In our own midst, behind our sea-defences, we were still competitive, jealous, grudging, parsimonious, wasteful, slow to mercy and of great anger; and the prevailing characteristic of our civil contentions was that no side would ever admit itself to be in the wrong, or consent to think that a change of its own heart was necessary. And as the very crown and apex to that mountain of self-deception, stood the ministerial bench in Parliament. When blunders had been perpetrated and became too obvious for concealment, we might occasionally be told that to make mistakes was human, and that government did not claim immunity from the operation of that law; but ministers would dodge, and shuffle, and lie--suppress, or even falsify information to which only they had access, rather than admit that they had “done wrong,” or open their eyes to the fact that what they mainly needed was a change of heart. And as with ministers as a whole, so as a whole with people. Those elements of our national and international relations which were leading steadily on to the great conflagration wherein we were all presently to be involved, were those in which (our pride being implicated) we stubbornly denied that any change of heart was necessary. The State would not admit that its exaltation of the Will to Power over the Will to Love was morally wrong; it would not admit that the alternative came within the scope of practical politics; such teaching it left to the advocacy of the Churches; and how half-hearted that advocacy had become under pressure of the surrounding atmosphere of national self-sufficiency was revealed when the war came upon us. Christianity became almost mute; the one form of prayer, special to the occasion, which the Church could not or would not use was that which alone is truly Christian--prayer in identical terms both for ourselves and our enemies. To pray that spiritual strength and moral virtue might be given equally to us and them was beyond us--though in the granting of it war would have ceased. We were not content to pray merely that right should prevail--right, that most difficult of all outcomes to secure when once, even for a just cause, nations embark on war--we insisted on praying that we should prevail: and so (praying for things materially established) not that we should prevail by a clean adherence to the principles of democracy, but by the instrumentality of a corrupt and secret diplomacy. And so before long--knowingly or unknowingly--we were praying for the success of the secret treaties, for the successful repudiation of the very principles for which we had set out to fight, for the suppression of Ireland’s right to self-determination, for the downfall of the Russian Revolution, which was insisting so inconveniently on a belated return to first principles, and for other doubtful advantages not at all synonymous with the coming of Christ’s Kingdom. And we were praying for these things--just as really, though