“I see no harm in priding ourselves that we have advanced beyond the German Emperor’s schoolboyish conception of Jehovah.  As a greater and far more highly bred and educated Emperor—­an Emperor of Rome—­ once warned us, ‘The best part of revenge is not to be like them.’

“Well, that is the point on which I would specially caution you this morning.  When an adversary suddenly and brutally assaults us, his ferocity springing from the instinct of a lower civilisation—­as when a farm-dog leaps upon us in the road—­our first instinct is to fall back and meet him on the ground of his own savagery, to give him an exact tit for his tat.  But can you not see that, as we do this, and in proportion as we do it, we allow him to impose himself on us and relinquish our main advantage?  It is idle to practise a higher moral code, if we abandon it hurriedly as soon as it is challenged by a lower.

“Bearing this in mind, you will not in the next few minutes say to yourselves, ’Our minister has ill chosen his time—­now, with the enemy at our gates—­to be preaching to us that we should be confirming what little hold we have on the divine purpose, to advance upon it; to counsel our striving to pierce further into the mind of God; when all the newspapers tell us that, for success in war, we should enter into the minds of our enemies.’

“For, let me tell you, all knowledge is one under God; and the way of theology—­which should be the head and crown of the sciences—­not different from the way of what we call the ‘natural’ sciences, such as chemistry, or geology, or medicine.  Of wisdom we may say with Ecclesiasticus:  The first man knew her not perfectly, neither shall the last man find her out.  But that does not matter.  What matters for us, in our generation, is that we improve our knowledge and use it to make ourselves comparatively wiser—­comparatively, that is, with our old selves as well as with our enemies.  ‘Knowledge,’ they say, ‘is power’; which, if it mean anything, must mean that A, by knowing a little more than B, has made himself, to that extent, more powerful than B.

“Now by saying that the way of all the sciences is one, I mean just this:  that the true process of each is to refer effects to their real causes, not to false ones, and in the search to separate what is relevant from what is irrelevant and—­so far as we can discover—­ quite accidental.  For example, when a pestilence such as typhoid fever broke out in Polpier five or six hundred years ago, your forefathers attributed it to the wrath of God visiting them for their sins:  and to be sure it is good that men, under calamity, should reflect on their sins, but only because it is good for them to reflect on their sins at all times and under any circumstance.  Nowadays you would have your well-water analysed and ask what the Sanitary Inspector had been about.  Or, again, if a fire were to devastate our little town, we should not smite our breasts in