from the operation of cosmic laws than are the stocks and stones.  Each party to this gigantic struggle declares that he is in it against his will; the fate that rules in the solar system seems to have them all in its grip; the working of forces and tendencies for which no man was responsible seems to have brought it about.  Social communities grow in grace and good-fellowship, but governments in their relations to one another, and often in relation to their own subjects, are still barbarous.  Men become christianized, but man is still a heathen, the victim of savage instincts.  In this struggle one of the most admirable and efficient of nations, and one of the most solicitous for the lives and well-being of its citizens, is suddenly seized with a fury of destruction, hurling its soldiers to death as if they were only the waste of the fields, and trampling down other peoples whose geographic position placed them in their way as if they were merely vermin, throwing international morality to the winds, looking upon treaties as “scraps of paper,” regarding themselves as the salt of the earth, the chosen of the Lord, appropriating the Supreme Being as did the colossal egotism of old Israel, and quickly getting down to the basic principle of savage life—­that might makes right.

Little wonder that the good people are asking, Have we lost faith?  We may or we may not have lost faith, but can we not see that our faith does not give us a key to the problem?  Our faith is founded on the old prescientific conception of a universe in which good and evil are struggling with each other, with a Supreme Being aiding and abetting the good.  We fail to appreciate that the cosmic laws are no respecters of persons.  Emerson says there is no god dare wrong a worm, but worms dare wrong one another, and there is no god dare take sides with either.  The tides in the affairs of men are as little subject to human control as the tides of the sea and the air.  We may fix the blame of the European war upon this government or upon that, but race antagonisms and geographical position are not matters of choice.  An island empire, like England, is bound to be jealous of all rivals upon the sea, because her very life, when nations clash, depends upon her control of it; and an inland empire, like Germany, is bound to grow restless under the pressure of contiguous states of other races.  A vast empire, like Russia, is always in danger of falling apart by its own weight.  It is fused and consolidated by a turn of events that arouse the patriotic emotions of the whole people and unite them in a common enthusiasm.