are inevitable ingredients of
the chastisement by war.

I see frequent allusions to the "deplorable state of the public mind,"
which is so fixed on this engrossing subject, the war, that its
attention cannot be gained for any other. I hear our soldiers called
"legalized murderers," and the war spoken of as a "hellish
panorama,"[40] which it is a blight even to look upon.

But,--I am impelled to say it at the risk of sacrificing the respect of
certain friends,--there is to me another view of the matter. It is this.
In this present woe, as in all other earthly events, God has something
to say to us,--something which we cannot receive if we wilfully turn
away the eye from seeing and the ear from hearing.

It is as if--in anticipation of the last great Judgment when "the Books
shall be opened,"--God, in his severity and yet in mercy (for there is
always mercy in the heart of His judgments) had set before us at this
day an open book, the pages of which are written in letters of blood,
and that He is waiting for us to read. There are some who are reading,
though with eyes dimmed with tears and hearts pierced with sorrow--whose
attitude is, "Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth."

You "deplore the state of the public mind." May not the cloud of
celestial witnesses deplore in a measure the state of _your_ mind which
leads you to turn your back on the opened book of judgment, and refuse
to read it? Does your sense of duty to your country claim from you to
send forth such a cry against your fellow-citizens and your nation that
you have no ears for the solemn teachings of Providence? Might it not be
more heroic in us all to cease to denounce, and to begin to
enquire?--with humility and courage to look God in the face, and enquire
of Him the inner meanings of His rebukes, to ask Him to "turn back the
floods of ungodliness" which have swelled this inundation of woe, rather
than to use our poor little besoms in trying to sweep back the Atlantic
waves of His judgments.

It is good and necessary to protest against War; but at the same time,
reason and experience teach that we must, with equal zeal, protest
against other great evils, the accumulation of which makes for war and
not for peace. War in another sense--moral and spiritual war--must be
doubled, trebled, quadrupled, in the future, in order that material war
may come to an end. We all wish for peace; every reasonable person
desires it, every anxious and bereaved family lon