Dr. Hillis, who occupies the pulpit of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, made famous by the pastorate of the late Henry Ward Beecher, delivered the following remarkable sermon on the European War on Sunday, Dec. 20, 1914, choosing as his text the words:  “From whence come wars?  Come they not from your own lusts?"

Nearly five months have now passed by since the German Army invaded Belgium and France.  These 140 days have been packed with thrilling and momentous events.  While from their safe vantage ground the American people have surveyed the scene, an old regime has literally crumbled under our very eyes.  Europe is a loom on whose earthen framework demiurgic forces like Frederick the Great, Bismarck, and Napoleon once wove the texture of European civilization.  Now the demon of war has, with hot knife, shorn away the texture, and a modern Czar and Kaiser, King and President, with Generals and Admirals, are weaving the warp and woof of a new world.  One hundred years ago the forces that bred wars were political forces; today the collision between nations is born of economic interests.  The twentieth century influences are chiefly the force of wealth and the force of public opinion.  These are the giant steeds, though the reins of the horses may be in the hands of Kings and Kaisers.  In Napoleon’s day antagonism grew out of the natural hatred of autocracy for democracy, of German imperialism for French radicalism.  Today Germany is not even interested in France’s republican form of Government, nor is France concerned with Germany’s imperial autocrat.  But all Europe is intensely concerned with the question of economic supremacy or financial subordination.

Ever since Oliver Cromwell’s day England has been the mistress of the seas, and Germany is envious and believes that she has a right to supplant England in this naval leadership.  France has long been the banker of Europe, and Germany covets financial leadership.  From whence come wars?  Come they not from men’s lusts?  Now that long time has passed, it is quite certain that neither Napoleon nor Bismarck nor William II. understood the future.  It is a proverb that yesterday is a seed, today the stalk, and tomorrow is the full corn in the ear.  Napoleon was a practical man, but he could not see the shock in the seed.  When Napoleon said, “One hundred years from now Europe will be all republican or all Cossack”—­Napoleon was quite wrong.  Forty years ago Bismarck said that he had reduced France to the level of a fourth-class nation, and that henceforth France did not count; while as for the Balkan States, “the whole Eastern question is not worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier”—­Bismarck was quite wrong.  The present Kaiser has no imagination.  A man of any prevision of the future might have foreseen that any attack upon England would settle the Irish question; that any treaty with Turkey would force Italy, as Turkey’s enemy in the late Italian-Turkish