tions of the Empire will not be prepared to go to defend the right and to crush that mad spirit which, beginning in "folly," has had its end in "wickedness." I speak of this because, without a clear conscience, our purpose cannot be high, our faith cannot be firm and strong; but with the profound conviction that our cause is right, the faith of the nation will remain unclouded, the courage of the nation will never falter, the sacrifice of the nation will know no limits; no defeat shall ever dismay us, no victory shall ever spoil us, for with unshamed conscience we can and we will in humblest dependence wait upon God.

THE DUTIES OF THE HOUR

With that deep sense of right undergirding all, what is to be the spirit of our people? There are three duties that await us:

1. We must seek, first of all, for the good that lies beyond this conflict, for good there surely is. It is not easy now to see its form. It is hard to trace one gleam of light through the cloud. It is difficult to behold anything in the immediate prospect but the incalcula

ble suffering and misery that must fall on guilty and innocent alike, and the immeasurable loss that must come, not to this country alone, but to every country, and not to this age alone, "but to posterity and to the whole prospects of European civilization." But good there will be! I repeat, it is not easy now

to see.

For who can so forecast the years,
And find in loss a gain to match?
Or reach a hand through time to catch
The far-off interest of tears?

But a "far-off interest" there will surely be to all our tears, and in the providence of God a mightier gain will match each overwhelming loss. It may be that the Empire needs this baptism of blood. We are not here to condemn one another, but to confess that, as a nation, in the riot of gain and pleasure, we have been forgetting God. Isaiah tells of a time when Israel was soggy with content, steeped in the stupor of material prosperity, morally insensible under the narcotic of worldly gain and pleasure, till it was written of them, "The heart of this people is waxed fat, their ears are dull of hearing, their eyes have

been closed, lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and believe with their hearts." Is it any wonder that such a nest of comfort was shattered and they passed into the captivity of Babylon, from which they emerged with a chastened view of life and a new recognition of the sovereignty of God?

Neither must we forget that it has been out of such experiences that almost every nation has come to its best in literature and art and religion. It was this fact that led Ruskin, no doubt, to make that extreme statement about war. "I found in brief that all great nations learned their truth of word and strength of thought in war; that they were nourished in war and wasted in peace, taught by war and deceived by peace, trained by war and betrayed by peace-in a word, that they were born in war and expired in peace.'

Ruskin was not an advocate of war-far from it. He is only hinting at this stern fact, that without the ministry of severe discipline the best of the nation is bound to die. And surely it is a striking fact that the highest

period of literature and art and philosophy in Greece is coupled with a life and death struggle against Persia. It was when England was fighting against Spain and Spain's armada that she entered upon the "golden age" of English literature that has never been surpassed, if, indeed, it has ever been equalled, in the subsequent history of English letters. Is it not a significant fact that during the first ten years of the last century, from 1800 to 1810, or you might stretch it to 1815, at a time when all Europe was blood-dripping with the wars of Napoleon, she gave birth to almost every great man who was to guide her better destinies for a hundred years to come? In that terrible decade of travail, England gave birth to Disraeli, Gladstone, Cobden, Bright, Browning, Tennyson, Shaftesbury, and many others, all born within ten years of each other. In these same ten years Italy suckled at her bleeding breasts Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and a few years later Victor Emmanuel, the four men who secured the liberty of the Italian people and brought about the unity of the Italian kingdom. In those same ten years Germany, fighting then against

the Cæsarism of which she is now the exponent, produced her first and greatest statesman, Bismarck; France gave us Victor Hugo for literature; while the throb of that world-upheaval seemed to reach America and there sprang into being Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Ward Beecher, and last and most splendid of all, Abraham Lincoln, the flower of American manhood. No! I am not an advocate of war. I believe that "war is hell" and comes out of hell. But let us not forget that in His overruling wisdom God brings good out of evil; He will make the wrath of men to praise Him; and let us remember that the highest spiritual interests and hopes of the race were redeemed and secured out of the mystery of suffering by the world's Saviour in Gethsemane and Calvary.

Already, in the present crisis, there is much that has been gained. The hearts of men everywhere have been cleansed of cowardice and divorced from selfishness by the superb spectacle of Belgium-heroic little Belgium-lifting herself with victorious courage against the