There have been times and places at which that appeal could be successfully made.  Indeed, as Gibbon owned, it was one of the causes to which the gradual triumph of Christianity was due.  But for Europe at the present moment to address that appeal to Africa or India or China would be to invite a deadly repartee.  In the long ages, Heathendom might reply, which have elapsed since the world “rose out of chaos,” you have improved very little on the manners of those primeval monsters which “tare each other in the slime.”  Two thousand years of Christianity have not taught you to beat your swords into plough-shares.  You still make your sons to pass through the fire to Moloch, and the most remarkable developments of physical science are those which make possible the destruction of human life on the largest scale.  Certainly, in Zeppelins and submarines and poisonous gas there is very little to remind the world of Epiphany and what it stands for.

Thirty years ago the great Lord Shaftesbury wrote:  “The present is terrible, the future far more so; every day adds to the power and facility of the means of destruction.  Science is hard at work (science, the great—­nay, to some the only—­God of these days) to discover and concentrate the shortest and easiest methods to annihilate the human race.”  We see the results of that work in German methods of warfare.

Germany has for four centuries asserted for herself a conspicuous place in European religion.  She has been a bully there as in other fields, and the lazy and the timid have submitted to her theological pretensions.  Now, by the mouth of her official pastors she has renounced the religion of sacrifice for the lust of conquest, and has substituted the creed of Odin for the faith of Christ.  A country which, in spite of learning and opportunity, has wilfully elapsed from civilization into barbarism can scarcely evangelize Confucians or Buddhists.

If we turn from the Protestant strongholds of the North to the citadel of Authority at Rome, the signs of an Epiphany are equally lacking.  The Infallibility which did not save the largest section of Christendom from such crimes as the Inquisition and the massacre of St. Bartholomew has proved itself equally impotent in these latter days.  No one could have expected the Pope, who has spiritual children in all lands, to take sides in an international dispute; but one would have thought that a divinely-given infallibility would have denounced, with the trumpet-tone of Sinai, the orgies of sexual and sacrilegious crime which have devastated Belgium.

Is the outlook in allied Russia any more hopeful than in hostile Germany and in neutral Rome?  I must confess that I cannot answer.  We were always told that the force which welded together in one the different races and tongues of the Russian Empire was a spiritual force; that the Russian held his faith dearer than his life; and that even his devotion to the Czar had its origin in religion.  At this moment of perplexity and peril, will the Holy Orthodox Church manifest her power and instil into her children the primary conceptions of Christian citizenship?