with a sacred treaty in his hand.  Why, all over this land, teachers, fathers, editors, authors, have found it necessary to say to the young men and women of the republic, “Do not sign your name to an obligation unless you intend to keep it.”  Keep your faith.  Remember that your word given should be as good as your bond.  “Swear to your own hurt, and change not.”  All this is inevitable, as the result of Germany’s trespass upon the property and the homes of Belgium.  In some European lands the State is everything and the individual nothing.  In this republic the individual is first, and the State is here to safeguard his rights and see to it that no one trespasses upon his property.  The time will come when the nation that breaks its treaties and sows to the wind shall of that wind reap the whirlwind.  It is an awful thing for a nation to make it inevitable that hereafter when other people sign a treaty with that country, that our representatives shall say:  “Before we sign this treaty with you, we wish to ask one question.  Later, if it is to your interest to break this treaty, is this document to be sneered at as a scrap of paper?  Or does this treaty mean the faith of a nation that will die rather than break its word, given before the tribunal of civilized States?”

The Death of the Tribal God Idea.

This great war and one or two of the leaders thereof have killed the old tribal idea of God.  In the twentieth century it seems almost ludicrous to find that the conception of the ancient Hebrews is still held by some rulers.  Be the reasons what they may, of late there has been a strange recrudescence of the tribal God idea.  This is the twentieth century, not the tenth!  Think of a man sending his soldiers into Belgium, saying, “Make yourselves as terrible as the Huns of Attila, and the Lord our God will give you victory.”  Just as if God were not the God of the whole earth, a disinterested God, a God who makes His sun to shine and His rain to fall upon all His children, without regard to race or clime or color.  Why, it is as artless as the way the old Hebrew peasant called on God to blast his enemy’s field, and drown his children with floods, and smite his herds with the plague.  The tribal idea of God belongs with the ox cart, the medicine man, the cave dweller.  This is an era of science.  Whatever is true is universal, not racial.  If the heart beats and the blood circulates in a German soldier’s veins, the blood flows in the veins of the people of England and France.  If the earth goes around the sun in Berlin, the earth goes around the sun in Petrograd and Edinburgh.  If there are seven rays in the sunbeam, why, the discussion is closed, and it is a universal fact.  And if Jesus was right when He said, “God is our Father, and all the races are our brothers, and the world has been fitted up by God as an Eden garden for His children,” then no man or ruler should ever adopt the view of the peasant and the cave man, and try to make the