[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR] Snt,—Many of your readers
must feel grateful to the editor of The Catholic Herald for the tone and content of his letter. The dilemma which faces those who accept Christian values is clearly and forcibly stated, but this makes his conclusions the more perplexing, and I, therefore, venture to carry the problem a stage further with so courteous a correspondent.
For, it appears to this reader that if the writer is correct —as I believe he is—in stating that war can solve nothing, that it will destroy for everyone those very things we seek to preserve, then, in that case, non-resistance can be the only sane and Christian attitude if a conference is spurned by the other side. The theory behind " non-violence " is to the man- of-the-world a stumbling block, and to the German, foolish- ness; but ought we now to rise to the belief that it may be "the power of God unto salvation" for Europe?
Would Jesus, who sorrowed for the mothers of Jerusalem, shed more tears over the mothers of London and Berlin, since they, too, are blind to the things which belong to their peace?
Is it reasonable to suppose that the Republican survivors who look back over the years of bitterness and race suicide in Spain may now be in a mood to resolve our problem? Would they confess that their 50,000 dead heroes might have served God and their Cause more effectively, and no less valorously, had they chosen to offer unarmed " resistance " to General Franco in 1936?
It is harder to live for a faith than to die for it (too hard for our human instincts, maybe): to live—to breed—to teach by example and, perhaps one day to triumph!
The Darwinian axiom of "the survival of the fittest" is at least as true in the world of ideas as in that inverted world of the battlefield where the fittest are slaughtered and the servile survive !—Yours faithfully,
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