ood as your
bond. "Swear to your own hurt, and change not." All this is inevitable,
as the result of Germany's trespass upon the property and the homes of
Belgium. In some European lands the State is everything and the
individual nothing. In this republic the individual is first, and the
State is here to safeguard his rights and see to it that no one
trespasses upon his property. The time will come when the nation that
breaks its treaties and sows to the wind shall of that wind reap the
whirlwind. It is an awful thing for a nation to make it inevitable that
hereafter when other people sign a treaty with that country, that our
representatives shall say: "Before we sign this treaty with you, we wish
to ask one question. Later, if it is to your interest to break this
treaty, is this document to be sneered at as a scrap of paper? Or does
this treaty mean the faith of a nation that will die rather than break
its word, given before the tribunal of civilized States?"

The Death of the Tribal God Idea.

This great war and one or two of the leaders thereof have killed the old
tribal idea of God. In the twentieth century it seems almost ludicrous
to find that the conception of the ancient Hebrews is still held by some
rulers. Be the reasons what they may, of late there has been a strange
recrudescence of the tribal God idea. This is the twentieth century, not
the tenth! Think of a man sending his soldiers into Belgium, saying,
"Make yourselves as terrible as the Huns of Attila, and the Lord our God
will give you victory." Just as if God were not the God of the whole
earth, a disinterested God, a God who makes His sun to shine and His
rain to fall upon all His children, without regard to race or clime or
color. Why, it is as artless as the way the old Hebrew peasant called on
God to blast his enemy's field, and drown his children with floods, and
smite his herds with the plague. The tribal idea of God belongs with the
ox cart, the medicine man, the cave dweller. This is an era of science.
Whatever is true is universal, not racial. If the heart beats and the
blood circulates in a German soldier's veins, the blood flows in the
veins of the people of England and France. If the earth goes around the
sun in Berlin, the earth goes around the sun in Petrograd and Edinburgh.
If there are seven rays in the sunbeam, why, the discussion is closed,
and it is a universal fact. And if Jesus was right when He said, "God is
our Father, and all