cries out, “How could a just God permit such cruelty upon innocent Belgium?” No man knows.  “Clouds and darkness are round about God’s throne.”  The spirit of evil caused this war, but the Spirit of God may bring good out of it, just as the summer can repair the ravages of winter.  Meanwhile the heart bleeds for Belgium.  For Brussels, the third most beautiful city in Europe!  For Louvain, once rich with its libraries, cathedrals, statues, paintings, missals, manuscripts—­now a ruin.  Alas! for the ruined harvests and the smoking villages!  Alas, for the Cathedral that is a heap, and the library that is a ruin.  Where the angel of happiness was there stalk Famine and Death.  Gone, the Land of Grotius!  Perished the paintings of Rubens!  Ruined is Louvain.  Where the wheat waved, now the hillsides are billowy with graves.  But let us believe that God reigns.  Perchance Belgium is slain like the Saviour, that militarism may die like Satan.  Without shedding of innocent blood there is no remission of sins through tyranny and greed.  There is no wine without the crushing of the grapes from the tree of life.  Soon Liberty, God’s dear child, will stand within the scene and comfort the desolate.  Falling upon the great world’s altar stairs, in this hour when wisdom is ignorance, and the strongest man clutches at dust and straw, let us believe with faith victorious over tears, that some time God will gather broken-hearted little Belgium into His arms and comfort her as a Father comforteth his well-beloved child.

HENRY WATTERSON

THE NEW AMERICANISM

(Abridged)

Eight years ago tonight, there stood where I am standing now a young Georgian, who, not without reason, recognized the “significance” of his presence here, and, in words whose eloquence I cannot hope to recall, appealed from the New South to New England for a united country.

He is gone now.  But, short as his life was, its heaven-born mission was fulfilled; the dream of his childhood was realized; for he had been appointed by God to carry a message of peace on earth, good will to men, and, this done, he vanished from the sight of mortal eyes, even as the dove from the ark.

Grady told us, and told us truly, of that typical American who, in Dr. Talmage’s mind’s eye, was coming, but who, in Abraham Lincoln’s actuality, had already come.  In some recent studies into the career of that man, I have encountered many startling confirmations of this judgment; and from that rugged trunk, drawing its sustenance from gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier sprays and Puritan branches deep beneath the soil, shall spring, is springing, a shapely tree—­symmetric in all its parts—­under whose sheltering boughs this nation shall have the new birth of freedom Lincoln promised it, and mankind the refuge which was sought by the forefathers when they fled from oppression.  Thank God, the ax, the gibbet, and the stake have had their day.  They have gone, let us hope, to keep company with the lost arts.  It has been demonstrated that great wrongs may be redressed and great reforms be achieved without the shedding of one drop of human blood; that vengeance does not purify, but brutalizes; and that tolerance, which in private transactions is reckoned a virtue, becomes in public affairs a dogma of the most far-seeing statesmanship.