our brothers. These wailing widows,
these small fatherless ones speak our mother language, utter their pain
in the tongue of our own wives and children. Victory seems barely better
than defeat, when it is victory over our own blood. The scars we carve
with steel or burn with powder across the shuddering land, are scars on
the dear face of the Motherland we love. These blackened roof-trees,
they are the homes of our kindred. These cities, where shells are
bursting through crumbling wall and flaming spire, they are cities of
our own fair land, perhaps the brightest jewels in her crown.

Ay! men do well to pray for _peace!_ With suppliant palms outstretched
to the pitying God, they do well to cry, as in the ancient litany, 'Give
peace in our time, O Lord!' Let the husbandman go forth in the furrow.
Let the cattle come lowing to the stalls at evening. Let bleating
flocks whiten all the uplands. Let harvest hymns be sung, while groaning
wagons drag to bursting barns their mighty weight of sheaves. Let mill
wheels turn their dripping rounds by every stream. Let sails whiten
along every river. Let the smoke of a million peaceful hearths rise like
incense in the morning. Let the shouts of happy children, at their play,
ring down ten thousand valleys in the summer day's decline. Over all the
blessed land, asleep beneath the shadow of the Almighty hand, let the
peace of God rest in benediction! 'Give _peace_ in our time, O Lord!'

And yet the final clause to, every human prayer must be 'Thy will be
done!' There are things better far than peace. There are things more
loathely and more terrible than, the horror of battle and 'garments
rolled in blood.' Peace is blessed, but if you have peace with hell, how
about the blessedness? A covenant with evil is not the sort of agreement
that will bring comfort. A truce with Satan is not the thing that it
will do to trust. There are things in this world, without which the
prayer for peace is 'a witch's prayer,' read backward to a curse.

That is to say, whether peace is good depends entirely on the further
question, With whom are you at peace? Whether war is evil depends on the
other question, With whom are you at war? In one most serious and
substantial point of view, human life is a battle, which, for the
individual, ends only with death, and, for the race, only with the Final
Consummation. The tenure of our place and right, as children of God, is
that we fight evil to the bitter end. 'Th