[Illustration: THE WONDERS OF CULTURE]
“Folk Who Do Not Understand Them”
How often have I been asked by sorrow-stricken mothers and wives: “Why
does not Providence intervene either to stop, this war, or at least
to check its cruelties and horrors?” If for many amongst us not yet
bereaved this European massacre is a puzzle, it should not cause us
dismay or surprise if the widow or son-bereaved mother lifts up her
hands exclaiming: “Why did not God save him? Why did He let him be shot
down by those Huns?”
Truth to tell, God has, so to speak, tied up His own hands in
setting ours free. When He placed the human race upon the surface
of this planet He dowered them with freedom, giving to each man
self-determining force, by the exercise of which he was to become
better than a man or worse than a beast. Good and evil, like wheat
and cockle, grow together in the same field. The winnowing is at
harvest-time, not before. Meanwhile, we ourselves have lived to see
the fairest portions of this fair creation of God changed from a
garden into a desert--pillaged, ravaged, and brought to utter ruin
by shot and shell, sword and fire. When I have said this, I have but
uttered a foreword to the hideous story, spoken the prologue only of
the “frightful” tragedy. We are all familiar with at least some of the
revolting facts and details with which the German soldiery has been
found charged and convicted by Commissions appointed to investigate the
crimes and atrocities adduced against them. The verdicts of French,
Belgian, and English tribunals are unanimous. They all agree that
Germany has been caught red-handed in her work of dyeing the map of
Europe red with innocent blood.
When you bend your eyes to the pathetic cartoon standing opposite this
letterpress, is there not brought home to you in a way, touching even
to tears, the “frightful” consequences of the misuse of human powers,
more especially of the attribute of freedom? If Germany had chosen to
use, instead of brute force, moral force, what a great, grand, and
glorious mission might have been hers to-day. If, instead of trying
the impossible task of dominating the whole world with her iron hand
upon its throat and her iron heel upon its foot, she had been satisfied
with the portion of the map already belonging to her, and had not by
processes of bureaucratic tyranny driven away millions of her subjects
who preferred liberty to slavery, America to Germany, by this date she
might have consolidated an Empire second in the world to none but one.
Alas! in her over-reaching arrogance she has, on the contrary, set out
to de-Christianise, de-civilise, and even de-humanise the race for
which Christ lived and died.
Our high mission it is to try to save her from herself. Already I can
read written in letters of blood carved into the gravestone of her
corrupted greatness,
“Ill-weaved ambition,
How much art thou shrunk!”