MBAPPU

Monthly Bulletin of the Advent Preparation Prayer Union

CAC

Catholic Apostolic Church

COPEC

Conference on Politics, Economics and Citizenship

ILO

International Labour Organisation

LFNA

League of Free Nations Association

LNS

League of Nations Society

LNU

League of Nations Union

The British reaction to the creation of the League of Nations in 1919 has always been seen in terms of an almost uniformly consensual acceptance. This is in contrast to the United States where a major controversy erupted upon the completion in 1919 of the League Covenant, which eventually was not ratified. In Great Britain the League of Nations is said never to have become an issue of significant contention nor a party political question, for the bulk of the Conservative party has been portrayed as equally supportive as were the Liberal and Labour parties. The few opponents and critics of this first-ever world political organisation who have figured in scholarly accounts have been branded invariably as psychologically unstable racist proto-fascists, imperialists and English nationalists who were entirely unrepresentative of the public at large.Footnote ¹

In existing accounts, British Churches, in particular, have appeared as almost unanimous, firm supporters of the League. They were supposedly among the chief proponents of wartime and subsequent campaigns for a world organisation because all of them were deeply affected by the First World War and agreed that, in its aftermath, perpetual peace and equitable development of all nations were intrinsically Christian goals that ought to be sought through such an organisation. In addition, it has been taken for granted that most British Christians were in some way supportive of the assumptions of early twentieth-century ecumenicists who saw the League of Nation's quest for political world unity as an accompaniment to their quest for a spiritual unity between Churches and, ultimately, of all peoples. Such having allegedly been the case, only a few rather ‘curious’ theological ‘reactionaries’, as one scholar put it, failed to see the allegedly self-evident truths of the League; all others were early, firm, consistent and enthusiastic in their internationalism.Footnote ²

In fact, a significant amount of debate over the League of Nations erupted in the British Churches, as well, and particularly among Protestants. These Churches were by no means united in support of the League experiment, and not all of them joined in campaigning for the ratification of the League Covenant. Even among those Protestant church leaders who were formally and publicly committed to the League, plenty of scepticism remained, and one subsection of Protestantism – the premillenarians – remained unwavering throughout in their faith-based opposition to the League. While never on the scale that deeply divided Churches in the United States,Footnote ³ the debates of British Protestants over the meaning and desirability of the League of Nations were real, prolonged and significant. These debates need be recognised with a nuanced historical narrative that takes full account of the ambiguity and conflicted nature of the relationship of British Churches to modern internationalism at the moment of its inception.

The scholarly presumption of near-universal and enthusiastic Christian support for the League of Nations rests on seven formal statements by the Church of England, one of which was also endorsed by the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Britain and one by the Free Churches. Scholars have collapsed all these appeals under the general rubric, ‘The Archbishops’ Campaign', implying that they were parts of a systematic, long-term effort to ensure the establishment of the League of Nations that was shared in all the Churches. In the narratives framed by these ecclesiastical statements, the First World War was a turning point that profoundly shocked British Christians and inspired them to seek as never before a new ordering of world affairs so as to prevent its repetition and to fulfil the Christian promise of peace on earth.

First in the series of formal statements was ‘Christianity and the League of Nations’, a joint appeal by the archbishop of Canterbury and the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Britain that was broadcast in February 1918. In it the two clerics pleaded ‘in the name … of the Prince of Peace’ for all Christians to lend their support to the creation of an international organisation that would ‘safeguard international right and permanent peace’ by means of concerted economic pressure, arbitration of international disputes and ‘in the last resort’ the collective use of armed force. Only a new political organisation that was entrusted with such tools could, according to this appeal, destroy the old ‘balance of power’ system of international relations which supposedly had encouraged wars, and so establish a ‘just and permanent peace’.Footnote ⁴ Essentially the same argument was put forth in the second major appeal, ‘The Church and the League of Nations: an appeal to Christians’, a joint public statement in December 1918 by the archbishop of Canterbury and the principal clerical leaders of the Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregationalist and Methodist Churches in England, Scotland and Ireland. In it, these leaders asked all Christians to support ‘the idea of the League of Nations as an essentially Christian means of attaining international justice and peace’.Footnote ⁵

The Upper House of the Canterbury Convocation issued its own, separate call to Christian action on behalf of the League in early 1918; the Lower House of the York Convocation followed suit in the summer, and the Upper House in early 1919. In 1920 the National Assembly of the Church of England and the Lambeth Conference of the worldwide Anglican communion gave their endorsement. Together with the major Free Churches, the Anglicans created an interdenominational publicity group, the Church and League of Nations Standing Committee, in 1918 which started to push the archbishops' message aggressively in the public arena.Footnote ⁶

