ch a war in our times that
bears so heavily on my soul. After all, "civilization" is a word we
have invented, and its meaning is hardly more than relative, just as is
the word "religion."

There are problems in the events that the logical spirit finds it hard
to face. In every Protestant church the laws of Moses are printed on
tablets on either side of the pulpit. On those laws our civil code is
founded. "Thou shalt not kill," says the law. For thousands of years
the law has punished the individual who settled his private quarrels
with his fists or any more effective weapon, and reserved to itself the
right to exact "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." And here we
are today, in the twentieth century, when intelligent people have long
been striving after a spiritual explanation of the meaning of life,
trying to prove its upward trend, trying to beat out of it materialism,
endeavoring to find in altruism a road to happiness, and governments can
still find no better way to settle their disputes than wholesale
slaughter, and that with weapons no so-called civilized man should ever
have invented nor any so-called civilized government ever permitted to
be made. The theory that the death penalty was a preventive of murder
has long ago been exploded. The theory that by making war horrible, war
could be prevented, is being exploded to-day.

And yet--I KNOW that if the thought be taken out of life that it is
worth while to die for an idea a great factor in the making of national
spirit will be gone. I KNOW that a long peace makes for weakness in a
race. I KNOW that without war there is still death. To me this last
fact is the consolation. It is finer to die voluntarily for an idea
deliberately faced, than to die of old age in one's bed; and the grief
of parting no one ever born can escape. Still it is puzzling to us
simple folk--the feeling that fundamental things do not change: that the
balance of good and evil has not changed. We change our fashions, we
change our habits, we discover now and then another of the secrets
Nature has hidden, that delving man may be kept busy and
interested. We pride ourselves that science at least has
progressed, that we are cleaner than our progenitors. Yet we are no
cleaner than the Greeks and Romans in the days when Athens and Rome
ruled the world, nor do we know in what cycle all we know to-day was
known and lost. Oh, I can hear you claiming more happiness for the
masse