“I confess to you that, however we clear it, I anticipate that what we see in the end is likely to be damaging to what I will call ‘official’ Christianity.  However you put it, the Churches of Europe (established or free) have been allowing at least one simulacrum of Christ to walk the earth, claiming holiness while devising evil.  However you put it, the slaughter of man by man is horrible, and—­ more than that—­our Churches exist to prevent it, by persuasion teaching peace on earth, good-will towards men.

“Disquieted, unable to sleep for this thought, I arose and dressed early this morning, and sat for a while on the wall opposite, gazing at this homely house of God across the roadway.  It looked strange and unreal to me, there in the dawn; and (for Heaven knows I can never afford to slight the place it holds in my affection) I even dared in my fondness to reckon it with great and famous temples such as in our Westminster, in Paris, in Rheims—­aye, and in Cologne—­men have reared to the glory of God.  I asked myself if these, too, looked impertinent as this day’s sun took their towers, dawning so eventfully over Europe; if these, too, suffered in men’s minds such a loss of significance by comparison with the eternal hills and the river that rushed at my feet refreshing this valley as night-long, day-long, it has run refreshing and sung unheeded for thousands upon thousands of years.

“Then it seemed to me, as the day cleared, that whatever of impertinence showed in this building was due to us—­and to me, more than any—­who in these few years past have believed ourselves to be working for good, when all the while we have never cleared our vision to see things in their right proportions.

“We are probably willing to accept this curse of War as a visitation on our sins.  But for what sins?  O, beware of taking the prohibitions of the Decalogue in a lump, its named sins as equivalent! In every one of you must live an inward witness that these sins do not rank equally in God’s eye; that to murder, for instance, is wickeder than to misuse the Lord’s name in a hasty oath; that to bear false witness against a neighbour is tenfold worse than to break the Sabbath.  Yet we for ever in our Churches put these out of their right order; count ourselves righteous if we slander our neighbour, so it be on the way to worship; and in petty cruelties practice the lust of murder, interrupting it to shudder at a profane oath uttered by some good fellow outside in the street.  To love God and your neighbour, summed up, for Christ, all the Law and the Prophets:  and his love was for the harlot and the publican, as his worst word always for the self-deceiver who thanked God that he was not as other men.