It is the strong, resolved assertion of a vast spiritual and intellectual Force, which, for many years, all the nations now warring together have elected to ignore, or else to acknowledge in such half-hearted fashion that sheer ignoring might betoken greater reverence. It is the Force, which by natural and immutable law acts upon unclean and poisonous things and exterminates them without mercy or appeal. We may call it Fate or God as it suits us--but whatever be the accepted name of this eternally working system of Mathematics, it admits of no false quantities and has to be reckoned with as the only positive FACT in the universe. All else may change, “Heaven and earth may pass away but My Word shall not pass away.” That is to say--“My Word” is the eternal Law; and however craftily and cleverly we may arrange our little “civilisations” and schemes of “giving” in order to “get,” we cannot carry forward a single act of injustice or falsity without punishment following the offence. If not soon, then late. _Our_ judgments, _our_ opinions on the scroll of everlasting equity, are as the scrawls of babes who are incapable of mastering the fact that two and two make four. We are always trying to make them five, the one over being a clumsy attempt to gain some advantage to ourselves. It is our “camouflage”--that vulgar expression of French police “argot” which truly is not in the French language at all, but which, nevertheless, has lately become the stupid parrot-cry of the irremediably illiterate British press, whose paragraphists seize with rabid joy on any foreign word they do not entirely understand and run it to death. Yet, try as we may, two and two will _not_ make five. Hence our small political quarrels and big greedy wars. The _pros_ and _cons_ of the present terrific clash of nations can be totalled up as easily as a sum on a slate--each effect has had its causes. Belgium is devastated, and her people have been and are robbed, tortured, and murdered. True! But what of Belgium’s own tacitly approved cruelties on the Congo? The present is the result of the past. Consider Russia! She is like a great creature fallen in the dust--the seeming corpse of herself, helpless to move, while birds of prey gather round her seeking to tear her to bits and divide the spoil. But does not Russia deserve her fate?--has she not invited it? May we not think of her cruelties, tyrannies, and enslavements practised on her own people for hundreds of years? The gods have been patient with her arrogance, but there is a limit even to divine patience. Italy and France--prosperous, and growing more and more fond of money-getting, eager to destroy all their noble, ancient ideals--these have, as it were, administered a kick to the very thought of Deity.