Lord God of Hosts, whose mighty hand Dominion holds on sea and land, In Peace and War Thy will we see Shaping the larger liberty. Nations may rise and nations fall, Thy Changeless Purpose rules them all. JOHN OXENHAM. VI THE GOD OF BATTLES Everything is in the melting-pot. Even our ideas of religion are changing. The development of theology is being hastened by the 'big push,' and orthodoxy is being tested in the red crucible of war. There is a lot of confusion, and that all the contending nations claim God is embarrassing to _us_, but not to God. We may be sure that there is no jostling or confusion in the Eternal mind. The Good Shepherd knows His own and is not deceived by our claims and counter-claims. 'Gott mit uns' is engraved upon the belt of each German soldier, and the Kaiser claims God as the German God. He has been appealed to by the Austrian Emperor, by the Czar; even the Sultan's soldiers advance to the charge crying, 'Allah, Allah.' We appeal to God too. It is all natural and, from the human standpoint, right. We may be sure that the God of Battles knows the worth of all our claims, knows how much of truth is contained in our cause. In His name the conscientious objector declines to fight, and God only knows where conscience ends and cowardice begins. 'The Lord is a Man of War,' and if history shows anything it shows that God does not despise the sword as an instrument whereby men contend for the faith, and even the blood of men is not too precious to spill for the defence of the ideals of freedom and right. Like the pulsator on the diamond fields of Kimberley, war, the mill of God, throbs back and forth. We may throw on it the heaps of earth, but as it throbs it will shake away the clods and wash away the mire; the true diamonds will remain. To the superficial, war seems to be a grim contradiction of the fact that God is the Ruler of the world. To them it seems as though this world were governed by a demon. But really war is a terrible confirmation of God's presence in the world and a lurid re-emphasis of His inevitable and inexorable Law. The mental disease of selfishness, lust of power, and military glory was present; it was slumbering in the heart of the nations in times of peace. The disease (which shows itself in commercial competition too) broke out in the violent inflammation and irruption of war. War is a delirium, a delusion, and a degeneracy. It is made possible by the brute strength of a soulless people on the one part and the weak unpreparedness of an easy-going, prosperous, and pleasure-loving people on the other part.