charge us with pursuing our ignoble ends by sly and underhand means, veiled under hypocritical pretence. They are convinced, for instance, that our horror and resentment at the brutal attack on Belgium was merely simulated, and that throughout we care for nothing but our own self-interest. They also charge us as a nation with a failure in the patriotic spirit which subordinates the interest of individuals and parties and classes to the good of the whole. They find in us an irresponsible frivolity and easy-going self-complacency which make us entirely undeserving of the position which we claim among civilized nations. On the other hand, they entertain no doubt that in all these ways in which we come short, they themselves are very strong, and that they, therefore, have a natural right to supplant us. Now I am far from saying that there is no foundation for some at least of the bad things which the Germans believe about us. But the sweeping and utterly indiscriminate way in which they hold these beliefs is obviously due to the blinding influence of hatred and kindred sentiments. That we on our side are similarly blinded admits, I think, of no doubt. We are convinced, for very cogent reasons, that our enemies deliberately brought on this war when they might honourably and safely have maintained peace. I do not believe that we are at all blind on this point. But our natural resentment does, I think, tend to obscure our view of the underlying motives for conduct which in any case cannot be justified. No doubt, a spirit of aggression, fostered by the German military system and by German traditions, was the most important factor. But we are apt to overlook the fact that fear also was a strong motive, fear of rival nations with antagonistic interests falling upon them and taking them at a disadvantage. Another error to which we are naturally prone is found in the assumption that what seems evident to us must be evident to our opponents. To us it is clear that the aggression is on their side. But the great body of the German people, including the best men among them, are convinced that it is they who are the victims and we who are the aggressors. Their natural leaders have assured them that this is the case, and have so stated the facts as to make it appear so; and this view found ready acceptance because of that attitude of suspicious fear to which I have just alluded. The picture which we are apt to make for ourselves of a whole people rushing to arms merely in order to make an unprovoked onslaught on its neighbours is certainly a false one, which we could not entertain unless we were more or less blinded by hate. I find further evidence of the same blindness in much of the current talk about the necessity of crushing Germany. So far as this means that we ought to do our work so thoroughly that it will not need to be done over again it is fully justified. But if the meaning is that the best or the only way of effecting this is by destroying the national existence of Germany, it seems to me that we are being misled by our passions. However good our case may be in this quarrel, we shall put ourselves in the wrong if we reduce our adversary to a position in which it becomes his absolute duty to lose sight of all other considerations in the bare struggle for existence. Again, I do not think that we at all realize how much we should miss Germany if there were no Germany. Omitting other most important considerations, it is very far from clear that the political situation as regards the balance of power in Europe would be at all improved by such a change. Besides this, we do not sufficiently consider whether it lies in our power to crush Germany in the way proposed, or, if it does, whether the attempt may not cost us too dear.

In another direction, the blindness of hate finds expression in the present tendency to depreciate German literature, science, and philosophy. Some of the things which are now being said on this topic I largely agree with. I have long held that the value of the German contribution to literature, science, and even philosophy has been seriously over-estimated as compared with that of other nations. But much of the current talk on this subject is hopelessly undiscriminating and exaggerated. In any case, it is amusing to find men talking in this vein who would never have thought of doing so if there had been no war. Our being at war with Germany can scarcely make any difference, one would think, to the greatness of Goethe or of Hegel.

In conclusion, let me go back to my starting-point. What are we to say finally concerning the precept ‘Love your enemies’? Is there any sense in which it is of universal application? I think there may be. It must not, of course, be taken to mean that we are to love our enemies with what Bishop Butler calls ‘a peculiar affection’. There are many who are not our enemies for whom we can feel no peculiar affection. Besides, if we love our enemies in this sense, what, as Confucius is said to have inquired, are we to do in the case of our friends? But if we take the meaning to be—Will good to your enemy rather than evil, the rule may, under a certain condition, be regarded as universally applicable. If we accept Plato’s doctrine that it is better for the evildoer himself that he should suffer punishment than that he should go unpunished, it seems possible, however difficult in practice, to inflict pain and hurt on him while retaining goodwill towards him in the very act of doing so. From this point of view, failure to feel just resentment and express it in action is an injury to the evildoer himself as well as to others. But is it always better for the evildoer himself to be punished? If it makes him a better man, we may agree that this is so. But so far as we can see, it sometimes has the reverse effect. If we are to justify the principle in its widest generality, we must go beyond what we can see. We must postulate a moral order or something equivalent to a moral order in the universe according to which it is always in some way ultimately better for the evildoer to be punished than to escape punishment. If this is Christian doctrine, then Christianity may consistently maintain the universal application of the maxim, ‘Love your enemies.’