ABSTRACT
On 25 April 1915 a less than subtle leaflet entitled ‘Safeguarded’ was published anonymously in Birmingham in response to the first use of gas on the Western Front. On the cover is a picture of three allied servicemen wearing gasmasks. Although the anonymous author was naturally shocked and appalled by the use of gas, he also sensed a danger far ‘more subtle than the poison gas’ and an enemy ‘more unscrupulous than the Kaiser’. This was the ‘poison gas of Modern Thought’ which, he claimed, had ‘spread its death-dealing doctrines far and wide. Long before the war the German apostles of KULTUR launched upon this country (and others) their “Higher Critic” theories, poisoning the minds of men in regard to the divine Inspiration and Authority of Holy Scriptures’. This was the real poison gas, he went on, which was far worse than the mustard gas of the trenches, ‘which at the worst can kill the body and not destroy the soul. … One of the up-to-date methods by which [the Devil] seeks to deceive and destroy men is the poison-gas method of Modern Thought’. But against this, the author continues, there is a powerful gasmask, namely, ‘The Word of THE TRUTH, The Gospel of your salvation’.2 Although this analogy may well be somewhat overdone, it is far from untypical of wartime reactions to German critical scholarship: the war was itself little more than the logical progression of the destruction of Christian truth exemplified by liberal theology.
