r rural about the average
Christian way of looking at events. One day the German Christian goes to
church to thank God for driving the Russians out of East Prussia; the
next day the English Christian thanks the same God for killing or
wounding 20,000 Germans at Neuve Chapelle--with the help of 350 guns.
Yet such things as these are the only claims we have offered to us of
the action of God in human events. Neither the steps that man takes
onward nor the steps that he takes backward are ascribed to divine
influence. All that is claimed is that when a ship goes down, for
instance, he saves the saved, and "permits" the rest to be drowned; when
a war has been raging for a few months by his "permission," he puts a
stop to it when one army is worn out. The unbeliever is really entitled
to a good deal of sympathy for his inability to follow this tortuous
reasoning with confidence. One cannot entirely blame him for being more
interested in the heart of man than in the petals of a rose.

These considerations are, of course, not novel. I am only applying to
this special case of the war a difficulty that has been discussed in all
ages, and has been acutely felt by very able religious thinkers. How a
group of bishops can sit down to write, in very deliberate and elegant
language, that such a calamity as this makes the soul more sensible of
"the approach of Christ" is one of the many little mysteries of the
clerical mind. It has precisely the opposite effect in any logical mind.
When the way of life is smooth, and our nation or home is prospering, we
may be genially disposed to think that God is near and is looking after
us as well as the sparrows. But when a black storm bursts suddenly and
disastrously on us; when the earth shakes their roofs on ten thousand of
our fellows, or a great ship strikes a rock and pours a laughing crowd
suddenly into the lap of death; when vast provinces are laid desolate by
war, and we see the tens of thousands clasping the hand of their loved
ones for the last time, it seems rather uncanny that this should suggest
to any person the approach of Christ. To very many people it is a
confirmation of the general impression they get from the world-process
and the story of man: that these great forces deploy and interlace and
build up and destroy without the slightest intervention from without.

In our time, we must remember, this difficulty had already been
enormously increased. St. Augustine, who felt the pr