war is
in ourselves. We bewail the horrors of war; what we ought to bewail is
the horror of sin. For war is only a symptom of the hidden disease, as
raving is the symptom of fever. And one of the sources of the blood
and tears that overwhelm the earth is our sin. The horror of the
battlefield pales before the horror of sin in our streets, sweeping
souls to death. Our surrender to pleasure, our pursuit of vanity, our
sacrifice of the State to party, of the race to our ease, our refusal
to {186} make the sacrifice that would make the Empire secure--these
are the conditions which made war inevitable and which evoked it. As
alcohol and the drunkard's palsied limbs are cause and effect, sin and
judgment; so the national sin and the horrors of war are cause and
effect, sin and judgment. Only the self-blinded are unable to discern
that they are living in a great day of judgment: judgment on Germany
for its greed and lust and covetousness: judgment on Britain for
wasting at the shrine of self-indulgence that wealth committed to it
for the serving and the uplifting of the world. And if the Church
cannot see the divine judgment, then it cannot call the nation to
repentance. For the nation, unconscious of wrong, will but say along
with the Church: 'I am rich and increased in goods and have need of
nothing.' After the war it will rush down the slope faster than ever
before. The real fact is that the vision of God is hid from us by the
mists of our sin. We cannot {187} imagine the sword of the divine
judgment unsheathed over the world, for a sword hanging from heaven
must be gripped by some hand. And if there be no hand of God, how can
there be a sword of His justice?

III

The one way of salvation for the human race is that of conformity to
the righteous will of God. On the side of those who seek to walk along
that road all the forces of nature fight; against those who resist the
will of God all the forces of the universe are marshalled. Those who
would conquer must walk with God. To return to God is the only hope.
Let us try and realise the truth of this.

The greatest danger threatening the race is, as we have seen, that of
racial suicide. The mentally developed have made the devitalising of
life a code of conduct. Unconscious of sin, they have made sin a
science. For the race that sets its face towards this goal there
awaits {188} nought but ruin. The problem is how to save the race from
the coffin.