es like wild beasts concealed in their
lair and waiting for the prey. Through the startled heavens winged
things like huge vampires vomiting fire and blood took their way
over cities, towns and unprotected hospitals, leaving behind them
the dead, the dying and the tortured. Hunger with its sunken cheeks,
and pestilence with its green eyes, its slavering lips have trod the
earth till horror with wordless anguish has kept vigil by the
blackened hearthstones of ruined homes and deserted firesides.

To-night, the fields of Flanders where the poppies grow and where
the dead who died too soon and lie almost too thick to count, are as
though a mighty juggernaut had rolled its fearful wheels over them,
crushing both man and earth together into one monstrous pulp of
hopeless ruin.

To-night France, where the lilies were wont to bloom, is torn and
ripped in all the one-time beauty and fascination of her white and
winding roads, poplar fringed, in the culture of her fruited
gardens, her orchards and her royal forests, as though some
monstrous creation of pre-Adamite days had survived and broken
through all restraint of all the ages to riot and gorge himself with
unlimited delight of destruction.

All this after two thousand years of professed Christianity and the
constant iteration that the Church was slowly winning its way to the
ruler-ship of the world; that each hour the world was growing better
and more and more the principles of the Christ of God dominating the
universal heart of man.

The world awoke to find its heart unchanged and war with aggressive
animalism still the underlying and primal force in man.

To-night in face of all this, in face of the solemn declaration of
the Son of God that during the whole time of His absence there would
be war and rumours of war, and specially within the territory once
occupied by Rome; that there would be distress of nations with
perplexity, men's hearts failing them for fear for looking after the
things that should be coming on the earth; that the people like the
waves of the sea should be roaring, uttering their discordant voices
in the thunder of protest and bitter discontent, breaking the bonds
of old customs and lashing the times with lawlessness and
unprecedented crime; in face of the warning of the Apostle Paul that
in the last days, that is to say in the closing hours of this age,
there should be, not peaceful but perilous times; that evil men
should wax worse and worse,