Certainly it is put to the test in these days, when every day brings the echo of violence, injustice, and new cruelties. But was it not still more tried when it was entrusted to the fishermen of Judea by him whom humanity pretends to honor still--with its lips more than with its heart? The rivers of blood, the burnt towns, all the atrocities of thought and action, will never efface in our tortured souls the luminous track of the Galilean barque, nor the deep vibrations of the great voices which from across the centuries proclaim reason as man's true home. You choose to forget them, and to say (like many writers of today) that this war will begin a new era in the history of mankind, a reversal of former values, and that from it alone will future progress be dated. That is always the language of passion. Passion passes away. Reason remains--reason and love. Let us continue to search for their young shoots amidst the bloody ruins. I feel the same joy when I find the fragile and valiant flowers of human pity piercing the icy crust of hatred that covers Europe, as we feel in these chilly March days when we see the first flowers appear above the soil. They show that the warmth of life persists below the surface of the earth, that fraternal love persists below the surface of the nations, and that soon nothing will prevent it rising again. I have on several occasions shown how the neutral countries have become the refuge of this European spirit, which seems driven from the belligerent countries by the armies of the pen, more savage than the others because they risk nothing. The efforts made in Holland or in Spain to save the moral unity of Europe, the burning charity and untiring help that Switzerland lavishes on prisoners, on wounded, on victims of both sides, are a great comfort to oppressed souls, who in every country are suffocating in the atmosphere of hatred forced on them, and who look for purer air. But I find still more beautiful and touching the signs of fraternal aid between friends and enemies in belligerent countries, however rare and feeble they may be. If there are two countries between which the present war seems specially to have created an abyss of hatred and misunderstanding, they are England and Germany. The writers and publicists of Germany, whose orders are to profess for France rather sympathy and compassion than animosity, and who are even constrained to distinguish between the people and the Government of Russia, have vowed eternal hatred against England. _Hasse England_ has become their _Delenda Carthago_. The most moderate declare that the struggle cannot be ended except by the destruction of the _Seeherrschaft_ (naval supremacy) of Britain. And Great Britain is not less determined to continue the conflict until German militarism has been totally eradicated. Yet it is precisely between these two nations that the noblest bonds of mutual assistance for the misfortunes of the enemy have been formed and maintained.