Men would think, as they follow the scarlet annals of war, that the lesson was sufficiently clear even for pacificists to read as they run, but is it so? France reads and learns, gloriously regenerate, blotting out the memory of old folly with her blood of sacrifice, turning again as her first King Clovis was adjured by St. Remi of Reims, destroying what she worshipped a year ago, worshipping what then, and for two centuries before, she had destroyed. Again France shows the way, traversing it with bleeding feet and with many tears; Russia is learning it, though she had less to unlearn; Belgium must have learned it through her blind martyrdom; but how of the others? Is England learning, and Italy; will Germany learn, and Austria; will America learn, standing aloof from the smoking altar of sacrifice; will the Church learn, there in trembling isolation while again Peter listens for the crowing of the cock? If not, if when silence comes down on a decimated, an exhausted, a bankrupt world, the old ways are sought again and men go on as before, then the myriad lives and the dreary rain of tears are indeed a vain oblation, and all will be to do over again. God sets no lesson that need not be learned, and unless out of it all comes an old heaven and a new earth, then the lesson is set again, as time after time it was set for imperial Rome, until a century of war and pestilence and famine broke down her insolent pride and made from the ruins of her vainglory a foundation for a new civilisation in the strength of the Christianity she had denied.