There is a thin and sinister philosophy, akin to that of Treitschke and Nietzsche (which is for to-day what Machiavelli was for the sixteenth century), that avows no building, no consummate work of art of any kind, “worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier,” justifying its statement on the basis of a superficial humanism. Never was a more malignant ethic. A man is valuable in proportion to what he is and does for righteous society, and for what he makes of himself as a free and immortal soul responsible to God. Go through the roaring mills of Crefeld and Essen, the futile pleasure-haunts of Homburg and Wiesbaden, the bureaux and barracks and palaces of Berlin; you will find--as similarly in every country--hundreds of thousands of peasants, workmen, and aristocrats whose contribution to Christian civilisation is nothing, and will be nothing however long they may live; who forget their souls and deny their God, and of these we can say, it is not the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier or even the bones of a Prussian _Junker_ that weigh more in the scale than Reims or Louvain, it is not a million of these that mean so much for service and the glory of God, as one such potent influence as Amiens or Reims, or the library and schools of Louvain, or the pictures of Memling and the Van Eycks in Bruges and Antwerp and Ghent. Those that cry loudest for the sanctity of human life and its priority before art and letters, most insistently hurl a hundred thousand lives against inevitable death, and spread black starvation over myriads of women and children, in order that their privilege of selling inferior and unnecessary products to far-away savages may be preserved intact. Against this set the cathedrals and universities and the exquisite art of France and Belgium and the Rhine; consider what it meant once, what it means even now, what for the future it is destined to mean as never before.