Is it all a vain oblation? There is the crucial question and the answer is left with us. This is no war of economic and industrial rivalry, of jealous dynasties, of opposed political theories; it is not the inevitable result of a malignant diplomacy from Frederick the Great and Metternich to Disraeli and the German Kaiser; it is not even the last act in a drama ushered in by Machiavelli and brought to its denouement at Pottsdam. All these and myriad other strands have gone to the weaving of the poisoned shirt of Nessus, but they all are blind agents, tools of a dominant and supreme destiny by which are brought about the events that are only the way of working of an unescapable fate. The war is a culminating catastrophe, but it is as well the greatest mercy ever extended to men, for it may be made the means of a great purging, the atonement for the later sins of the world, the redemption from a wilful blindness and folly that are not consonant with the will of God. There is a stern propriety in the centring around the Cathedral of Reims of the first phase of the great conflict, and in its slow and implacable demolition. Long ago Heinrich Heine, the poet of the German people, though not himself a German, saw clearly the coming ruin and wrote as follows: Christianity--and this is its highest merit--has in some degree softened, but it could not destroy, the brutal German joy of battle. When once the taming talisman, the Cross, breaks in two, the savagery of the old fighters, the senseless Berserker fury of which the northern poets sing and say so much, will gush up anew. That talisman is decayed, and the day will come when it will piteously collapse. Then the old stone gods will rise from the silent ruins, and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes. Thor, with his giant’s hammer, will at last spring up, and shatter to bits the Gothic cathedrals. Better than any other, he has declared the nature of this war that arose a century after his death. Thor, the impersonation of conscienceless and unmitigated force, shatters in pieces the Gothic cathedrals because he and they are antitheses and they cannot exist in the same world. Like Barbarossa sitting stonily in his dim cave under ground, century after century, while his beard grows through the rocky table before him, waiting for the call that will send him forth into the world again, primitive force and primitive craft have sullenly awaited the day when the Christian dispensation passes and they issue again into the light. In the fulness of time their day arrives and their first task is to destroy the symbol of their ended bondage. With the name of Christ on their lips and the boast of Christian civilisation in their mouths, the nations and the peoples forsake Christianity until only the nomenclature remains and the memorials of its power and glory.