democratic; the rest of the world was the “White man’s Burthen”; the clear destiny of mankind was subservience to the good Prussian eagle.  Nevertheless—­those wet draggled bodies that swirled down in the eddies of the sinking Titan—­Ach!  He wished it could have been otherwise.  He nursed his knees and prayed that there need not be much more of these things before the spirit of the enemy was broken and the great Peace of Germany came upon the world.

And suddenly he stopped short in his prayer.

Suddenly out of the nothingness and darkness about him came the conviction that God did not listen to his prayers....

Was there any other way?

It was the most awful doubt he had ever had, for it smote at the training of all his life.  “Could it be possible that after all our old German God is not the proper style and title of the true God?  Is our old German God perhaps only the last of a long succession of bloodstained tribal effigies—­and not God at all?”

For a long time it seemed that the bishop watched the thoughts that gathered in the young attache’s mind.  Until suddenly he broke into a quotation, into that last cry of the dying Goethe, for “Light.  More Light!"...

“Leave him at that,” said the Angel.  “I want you to hear these two young women.”

The hand came back to England and pointed to where Southend at the mouth of the Thames was all agog with the excitement of an overnight Zeppelin raid.  People had got up hours before their usual time in order to look at the wrecked houses before they went up to their work in town.  Everybody seemed abroad.  Two nurses, not very well trained as nurses go nor very well-educated women, were snatching a little sea air upon the front after an eventful night.  They were too excited still to sleep.  They were talking of the horror of the moment when they saw the nasty thing “up there,” and felt helpless as it dropped its bombs.  They had both hated it.

“There didn’t ought to be such things,” said one.

“They don’t seem needed,” said her companion.

“Men won’t always go on like this—­making wars and all such wickedness.”

“It’s ’ow to stop them?”

“Science is going to stop them.”

“Science?”

“Yes, science.  My young brother—­oh, he’s a clever one—­he says such things!  He says that it’s science that they won’t always go on like this.  There’s more sense coming into the world and more—­my young brother says so.  Says it stands to reason; it’s Evolution.  It’s science that men are all brothers; you can prove it.  It’s science that there oughtn’t to be war.  Science is ending war now by making it horrible like this, and making it so that no one is safe.  Showing it up.  Only when nobody is safe will everybody want to set up peace, he says.  He says it’s proved there could easily be peace all over the world now if it wasn’t for flags and kings and capitalists and priests.  They still manage to keep safe and out of it.  He says the world ought to be just one state.  The World State, he says it ought to be.”