From the very beginning, the Archbishops' Campaign was linked to two other publicity efforts on the League's behalf that had been launched by secular League proponents gathered in the League of Nations Society and the League of Free Nations Association. In 1918 these merged to form the League of Nations Union.Footnote ⁷ Although clearly secular in the sense that they operated outside ecclesiastical structures, both organisations can be seen as parts of the Archbishops' Campaign, for among their leaders were some of the very men who had played key roles, as lay members of their Churches, in the drafting of the bishops' appeals. From 1923 to 1945 the LNU was led by the Anglican layman Lord Robert Cecil, a critic of what he called ‘narrow Protestantism’ and chief among the laity of his Church who saw the League of Nations as the outgrowth of ‘Christian morality’. He was not only a prime mover behind the Archbishops' Appeals but also, as a Paris peace conference delegate, one of the drafters of the League Covenant itself.Footnote ⁸

Even before the 1918 merger, at an interdenominational conference chaired by the bishop of Oxford, Charles Gore, the League of Nations Society had set up a special Clergy Auxiliary Committee. This group played a role in pushing the Churches into the Archbishops' Campaign to begin with, and once that campaign was underway, it supported it through the publication of pamphlets by church leaders supportive of the League. The LNU likewise encouraged clergy to give sermons on the League and to campaign for it in other ways.Footnote ⁹

Some of the publicity materials distributed under these auspices clearly lend themselves in support of claims about apparent near-unanimous church support for the League idea and plan. The terms used and the claims made were so expansive that anyone who is minded to take their argument at face value cannot but conclude that all authorised leaders and prominent laymen of the British Churches (and especially of the Church of England) were both passionately in favour of the League and representative of the broader opinion of members of their Churches. For example, the bishop of Winchester, Edmund Talbot, claimed matter-of-factly in the LNS-sponsored tract The spiritual sanctions of a League of Nations (1919) that ‘all men of goodwill’ were, by definition and a priori, enthusiastic supporters of the League. This was especially the case with Christians, Talbot claimed, for they recognised that both Christ and the League of Nations sought the same end, the ‘goal of human brotherhood, existing to give fullest expression to the life of humanity’.Footnote ¹⁰

Intermingled in these sentiments was the sometimes explicit fear that if the British Churches did not take the lead in the post-war quest for a world peace-keeping organisation, they themselves would be deemed a failure and people would cease to listen to them and would stop worshipping their God. As David Davies of the LNU argued in 1918, the Churches would find themselves among the war's casualties, their profession of religion deemed a ‘sham and an illusion’ by ordinary, war-weary people, were they not to take the lead now.Footnote ¹¹ Thus it was that the First World War was depicted as a turning-point in terms of the relevance of a Church that finally, supposedly, had come to a full realisation of its wordly duties.

Undoubtedly, these sentiments reflected the opinion of significant sections of the Church of England, and of the Roman Catholic and Free Churches. Over-concentration on the texts of formal statements, and on the paid publicity of organisations such as the LNS and the LNU, obscures, however, as much as it illuminates. Obscured are the very real misgivings and deep reservations that even some of the League's apparently most firm religious supporters continued to harbour as they engaged in the twin campaigns by the archbishops and the LNS/LNU. Such misgivings and reservations suggest that the formal, triumphalistic statements that the Churches issued on the League's behalf in 1918–20 did not imply a considered consensus either among their members or among their leaders.

In fact even the archbishop of Canterbury himself, Randall Davidson, harboured deep reservations. The appeals that he signed were not drafted on his own initiative, and he had to be pressured into signing them. This he agreed to do only on the condition that the terms ‘League of Nations’ and ‘balance of power’ remained in inverted commas. Even then, Davidson at first refused to lead the public campaign to which he was formally so thoroughly committed.Footnote ¹² Eventually, of course, he did speak out, and with apparent enthusiasm. During the Archbishops' Campaign, he claimed that only through the League was it ‘possible to abolish war now from between the “Christian peoples” ’.Footnote ¹³ He called the League ‘a Christian Covenant if ever there was one’ and he celebrated it as the worldwide manifestation of ‘the fealty of Christian men and women to the Prince of Peace’.Footnote ¹⁴ Privately, however, Davidson believed throughout that however good the League's machinery, it could not work if it did not have a strong ‘spiritual basis’, currently absent. Such a base could, according to Davidson, be built only in a laborious process that would take many years, through prayer and conversion.Footnote ¹⁵

The reservations of several key Church of England laymen who eventually participated in the Archbishops' Campaign were even more significant. The powerful triumvirate of Anglo-Catholic politicians (and Conservative party power-brokers) – William Waldegrave Palmer (2nd earl of Selborne), Charles Wood (1st Viscount Halifax), and James Gascoyne-Cecil (4th marquis of Salisbury) – all belonged to this group. Salisbury, the elder brother of Lord Robert Cecil, and Selborne, who had married one of their sisters, were Die-hard Conservative imperialists in their politics and leaders of the anti-disestablishmentarian Church Defence Institution and the Anglo-Catholic English Church Union, the latter of which was led for many years by Halifax.Footnote ¹⁶ While formally not a Die-hard himself, Halifax was connected both socially and ecclesiastically with these men, and politically he had shared with the Die-hards an imperialist advocacy of military preparedness and universal military training before the world war. During the war he had been as staunch an advocate as they were of fighting the conflict to a victorious finish.Footnote ¹⁷

