The Idols
the more does it offer for passion to devour, and history sufficiently shows the terrifying paroxysms to which the lives of religious leaders and revolutionaries have attained. But these toilers in the spirit love careful work, and are repelled by popular modes of thought which perpetually break through the meshes of reasoning. They have to make a more closely woven net in which instinct and idea, cost what it may, combine to form a stouter tissue. They thus achieve monstrous chefs-d'œuvre. Give an intellectual any ideal and any evil passion and he will always succeed in harmonising the twain. The love of God and the love of mankind have been invoked in order to burn, kill, and pillage. The fraternity of 1793 was sister to the Holy Guillotine. We have in our time seen Churchmen seeking and finding in the Gospels the justification of Banking and of War. Since the outbreak of the war a clergyman of Würtemberg established the fact that neither Christ nor John the Baptist nor the apostles desired to suppress militarism[1] A clever intellectual is a
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- ↑ The Evangelical pastor Schrenck in an article on "War and the New Testament," quoted with approval by the Rev. Ch. Correvon in the Journal religieux of Neuchâtel, November 14th.
