Reims falls, but that which built Reims fell long ago, while the devious undermining and the blind sapping began even while the last cubits were being added to its stature, and since then has been only a steady progression in strength and assurance of its antitheses--of materialism, intellectualism, secularism, industrialism, opportunism, efficiency; founded on the coal and iron of the Scar of Europe and on the sinister and ingratiating philosophy that came out of a re-entrant paganism, thrived under the fertilisation of an evolutionary empiricism, flowered in a Nietzsche, a Treitschke, and a Bernhardi. And always it presented itself in a gracious guise; intellectual emancipation, humanitarianism, social service, democratic liberty, evolution, parliamentary government, progress, direct approach of each soul to God. It all sounded fine and high and noble, and on the 30th day of July, 1914, there could have been hardly a thousand men in the world, apart from those in the secret, who would not have said--there were not a thousand in Europe who did not believe--that man in his regular progress from lower ever to higher things had achieved a plane where the wars and savagery and lies of the past were no longer possible. And in one week from that fateful 30th of July the cloud castle had dissolved in a rain of blood. Could conviction have come to the world in any other way? Would the diseased body have reacted to a gentle prophylactic, could the Surgeon have spared His knife? Since the knife is used, the answer admits of no dispute, but will it be enough? This is the question that is asked on every battle-field of a world at war; the lesson is set for the learning--will the nations learn? In so far as they have diverged from what Reims stood for; from Leo IX and Gregory VII and Innocent III; from Edward I and Ferdinand III and Louis IX; from Eleanor of Guienne and Blanche of Castile and Margaret of Malines; from St. Bernard, St. Norbert, and St. Anselm; from Albertus Magnus and Hugh of St. Victor and St. Thomas Aquinas, just so far have they to return, bringing with them not empty hands but all the great good winnowed from the harvest of grain and chaff they have reaped in those years of spiritual and material and national disorder that began when the dizzy fabric of mediævalism trembled to its base at the exile at Avignon and “piteously collapsed” between the nailing at Wittenberg and the sansculotte throning of the “Goddess of Reason” in the desecrated cathedral of Notre Dame. There is good grain in plenty, but it is sowed along with the chaff and the tares, and now for the last harvesting the grain has germinated only to dwindle and die, for the tares have sprung up and choked it and the red garnering is of tares alone.