Despite their wartime stances, each of the three eventually lent their public support to the Archbishops' Campaign. Even as they did so each of them, however, continued to harbour major private misgivings. Selborne, in fact, refused to sign any formal statement of support for the League. Salisbury, who did eventually sign such a statement, developed such significant reservations that within weeks of having made his support public he regretted ever having spoken. After 1918, while accepting that some kind of an international organisation was needed, he always took care to stress his reservations about the actual League that was being proposed. Such were their reservations that both these two men refused, too, to join the main secular groups that campaigned for the League.Footnote ¹⁸

Halifax, on the other hand, was certain that no League of Nations could ever achieve the results that the archbishops had set for it. With or without a League, wars between nations and the persecution of Christians would continue, he believed, for he was convinced that only Christ at His Second Coming could achieve the hopes which his Church seemed to be placing in the League experiment. For this reason, Halifax had minimal actual expectations of the League.Footnote ¹⁹ His son Edward (the future first earl of Halifax, Foreign Secretary at the start of the Second World War and for decades an influential Conservative politician), who was already active at this time both in the Anglo-Catholic movement and in Conservative party politics, likewise went on record as believing that ‘little trust for the prevention of future wars may be placed in human expedients of alliances or treaties, economic or political’.Footnote ²⁰

Among the influential clergy in the Church of England, the always vocal and politically well-connected dean of St Paul's, W. R. Inge, was the most confirmed League sceptic. Though formally committed to his Church's official position and a member of the LNS's Clergy Auxiliary Committee, Inge did not let this prevent him from sermonising about the futility of the League's promise to end all wars. Inge worried a great deal about ‘another kind of strife’ that the League might engender by virtue of the expansive social reformist agendas that its founders had included within its remit.Footnote ²¹ The League had, as a specialised agency, the International Labour Organisation, which on paper at least was given significant powers to propose new internationally-binding social and economic reforms and its councils were based on the tri-partite, co-equal representation of labour, business and government.Footnote ²² To a politically conservative man such as W. R. Inge, all of this opened up grave new vistas of class war and international socialism. Instead of transferring their spiritual hopes onto an earthly organisation with such materialistic and possibly even revolutionary dimensions, Inge suggested that Christians keep setting their sights ‘on things above’.Footnote ²³

Similar grave concerns over the ILO coloured the earl of Selborne's scepticism about the League.Footnote ²⁴ Of the Church of England bishops, on the other hand, only the bishop of Hereford (and later of Durham), Hensley Henson, sided with Inge. Rather reluctantly, he did eventually endorse the Archbishops' Appeal but he played next to no role in attempts to publicise it. Staunch anti-socialist as he was, Henson thought that the organisation was rooted in a socialist rather than Christian worldview and, like Dean Inge, he feared that it would end up advancing socialist rather than Christian purposes. Overall, he regarded the League Covenant as highly impractical and most likely to fail. For both of these reasons, Henson would fail to participate in the Archbishops' Campaign apart from through a few very generally couched speeches.Footnote ²⁵

While others in the episcopate did not go that far, several did continue to have doubts. Arthur Winnington-Ingram, the bishop of London, a prominent and (to many) extreme sacraliser of the First World War who was on record as a supporter of the League, nevertheless stated – in print and during the Archbishops' Campaign – that in reality neither world peace nor ‘brotherhood’ could come through this organisation, but only through a universal conversion to personal faith in Christ.Footnote ²⁶ The archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang, echoed this line when he counselled League enthusiasts not to be too ambitious in their goals nor to raise popular expectations. The real object of the League was not ‘to fulfill a dream for making civilisation better’, he insisted; it was only to ‘prevent a catastrophe’. Even then, one should expect success only once a ‘common mind’ and a ‘new spirit’ had developed among all peoples.Footnote ²⁷

Not only was this kind of scepticism and opposition widespread, it was also persistent. Even as late as July 1920 – when the League was already established and functioning – some delegates at the National Church Assembly tried to prevent the adoption of a resolution calling ‘upon all Churchmen to uphold the League and further its work’. This was proposed by Lord Hugh Cecil, brother of Salisbury and Lord Robert Cecil, and seconded by the bishop of London, so that it had the imprimatur of both clerical and lay leaders in the Church. The layman J. Marshall Freeman however put up a challenge in the form of an alternative resolution that would have ‘welcome[d] the League of Nations as an important step towards the abolition of war’. At the same time, however, Freeman's resolution would have insisted that this worthwhile goal could be reached only if a thus far unavailable ‘common international conscience’ was first constructed. Such a common conscience could, according to Freeman, only come through the conversion of every single nation into belief in ‘the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth’. Thus Freeman wanted the Church of England to concentrate its efforts on missions that led to worldwide Christianisation rather than on the projects of the secular League of Nations.Footnote ²⁸

