Page:The War and the Churches.djvu/102

 The mood and outlook and ambition of the Kaiser take their colour from his notoriously morbid nervous frame. In a word, you have a mighty concurrence of movements, whether acts of will or otherwise, converging in all parts of Europe toward this war. Was God indifferent to the whole of those movements?

Those movements are particularly traceable in Europe during the last fourteen years. Before that there was a similar concurrence of movements eventuating in the South African War; and in the meantime a series of processes and circumstances had given us the Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan-Turkish War and the Mexican War. So we might go over the wars of the nineteenth century and all earlier wars. The "permissiveness" or indifference of the ruler of the universe grows amazingly. In the meantime we had mighty catastrophes like the sinking of the Titanic and other ships, the earthquakes at Messina and elsewhere, famines and epidemics and floods in various places, and great numbers of murders, railway and other accidents, etc. We begin to ask where the ruling of the universe comes in at all, and, as far as human events go, all that we can gather in the way of reply is that sometimes individuals who pray very fervently get their diseases healed or their coffers filled; and even these claims do not pass rational inquiry.

Now here is the precise difficulty of the unbeliever, and this present tragedy makes it acute. We ask our neighbour, or seek in some learned theological treatise, what are the indications of this government of the universe, and we are told about the making of stars and the decoration of flowers and the putting of instincts into animals or pretty patterns on their skins. But when we point out that the really