In Tempore Belli

Our first duty, now that war is upon us-and it will be increasingly our duty until the conflict is ended-must be to remind ourselves of what our attitude towards it should be as Christians. Morality is not Christian unless it is subsumed under religion; right action is determined primarily by our whole attitude to God; and in the context of war there is a Christian attitude of mind towards it in general as well as a detailed system of ethical principles. That attitude of mind should be our first concern now. In the litany of the saints we pray: From pestilence, famine and war, O Lord deliver us. War is set beside the other two scouiges with which God chastises the sins of the world. In the recognition of that fact, that war for the Christian is chastisement, lies the root of our attitude. For needless to say, the sin of which we shall think is not the sin of somebody else. It is easy, all too easy, to project the moral guilt on to our neighbour-in this case, those with whom we are at war. It is so easy that it is the first thing to guard against. It is not a question here of assigning the political responsibility. The drama of war is played on two planes, the temporal and the spiritual; on the one level we may as a nation be guilty or we may not; on the other, it would be the negation of all that Christianity teaches to regard ourselves as innocent. It is a platitude to say that the perhaps unspectacular sins of the Christian are more grievous than the spectacular sins of the pagan because they are a deeper injury to God's love; but it is a platitude of Which we do well to remind ourselves. The first thing, then, is penitence: to desire, and work for, and pray for, a change of heart within ourselves

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