In a world of angels, peace is natural. As a very old Jewish prayer asks, “May He who makes peace in His high places make peace for us.” What is meant, says one master, is that in Heaven, even the Angel of Fire and the Angel of Water pull together and do not extinguish each other. May He who sustains that harmony help us to see our oppositions here below as complementary polarities and so find peace.

Those who envision the redeemed world see it as a world of peace. The prophets speak of it and teach of it. Isaiah and Micah tell of a world in which the weapons of war will be turned into farming tools, and war shall no longer be learned.
What can one do, though, when faced with the murderous idolatry of the modern Total State? This was the question with which Winston Churchill wrestled when he took the lead in mobilizing the world to smash Hitlerism.
Churchill understood well the political role of religion. Nothing has more power in mustering the will of people to take a self-sacrificial stand than religion. He wrote about religion’s role in the decisive seventeenth century battle against King Charles I to establish the liberties of Parliament and of the people from despotic rulers.
When Parliament met again at the beginning of 1629 there was no lack of grievances both in foreign and domestic policy. Yet it was on questions of religion that the attack began…. [The] harassed Parliamentarians found in the religious prejudices of England a bond of union and eventually a means of war.
As all sides of this war found religious motivation, it was a long and bloody civil war. It resulted in fifteen years of Cromwell’s military dictatorship, though it also saw a decisive end to the pretension of British monarchs to have unlimited prerogative to govern as they pleased. (It is also worth noting that it was this rigid Puritan Cromwell who ended the centuries-old prohibition of Jewish settlement in England.)
Churchill’s youthful engagement with modern religious skepticism resulted...