While Freeman's proposed resolution was not in the end accepted, the debate on it that now took place more than two years after the Archbishops' first appeal on behalf of the League of Nations uncovered significant continuing disagreements. There had, in fact, emerged no real consensus on this issue in the Church of England. Instead, an unknown number of laymen and nationally influential pastors, and even a few bishops, continued to harbour reservations about an organisation that their leaders had depicted as ipso facto Christian in origin, purpose and mechanism. Much of the League's institutional structure (especially the ILO) had raised new concerns among many in the Church about consequences unforeseen at the time when the Churches' appeals had been made. All this suggests that behind the apparently consensual façade of the Archbishops' Campaign there lurked significant dissension.

The Archbishops' Campaign was not the expression of any truly spontaneous popular demand for churchly engagement in favour of the League of Nations, nor a reflection of well-nigh universal League enthusiasm in the British Churches. It owed most of its drive to a relatively small coterie of liberal Anglo-Catholics and Christian Socialists. These people saw in the League of Nations the perfect instrument for the worldwide furtherance of that radical social transformation to which they had, for many decades, been wedded on theological and political principle alike. Many of these individuals also valued the League as a peace-keeping organisation, but as their critics correctly perceived, their real interest was in using the League's machinery to solidify, expand and internationalise their pre-existing programmes of social reform.

Charles Gore, the influential bishop of Oxford, was the Christian Socialists' unquestioned leader in the fight for a socially-oriented League of Nations. As was to be expected from the longtime leader of the Christian Social Union, he pushed for his Christian Socialist conception of the League in the Canterbury Convocation, in committees set up by the archbishops, through the LNS and the LNU and in a stream of articles, books, sermons and speeches. In October 1918 Gore even travelled to the United States in an attempt to persuade the Episcopal Church to join in a transatlantic campaign for the putative world organisation. So passionately did he, indeed, feel about the League of Nations as the ultimate instrument of his Christian Socialist agenda that in June 1919 he resigned his bishopric, in part so as to be able to devote more time to the League campaign.Footnote ²⁹

As Gore presented it, the League of Nations idea was a ‘proposal profoundly congenial to the Christian spirit’. He admitted from the start that it had ‘no religious basis’ and rested on ‘no authoritative religious sanction’, yet he insisted that the ‘idea of a fellowship of humanity’ which underlay the organisation was an ‘idea which has mainly had its origins in Christian thought and imagination’.Footnote ³⁰ More particularly, Gore had it that ‘it is the will of God’ to have democracy at last triumph all over the world. To that supposedly divine end the League of Nations was the best and most promising means for, according to him, in it was embodied the supposedly growing, ecumenical realisation that unfettered national sovereignty was incompatible with true democracy.Footnote ³¹

In making this case, Bishop Gore gave all due attention to the plans of the League drafters for arbitration, economic sanctions, disarmament and collective peace-keeping. For him, as for many other pro-Leaguers, these aspects of the emerging organisation exposed a desire to move beyond the un-Christian ‘principle of selfishness’ that, supposedly, had underlain the old ‘balance of power’ concept of international relations. More important, however, Gore understood the evolution of the international order to be a reflection of what he took as a new given in the conditions of the First World War – that ‘in some broad sense we have almost all become socialists’. In his view, peoples had ceased to think in terms of nations or economic classes within nations and had made ‘the whole body of nations’ and ‘the good of the race’ the starting point and foundation of all social organisation.Footnote ³²

In 1918 Gore went so far as to state that ‘we need a socialism’ in domestic as well as in international affairs. In practice, this meant that he wanted the League of Nations to concentrate on combating poverty, ‘the commercial exploiting of the weak by the strong’ and the oppression of labour by capitalists. As he told his American friends in October 1918, the goal was ‘the establishing of an abiding peace on the principles of justice, not only between the warring nations, but between the warring elements within the several nations’.Footnote ³³ To Gore, in other words, the ILO was the core of the League of Nations, its promise to satisfy the grievances of the labour movement ultimately the most important aspect of the whole experiment.

This view of the League of Nations as the instrument for internationalising Christian Socialism also characterised the public argument of the most prominent Free Church proponent of the organisation, the Baptist the Revd John Clifford. Both a leading Free Church publicist for the First World War and among the earliest of all clerical protagonists for a world assembly, his passionate polemics were printed and inspired the Social Gospel community on the other side of the Atlantic as well. Already in 1914 Clifford had demanded that the ‘States of Europe, great and small, first, and finally of the whole planet’, create a federal world government with ‘an International Court to administer the law, and an International Police to execute the laws.’Footnote ³⁴

