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Christianity in Khaki
43

able to develop, this will seem no wild word of cynical exaggeration.

In order to understand what has occurred, we must remember that the ethics of the Hebrew Scriptures has never really taken root in the soul of the British nation. I do not mean that we have always failed to live up to our ideal, but that the Christian ethics as condensed in the Sermon on the Mount and the New Commandment has never really furnished an ideal for us. The Hebrew ethics taken over with the religion of Christianity is not a natural product of British thought, it does not express our national attitude towards life. It is no more possible to transplant the ethics of an Eastern nation into the far West than to transplant their most delicate flora and fauna. The soul of a people is not portable. The moral teaching of Jesus has always languished, as an exotic, in this country. It matters not whether we test the matter by reference to the Old or the New Testament. Neither the privative morality of the former nor the active charitable ideals of the latter have ever thriven in the English people. Just as we are not for peace 'at any price,' so we are not for the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount 'at any price.' We try to represent our lapses

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