aughtered. Never since the world began were so many men
writhing in mortal anguish, so many women weeping, so many children
fatherless. And whilst a hundred thousand women know that they will
see no more the face that was all the world to them, millions of others
are sleepless with haunting fear and terrible anxiety. And every day I
hear good men moan that the world can never be the same again. 'We
shall never get over it!' they tell me. It is the old mistake, the
mistake that we always make in the hour of our sad and bitter grief.
'We shall never get over it!' Of course we shall! And as the fields
are sweeter, and the flowers exhale a richer perfume, after the
thunder-clouds have broken and the storm has spent its strength, so we
shall find ourselves living in a kindlier world when the anguish of
to-day is over-past. Much of our old civilization, with its veneer of
politeness and its heart of barbarism, will have been riven as the
ranges were riven by the earthquake. But out of the wreckage shall
come the healthier day. The wounds will heal as they always heal, and
the scars will stay as they always stay; but they will stay to warn us
against perpetuating our ancient follies. Empires will never again
regard their militarism as their pride.

Surely this torrent of blood that is streaming through the trenches and
crimsoning the seas is sacrificial blood! It is an ancient principle,
and of loftiest sanction, that it is sometimes good for one man to die
that many may be saved from destruction. If, out of its present agony,
the world emerges into the peace and sunshine of a holier day, every
man who laid down his life in the awful struggle will have died in that
sacred and vicarious way. This generation will have wept and bled and
suffered that unborn generations may go scatheless. It is the old
story:

No mortal born without the dew
Of solemn pain on mother's brow;
No harvest's golden yield save through
The toil and tearing of the plough.

It was only through the Cross that the Saviour of men found a way into
the joy that was set before Him, and the world therefore cannot expect
to come to its own along a bloodless road.

The recuperative forces that lurk within us are the divinest things
about us. I cut my hand; and, before the knife is well out of the
gash, a million invisible agents are at work to repair the damage. It
is our irrepressible faculty for getting over things. No minister c