Clifford believed in the inevitability of world government, for in his incarnationalist theology he posited an immanent in-dwelling of God in all humanity that was gradually making itself more and more known to all, unifying all peoples in the single world-consciousness of ‘brotherhood’.Footnote ³⁵ ‘God has breathed a new soul into the human world’, he maintained; ‘internationalism is the next stage divinely ordained for the world's life’.Footnote ³⁶ No upholder of the allegedly non-brotherly, competitive system of free market capitalism could ever again undo what God's immanent mind had thus wrought, Clifford was sure. Even during the post-war conservative resurgence when the world had, in his view, descended into a ‘kind of moral backwater’, he would still celebrate the ‘sights of the conquering spirit of God in the League of Nations and in the growth of fellowship, in the growth of sympathy with the poor and the suffering all over Europe’.Footnote ³⁷

These words exposed the core of Clifford's interest in the League experiment. Like Gore, he was primarily interested in it as a ‘League of Faith’ and a ‘League of Pity’, predicated on the ‘establishment of righteousness, the enlargement of liberty, the abolition of injustice and the promotion of the fraternity of man’. Clifford asked all Christians to support the League because, in his view, it was based on the teaching of Jesus the ‘revolutionary social reformer’ and was thus the first-ever worldwide institutional rendering of divine immanency and incarnationalism as he understood these concepts.Footnote ³⁸ Repeatedly, Clifford presented the ILO as the core of the entire structure, for only that agency provided the tools with which to tackle what to him were the real causes of war and strife, the unjust social and economic conditions perpetuated by the competitive capitalist system.Footnote ³⁹

The position of the Congregationalist R. F. Horton, another key leader of the Christian Socialist movement, was probably much the same. His Hampstead church was one of the very first in all of Britain to become a corporate member of the League of Nations Union.Footnote ⁴⁰ Both before and after that affiliation Horton insisted that the League be made into the sole originator of all ‘legislation for mankind’, and he predicted that as its institutions started to function it would not only abolish all armaments and secure peace for all the world, but also end poverty, assure material plenty and happiness to all, remove all known vices and disease and distribute ‘all the resources of science and industry, and all the fruits of culture’ on an egalitarian basis. The League of Nations was a ‘thought that came of Christ’. At one point he was even enthused to call it nothing less than ‘the City of God descending out of heaven, the Kingdom of Righteousness and Love coming from God's presence to be a reality on earth’.Footnote ⁴¹

The principal lay Anglican enthusiast for the League, Lord Robert Cecil, also saw the world organisation in this light. He told his brother Salisbury that whereas before the world war he had been a rather traditional Tory, the war had changed his mind. Thereafter he set himself against what he now called a party of ‘narrow Protestantism’ allied with ‘excessive individualism and competition’ and nationalism. Instead, Cecil sought a League of Nations that tackled, first of all, the perceived socio-economic grievances of the peoples. He believed in this task so strongly and fought for it so determinedly as delegate at the peace conference that decades later he was still being praised as ‘the principal founder’ of the ILO.Footnote ⁴²

Thus it comes as no surprise that once the League was up and running, it was the Christian Socialist and liberal Anglo-Catholic constituency that remained its most enthusiastic supporters. It was they who saw to it that the Revised Prayer Book of 1928 included a collect for the League of Nations, they who made the 1930 Lambeth Conference thank God for the organisation and they who asked all Christians in 1933 to fight for it by joining the League of Nations Union.Footnote ⁴³ It is no coincidence that these statements coincided with the rise to positions of power of the younger generation of Christian Socialists that led to the Conference on Politics, Economics and Citizenship of 1924 and to subsequent demands for major alterations in the capitalist ordering of British economic life. The League of Nations was from the beginning an aspect of the Christian Socialist drive towards such change.

Whereas the Christian Socialists were the principal driving force behind the Churches' campaign for the League, faith-based opposition to it was at its most strident in the relatively small interdenominational community of premillenarian Evangelicals and fundamentalists. It has been estimated that from the 1850s onwards the majority of Evangelical clergy in Britain subscribed to some version of premillenarianism; it had established an especially firm stronghold among Anglican Evangelicals but significant numbers of adherents could be found also among the Baptists and the Plymouth Brethren.Footnote ⁴⁴ Unlike the Christian Socialists, this disparate community did not launch a systematic, organised campaign that was specifically designed to affect the ratification of the League of Nations. But key premillenarian organisations, and a number of politically influential lay church leaders whose faith was premillenarian, did argue a clear faith-based case against the League. Premillenarian anti-internationalism, too, was perpetuated into the interwar period, its theologically-based assumptions hardly changed.

