[Illustration: THE WONDERS OF CULTURE]
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"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 redhanded 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-Christianize, de-civilize, and even de-humanize 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!"