The Daily Telegraph has joined the Peace Society, wishes us
to put down our Army and Navy, and to surrender England at once to the first invader. At least that is the only legitimate inference from its fearfully and wonderfully eloquent attack on the Bishop of Winchester,—a prelate we do not often defend,—on Fridays The Daily Telegraph says :14But when Dr. Wilberforce rose, this was the sentence which his Lordship uttered on the subject ' We are often called ministers of peace—and, in one sense, I trust that we are all ministers of peace—but not, I hope, iu that mawkish sense which thinks that war cannot be honourable even when it is just, and which would not appeal to the God of Battles in the extremest necessity. We counsel no cowardice in such times as these.' Appeal to the God of Battles! What horrible God, then, is this? and whose are the lips from which falls such glorification of brute force and slaughter?" After which it goes off into infinite eloquence which if it have any serious meaning except that peace-making is good, and rhetoric about it remunerative, means what we have explained. Or does it mean, as we suspect, that clergymen should have one ostensible morality and laymen another,—the worst of all the insincere and conventional customs of a conventional day ? If, as this paper says, "the God of Battles and the Father which is in Heaven are wholly different Deities " (that is, if the re- ligion of Moses has nothing in common with that of Christ), we should now shut up our War Office, sell our Navy for old iron and timber, and start afresh as Christians. If not, why bishop has as good a right to repudiate what is false and senti- mental in the morality of the Peace Society as the Duke of Wellington himself.
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