As an eschatological interpretation, premillenialism stood at radical variance with the optimistic postmillenialism that inspired the Christian Socialists. Instead of trusting that the Church itself was soon to usher in the biblically-prophesied thousand years of peace and plenty on earth (or the millennium), premillenialists believed that Christ would return to earth before the millennium commenced. Rooted in the second-century writings of the Church Fathers Irenaeus and Tertullian, this eschatology had been significantly recharged in the early nineteenth century by the Irish pastor John Nelson Darby and by the so-called Irvingite movement (the Catholic Apostolic Church) in England and Scotland. In this socially and politically highly pessimistic, so-called futurist (or dispensational) version of premillenialism, it was maintained that all human institutions – States and Churches as well as international organisations – were in a constantly accelerating process of decay. Christian Churches, in particular, were said to be in rapid descent into apostasy that would be cut short only after the small true remnant of believers had been taken (or raptured) to heaven in historical time and the Jews restored as a nation to the Promised Land in preparation for the triumphant return (parousia) of Christ on the fields of Armageddon.Footnote ⁴⁵

These general tenets began to be connected specifically with the League of Nations on an October morning in 1917 when a small group of premillenarian clergy and laymen from the Free Churches gathered for a breakfast meeting in London and founded the Advent Testimony Prayer Union. Later renamed the Prophetic Witness Movement International, this was to prove the single most enduring association of British prophecy investigators ever. Whereas such other, and earlier, premillenialist groups as the Prophecy Investigation Society had only a couple of hundred members, in its early years the Advent Testimony Prayer Union could boast some two thousand. These were exceptionally active and passionate in spreading their message and some of them were important, nationally recognised leaders of their Churches. The group was led by none other than F. B. Meyer, one of the signatories of the Archbishops' Appeal of 1918 and, after 1920, the head of the National Free Church Council.Footnote ⁴⁶

At its founding meeting, the Advent Testimony group issued a manifesto that declared that the era of the Christian Church was coming to an end and the end-times were at hand. Since Jerusalem had recently been conquered by the British and since Britain had promised the Jews a National Home, the manifesto assumed that Jews would soon return to the Holy Land en masse. This meant that the rapture and the return of Christ were to be expected at any moment. Given this, the Advent Testimony manifesto stressed that ‘all human schemes of reconstruction must be subsidiary to the second coming of our Lord, because all nations will then be subjects to His rule’. All Evangelical Christians were advised to make this statement the guide and rule of their participation in secular efforts to address ‘the pressing problems of the hour’.Footnote ⁴⁷

The manifesto did not mention the League of Nations by name, but its premillenarian framework made it obvious that it did, in fact, relate to the League. This is how fellow-premillenialists on both sides of the Atlantic saw it. In fact, it was the British manifesto that inspired American premillenialists into creating the World Christian Fundamentals Association.Footnote ⁴⁸ The founders of this first interdenominational organisation of self-designated fundamentalists meant it to be a counterweight and an alternative to the transnational Christian Socialist (or Social Gospel) movement's plans for ‘Christianisation’ through international secular institutions, and they became opponents of the League of Nations because of their premillenarian faith.Footnote ⁴⁹ It was this juxtaposition of pro-League Christian Socialists and anti-League fundamentalists that lay at the heart of premillenarian discourse on current affairs in the aftermath of the world war on both sides of the Atlantic. This was so whether the precise words ‘League of Nations’ were used or not, for premillenarian discourse was guided by the already firmly established matrix of prophetic interpretation which expected some such international organisation soon to emerge.

Briefly put, premillenarians expected the satanic AntiChrist to set up his last great world empire, with its headquarters, eventually, in Jerusalem, in the period immediately preceding the expected and imminent Second Coming of Christ. They maintained that this world organisation would be made up of the nations formerly belonging to the Roman empire (the ‘ten toes’ of Daniel ii.41) and composed of ‘iron and clay’ (Dan. ii.33, 41–3), that is, promising to meet the grievances of the peoples but actually dictatorial in its operations. It would proclaim ‘peace, peace; when there is no peace’ (Jeremiah vi.14) and develop as its legitimation a new prescribed religion (the ‘mystery of Babylon’ of Revelation xvii.5), an apostate form of Christianity. In the last seven years before the Second Coming, this satanic world empire would attempt the purification and perfection of the world by centralised, coercive human effort that had lost its relation to God. But premillenialists were convinced that the redemption of the nations was impossible until the returning Christ Himself changed human nature and the conditions of the world, dispersed all human institutions as so much ‘chaff of the summer threshing’ (Dan. ii.35), defeated Satan and ushered in the millennium.Footnote ⁵⁰

Those who believed in such a prophetic interpretation felt the inner urge to speak out and to save as many as possible from being apostasised. Thus, at a major Advent Testimony meeting at Queen's Hall in London in December 1917, group members denounced all ‘social schemes of any kind originating in the human mind’. According to the Revd W. Fuller Gooch, Christ could appear at any moment and it was time to ‘divert the thoughts of the Christian Church from social problems and various systems of reconstruction’. To G. Campbell Morgan, all ‘hope, centered in earthly thrones or governments, in human diplomacies, in leagues of nations’ was utterly ‘futile’ since all these media would soon be ‘overturned’. Prebendary H. E. Fox warned that ‘false Christendom’ was trying to construct ‘a confederacy of the nations [that] will be ruled by an autocrat endowned with Satanic powers’. Fox's demand was for ‘repentance’, not for ‘reconstruction’, and he called all true Christians to stand firm against all the mooted ‘national and political readjustments; Leagues and Alliances’.Footnote ⁵¹

