(5)

These doctrinal and physical anxieties and distresses were at their worst in the spring and early summer of 1914.  That was a time of great mental and moral disturbance.  There was premonition in the air of those days.  It was like the uneasiness sensitive people experience before a thunderstorm.  The moral atmosphere was sullen and close.  The whole world seemed irritable and mischievous.  The suffragettes became extraordinarily malignant; the democratic movement went rotten with sabotage and with a cant of being “rebels”; the reactionary Tories and a crew of noisy old peeresses set themselves to create incurable confusion again in the healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly broke out at every point of the social and political edifice.  And then a bomb burst at Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult.  The unstable polity of Europe heeled over like a ship that founders.

Through the swiftest, tensest week in history Europe capsized into war.

(6)

The first effect of the war upon the mind of the bishop, as upon most imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it.  Trivialities and exasperations seemed swept out of existence.  Men lifted up their eyes from disputes that had seemed incurable and wrangling that promised to be interminable, and discovered a plain and tragic issue that involved every one in a common call for devotion.  For a great number of men and women who had been born and bred in security, the August and September of 1914 were the supremely heroic period of their lives.  Myriads of souls were born again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those tremendous days.

Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great thing; it did this much for countless minds that for the first time they realized the epic quality of history and their own relationship to the destinies of the race.  The flimsy roof under which we had been living our lives of comedy fell and shattered the floor under our feet; we saw the stars above and the abyss below.  We perceived that life was insecure and adventurous, part of one vast adventure in space and time....

Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances again, but they could not altogether destroy the memories of this revelation.

For the first two months the bishop’s attention was so detached from his immediate surroundings and employments, so absorbed by great events, that his history if it were told in detail would differ scarcely at all from the histories of most comparatively unemployed minds during those first dramatic days, the days when the Germans made their great rush upon Paris and it seemed that France was down, France and the whole fabric of liberal civilization.  He emerged from these stunning apprehensions after the Battle of the Marne, to find himself busy upon a score of dispersed and disconnected war jobs, and trying to get all the new appearances and forces and urgencies of the war