epartee. In the long ages,
Heathendom might reply, which have elapsed since the world "rose
out of chaos," you have improved very little on the manners of
those primeval monsters which "tare each other in the slime." Two
thousand years of Christianity have not taught you to beat your
swords into plough-shares. You still make your sons to pass through
the fire to Moloch, and the most remarkable developments of physical
science are those which make possible the destruction of human life
on the largest scale. Certainly, in Zeppelins and submarines and
poisonous gas there is very little to remind the world of Epiphany
and what it stands for.

Thirty years ago the great Lord Shaftesbury wrote: "The present
is terrible, the future far more so; every day adds to the power
and facility of the means of destruction. Science is hard at work
(science, the great--nay, to some the only--God of these days)
to discover and concentrate the shortest and easiest methods to
annihilate the human race." We see the results of that work in
German methods of warfare.

Germany has for four centuries asserted for herself a conspicuous
place in European religion. She has been a bully there as in other
fields, and the lazy and the timid have submitted to her theological
pretensions. Now, by the mouth of her official pastors she has
renounced the religion of sacrifice for the lust of conquest, and
has substituted the creed of Odin for the faith of Christ. A country
which, in spite of learning and opportunity, has wilfully elapsed
from civilization into barbarism can scarcely evangelize Confucians
or Buddhists.

If we turn from the Protestant strongholds of the North to the
citadel of Authority at Rome, the signs of an Epiphany are equally
lacking. The Infallibility which did not save the largest section
of Christendom from such crimes as the Inquisition and the massacre
of St. Bartholomew has proved itself equally impotent in these
latter days. No one could have expected the Pope, who has spiritual
children in all lands, to take sides in an international dispute;
but one would have thought that a divinely-given infallibility
would have denounced, with the trumpet-tone of Sinai, the orgies
of sexual and sacrilegious crime which have devastated Belgium.

Is the outlook in allied Russia any more hopeful than in hostile
Germany and in neutral Rome? I must confess that I cannot answer.
We were always told that the force which welded together in one