The same message was spread by the Advent Testimony group's newspaper, the Monthly Bulletin of the Advent Preparation Prayer Union. In article after article, members insisted that the wars of the end-times were about to begin and all human schemes of improvement would prove worthless, that God was about to cease his work through the Church and that personal salvation and separation onto the ‘blessed hope’ of Christ's imminent parousia was the only option for those seeking refuge. Repeatedly, the League of Nations itself was given as a crucial sign of the nearness of the end, a portent of AntiChrist's coming that should convince God-fearing people to ‘flee from the wrath to come by being prepared to make ready to meet Him in the air’. The organisation was denounced as ‘visionary and futile because without God’, the plaything of satanic ‘world dominion schemers’.Footnote ⁵²

Many premillenarians outside of the Advent Testimony group voiced similar sentiments during and after the First World War. For example, at its February 1918 meeting, the Lower House of Canterbury Convocation could not give the formal endorsement to the League that its leaders had planned because several delegates insisted that wars and persecutions would have to continue until the Second Coming, which made the League experiment pointless and ungodly.Footnote ⁵³ Similarly, at a February 1919 meeting of Anglican lay activists in London, Professor Beresford Pite hoped that the Church would start educating its members not in the glorious promises of a secular world assembly but in how the League of Nations and all other merely human attempts at perfecting the world represented the ‘spirit’ of the AntiChrist. Like the Advent Testimony group, Pite insisted that only Christ at his imminent Second Coming could work out all the problems which the League purported to solve.Footnote ⁵⁴

One little-known layman even wrote an entire book on the League of Nations as the prefiguration of the AntiChrist's world-empire. In his The great delusion: the League of Nations (1926), S. G. Reddie canvassed all the customary premillenarian interpretations about ‘clay and iron’, the ‘mystery of Babylon’ and the ‘chaff of the threshing’, and he ended up by suggesting that the ‘League of Nations is contrary and absolutely opposed to the will and purposes of God, and therefore a delusion – in fact, the greatest delusion since the Tower of Babel, and it is doomed to the same fate’. Like those in the Advent Testimony group, he ascribed the whole experiment to those in the Churches who were but representatives of a ‘humanism … appointing itself a place and power which is already appointed to the Prince of Peace’.Footnote ⁵⁵

Always in a minority, the premillenarian fundamentalists who argued thus found a nationally known champion in Alan Percy, 8th duke of Northumberland, a member both of the Catholic Apostolic Church and the Church of England, and the first vice-chairman of the House of Laity in the latter's national Church Assembly. A Conservative party insider, known for his right-wing nationalist and imperialist views, he was in fact a Christian fundamentalist whose politics were grounded in the CAC's premillenarian worldview.Footnote ⁵⁶ From its creation in the 1830s, the CAC had maintained that since the French Revolution the prophesised ‘grand antichristian confederacy of nations’ had been slowly growing from among the apostate nations of Christendom.Footnote ⁵⁷ Northumberland's own great-grandfather, Henry Drummond mp, who was one of the CAC's ‘apostles’, had insisted in the 1850s that all who were trying to establish a ‘millennium’ of peace through international peace-keeping pacts and leagues were in rebellion against God.Footnote ⁵⁸ More recently, the last surviving CAC ‘co-adjutor’ (minister), Edward Heath, had insisted (in 1919) that all the then-current attempts to ‘reconstitute’ the world and so to assure peace were tantamount to ‘fight[ing] against God’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Not all CAC members derived the same conclusions from such ‘apostolic’ and ministerial guidance. To the contrary, Northumberland's own younger brother, Lord Eustace Percy (later Lord Percy of Newcastle), managed to reconcile his premillenial end-times beliefs with service as the Foreign Office liaison officer between the British and American drafters of the ILO. A vocal supporter of the League, in a book that he wrote in its favour in 1919, he did, nevertheless, take care to stress that the expansive social reformist and moral perfectionist aims of some of the world organisation's key protagonists could not be fulfilled this side of the parousia.Footnote ⁶⁰

Much more forcefully than his brother, Northumberland made that point in his years-long campaign against the League's political and ecclesiastical advocates. He tackled, first of all, his own archbishop. In a public debate with Lord Robert Cecil in October 1919, he took issue with the archbishop of Canterbury's public statements that presented the League as an organisation based on the Christian faith, insisting that he himself could ‘see no evidence of that’. On the contrary, in Northumberland's eyes the League had ‘no ethical or religious basis whatever’. It was only a ‘political expedient to regulate foreign policy’ – and a poor, weakly built one at that.Footnote ⁶¹ This being so, his own bishops’ enthusiastic sacralisation of this organisation appeared to be a rather clear case of apostasy in high circles. ‘Are we really to infer’, asked the duke, ‘that Christianity is so bankrupt that it has no better hope to offer than the League of Nations, and that the Christian religion would decay if the Church of England were to abandon a peculiarly ill-chosen political “stunt”?’Footnote ⁶²

