Europe, as in a sort of Devil's smithy, men
are busied in the most horrid self-destruction. The accumulated stores
of age-long and patient industry are being consumed and annihilated; the
works and monuments of civilized life are laid low: all physical and
intellectual energies are bent to the service of destruction. The very
surface of the kindly and fertile earth is seamed and scarred and
wasted. And the human beings who live and move in this inferno, are
jerked like puppets hither and thither by the operation of passions to
which we dare not venture to give names, lest we be found either not
condemning what defiles and imbrutes our nature or denying our meed of
praise and gratitude to what ennobles it. All this portentous activity
and business flows from no other fount and is fed by no other spring
than the spirit which is within us, that spirit which has created that
wealth, material, artistic, spiritual, which it is so busily engaged in
wrecking and undoing. It is still as of old, making History, making it
in the old fashion with the old ends in view and by the exercise of its
old familiar powers. And if in this tragic scene or episode we cannot
still read the features of Progress, our theory is a baseless dream, and
we can frame no valid or 'right' ideal of action. For except to an
environment known to be still, because always, the work and
self-expression of a spirit akin to, and indeed identical with our own,
and except as knowing ourselves to be still, because always, in all our
ways of working its vehicles and instruments, we can neither define nor
realize any ideals of action at all. This war is not an accident, nor an
outburst of subterranean natural forces, but the act and deed of human
will, and being so it cannot be merely evil.

What, then, can we read not into, but out of, the tragic spectacle now
being enacted, not merely before but in, through, and by us? Unless we
have all along been mistaken, the victims of mere delusion and error,
here, too, there has been and still is Progress. Primarily and
principally what is taking place, is a tremendous revelation of the
potencies which in our nature--in that which makes us men--have escaped
our notice and therefore, because unseen or ignored, working in the
dark, have not yet been drawn upon and utilized. There has been and
still is going on, an enormous increase of self-knowledge. At first
sight this seems wholly an opening up of undreamt-of evil. Side by sid