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 before God, which does not know this concern, or complies with it as clumsily as Laban who still believes that he must slaughter his little son and bury him in the foundation of his house, a custom which once was quite beneficial but is so no longer.

Must I add, Ladies and Gentlemen, that we owe the tribulations which we now have to endure, the catastrophe in which we are living, to the fact that we lacked intelligence toward God to a degree which had long become criminal? Europe, the world, was full of stale and outworn things, of evident obsolete and even sacrilegious anachronisms which had been clearly outdistanced by the world will, and which we permitted to continue, in dull mind and in disobedience to this will. It is understood, that the spirit is always ahead_ of reality, that reality follows it clumsily. But never, perhaps, had there existed before such pathological, such unmistakably dangerous tension, in the social, political and economic life of the peoples, between truth and reality, between things long reached and accomplished by the spirit and between things which still took the liberty of calling themselves reality; and foolish disobedience to the spirit or, religiously speaking, to God's will, is undoubtedly the true cause for the world explosion which stuns us. But explosion is equalization, and I think that here, in this hall, it is quite the right place to express the hope that after this war, we—or our children—will live in a world of happier equalization between spirit and reality, that we will "win the peace." The word peace always has a religious ring, and what it signifies is a gift of intelligence before God.

You understand, I am eager to prove, that it is not wholly vain and idle to speak about my private work at a moment like this, instead of general and important matters. I may [20]