Calling the League nothing but the latest version of ‘the Tower of Babel’, Northumberland wondered if he had been mistaken when all his life he had thought that the ‘Church of England held that the progress and betterment of mankind could only be achieved through the agency of the Church … as the exponent of the Christian religion’. Now, however, the Church seemed to be saying that world redemption and ‘regeneration can be achieved, not through her agency, but through an international assembly’. The duke assured his episcopal interlocutors that they were profoundly wrong on theology and that this in itself sufficed to keep him firmly opposed to all their directives on the League.Footnote ⁶³

Just as with fellow anti-socialists Inge, Henson and Selborne, the ILO became Northumberland's especial target. In the case against this agency that he made, repeatedly for some ten years from 1919, his actually faith-based premillennarian argument was partially obscured by his well-known political position in opposition to all forms of socialism. But even if he were not explicit about the ‘ten toes’ of ‘iron and clay’, there were clear echatological undertones to his conviction that ‘socialism is primarily directed against Christ’, a false faith seeking the allegiance of those who had apostasised.Footnote ⁶⁴ To him and those like him, the ILO was, quite simply, the principal institutional manifestation of this false faith. It would create a ‘Slave State’ and a ‘Communism under an iron despotism, as in Russia’, the duke insisted, one legitimated by the ‘proud little brazen Baals and talking fetishes’ that were socialist and Social Gospel promises of a coming millennium.Footnote ⁶⁵

Especially in the later 1920s, some premillenarians tended to substitute Benito Mussolini's Fascist Italy for the League of Nations as the prefiguration of the AntiChrist's coming world empire, but the interpretative matrix first elaborated by the Advent Testimony group and the likes of Northumberland did, for the most part, retain its hold on their community. Thus can be found the erstwhile suffragist Christabel Pankhurst, during her later career as a key populariser of premillenarian eschatology, wondering whether Mussolini might turn out to be the AntiChrist and his ‘New Rome’ the prophesied world empire. In the end, however, she concluded that the League of Nations was the form into which Mussolini (or some other like man) would pour the fully developed AntiChristian substance, thus making the AntiChrist's world empire an accomplished fact.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the 1920s she wrote several books and in 1926 began a speaking tour for the Advent Testimony group on the approaching end-times from her newly acquired premillenialist premisses. Throughout, she pegged her message to the core supposition that all human designs for the ‘ideal social and international order’ were utterly futile and always posited the League of Nations’ failures as a key confirmation of the argument and as a portent of the coming of the AntiChrist.Footnote ⁶⁷

All in all, then, belief in the premillenarian interpretation of the end-times yielded an unwavering opposition to the League of Nations. This was the case in the United States where the most passionate League opponents came from among the premillenarians, and it was the case in Great Britain. Premillenialism compelled its adherents to oppose the League both because it regarded as utterly futile all merely human efforts at world betterment and pacification and because it expected the iminent arrival of an AntiChristian world empire with socialist undertones. As constructed and as legitimated by the Christian Socialists, the League of Nations fitted perfectly the premillenarian matrix of end-times interpretation, leaving few options for those who were focused on the ‘blessed hope’.

The League of Nations continued to be contested by so many British Protestants that in 1923, five years after the Archbishops’ Campaign had supposedly established unanimity on this issue, Lord Robert Cecil still felt the need to write an entire book to restate the case for the League. His Moral basis of the League of Nations was written specifically to answer the persistent scepticism of all those whom Cecil now called ‘good men and women who are opposed to the League of Nations’. Such people were not, Cecil hastened to add, ‘criminals nor lunatics’ but there were so many of them that it had become ‘extremely important’ to counter and finally to convince them.Footnote ⁶⁸

That the most enthusiastic protagonist for the League of Nations in the British Churches would need to write such a book in 1923 underlines the reality that there had, in fact, emerged no true unanimity in the Churches on modern international organisations. There was no such unanimity in 1918–20 when British membership in the League was being debated and there was no such unanimity in the 1920s and the 1930s as the established League went about its business. British Protestant Christian critics continued to assail the world organisation and the theologies that had been marshalled in its support just as determinedly as they ever had. The First World War had not changed their minds. There was also controversy about the League of Nations in British Churches, and unlike that in America which led to a refusal to ratify the League Covenant in early 1920, the British one lasted throughout the lifetime of the League itself.

This controversy was ecclesiastically significant and it was also inevitable, for the League of Nations as sketched by its enthusiasts in the Churches involved clearly spiritual end-goals that other believers simply could not accept. Involved, in other words, were not just disagreements over the most practicable means of addressing issues of war and peace but profoundly theological questions about eschatology, the nature of humanity and its relations to the divine, of incarnation, personal and national salvation and the proper Christian organisation of societies. There was no consensus on these issues in British Churches, and there could be no consensus on modern internationalism.