by keeping nations armed to the teeth, so that rival powers will be afraid to fight, and huge armies and navies are labelled insurance against war.  A sentence in a letter of Erasmus has a singularly modern sound:  “There is a project to have a congress of kings at Cambrai, to enter into mutual engagements to preserve peace with each other and through Europe.  But certain persons, who get nothing by peace and a great deal by war, throw obstacles in the way.”  The armament argument for peace has been given its reductio ad absurdum; but it is by no means clear that the world-wide war will free the nations from the burdensome folly of keeping enormous armies and navies.  As Christians we must protest without ceasing that international relations, based on mutual fear and maintained by the use of brute force, can never furnish the peace of Christ.

It scans the system of justice in its treatment of the wrong-doer, and declares that the crude attempt to fit the punishment to the crime, and to protect society by deterrent penalties, is not the justice of Him who is “faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”  Divine justice is redemptive; and society, if it wishes to be Christian, must pay the heavy cost of making all its contacts with the imperfect transforming.

It scans the educational institutions of our land, and sees many students viewing learning only with reference to its immediate commercial availability, spurning all studies as “unpractical” which do not supply knowledge that can be coined into financial returns; and it sees many others without intellectual interest, prizing schools and colleges merely for their social pleasures, lazily choosing courses which require a minimum of labor, and disesteeming the great opportunities of culture and enrichment provided by the sacrificial studies and labors of the past.  It insists that a moral revival is needed for an intellectual renaissance.  All students must be baptized with a passion for social service, before studies that enrich the mind and enlarge the character will be pursued with eager devotion.  The blight of irresponsibility is almost universal upon the students in the higher educational institutions of our country.

So the Christian social order contrasts itself with every phase and aspect of our present life, and exposes the impoverishing absence of the Spirit of God.  Its protest is reinforced by widespread social restlessness and the feeling that the existing state of things has gone into moral bankruptcy.

But the Kingdom of God is no mere protest; it is a program of social redemption.  Some thinkers flatly deny that Christianity can provide a constructive plan for society.  Mr. Lowes Dickinson makes his imaginary Chinese official write of the social teachings of Jesus:  “Enunciated centuries ago, by a mild Oriental enthusiast, unlettered, untravelled, inexperienced, they are remarkable not more for their