There are two great spiritual figures that have been revealed to us through the Great War:  Cardinal Mercier, the great confessor, who held aloft the standard of spiritual glory through the war itself, and Bishop Nicholai of Serbia who has testified to eternal truth and righteousness in the wilderness the war has brought to pass.  It is with his inspired words that I will make an ending of the things I have been impelled to say.

“Christ is merciful, but at last He comes as the Judge. * * * He comes now not to preside in the churches only but to be in your homes, in your shops, to be everywhere with you.  He wants to be first; He has become last in Europe, * * * Civilization passes like the winds, but the soul remains.  Christianization is the only good and constructive civilization.  Americanization without Christianization means Bolshevism.  Europe is suffering today for her sins.  Christ has forgiven seventy times seven, and now it seems that He is the Judge, turning away, rejected, leaving Europe and going through the gate of Serbia to Asia.  Pray for us. * * * Send us not your gold and silver for food so much as send us converted men.  Convert your politicians, your members of the press, your journalists, to preach Christ.

“Christ is choosing the perfect stones, the marble of all the churches, to complete His mystical body in Heaven.  He thinks only of one Church, made from those true to Him of all the churches here.  Civilizations are moving pictures, made by man.  Without God they perish.  The soul, the spirit, lives.  The war is not against externals; the war is against ourselves.”

APPENDIX A

From the point attained in the lecture on “A Working Philosophy,” a point I believe to be clearly indicated by Christian philosophy and sharply differentiated from that of paganism or modernism, I would adventure further and even into a field of pure theory where I can adduce no support or justification from any other source.  Speculation along this line may be dangerous, even unjustifiable; certainly it introduces the peril of an attempt to intellectualize what cannot be apprehended by the intellectual faculty, an effort which has been the obsession of modernism and has resulted in spiritual catastrophe.  On the other hand we are confronted by a definite and plausible system worked out by those who were without fear of these consequences, and while this already is losing something of its common acceptance, it is still operative, indeed is the only working system and consistent theory of the majority of thinking men outside the limits of Catholicism.  I think it wrong both in its assumptions and its inferences, and it certainly played a deplorable part in the building up of the latest phase of modern civilization, while its persistence is, I am persuaded, a barrier to recovery or advance.  This theory, which has gradually been deduced from the wonderful investigations, tabulations and inferences of Darwin, Tyndall, Huxley, Spencer and others of the great group of British intellectuals and scientists of the nineteenth century, is known under the general title of Evolution.