do, rowdyism in the form of violent opposition to free speech and freedom of meeting.  It is as wholly unjustifiable, as it is unwise.  Nothing tends more to the elucidation of truth than evidence and freedom of speech from all sides.  Good works on many hands are languishing for lack of the funds and zeal needful to carry them on.  The Public Press, and especially the Pictorial Press, fosters a morbid sentiment in the public mind by needlessly vivid representations of mere slaughter; to all this may be added (that which some mourn over most of all) the drain upon our pockets,—­upon the country’s wealth.  All these things are a part of the great tribulation which is upon us.  They are inevitable ingredients of the chastisement by war.

I see frequent allusions to the “deplorable state of the public mind,” which is so fixed on this engrossing subject, the war, that its attention cannot be gained for any other.  I hear our soldiers called “legalized murderers,” and the war spoken of as a “hellish panorama,"[40] which it is a blight even to look upon.

But,—­I am impelled to say it at the risk of sacrificing the respect of certain friends,—­there is to me another view of the matter.  It is this.  In this present woe, as in all other earthly events, God has something to say to us,—­something which we cannot receive if we wilfully turn away the eye from seeing and the ear from hearing.

It is as if—­in anticipation of the last great Judgment when “the Books shall be opened,”—­God, in his severity and yet in mercy (for there is always mercy in the heart of His judgments) had set before us at this day an open book, the pages of which are written in letters of blood, and that He is waiting for us to read.  There are some who are reading, though with eyes dimmed with tears and hearts pierced with sorrow—­whose attitude is, “Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth.”

You “deplore the state of the public mind.”  May not the cloud of celestial witnesses deplore in a measure the state of your mind which leads you to turn your back on the opened book of judgment, and refuse to read it?  Does your sense of duty to your country claim from you to send forth such a cry against your fellow-citizens and your nation that you have no ears for the solemn teachings of Providence?  Might it not be more heroic in us all to cease to denounce, and to begin to enquire?—­with humility and courage to look God in the face, and enquire of Him the inner meanings of His rebukes, to ask Him to “turn back the floods of ungodliness” which have swelled this inundation of woe, rather than to use our poor little besoms in trying to sweep back the Atlantic waves of His judgments.