"
There are problems in the events that the logical spirit finds it hard
to face. In every Protestant church the laws of Moses are printed on
tablets on either side of the pulpit. On those laws our civil code is
founded. "Thou shalt not kill," says the law. For thousands of years
the law has punished the individual who settled his private quarrels
with his fists or any more effective weapon, and reserved to itself the
right to exact "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." And here we
are today, in the twentieth century, when intelligent people have long
been striving after a spiritual explanation of the meaning of life,
trying to prove its upward trend, trying to beat out of it materialism,
endeavoring to find in altruism a road to happiness, and governments can
still find no better way to settle their disputes than wholesale
slaughter, and that with weapons no so-called civilized man should ever
have invented nor any so-called civilized government ever permitted to
be made. The theory that the death penalty was a preventive of murder
has long ago been exploded. The theory that by making war horrible, war
could be prevented, is being exploded to-day.
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