Whatever the verdict of history upon this decision of brave men in the ministry, certain effects of the war upon them and upon their work are sure. These again are both good and evil. On the debit side of the ledger will be the loss of many in whose future service lay much of the hope and strength of the church. A large proportion of the best men, who were looking forward to the ministry, are in the training camps and trenches. Some may now be diverted to other callings; some will never come back. Their vacant places in the ranks will be saddening and for a time crippling. Great tasks which might have been done must needs be left undone. New Elishas will wear the prophet's mantle; but the memory of many a vanished face will waken the old cry upon their lips: "My father, my father, the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof!" If the church does not begrudge them, it will mourn them among its multitude of sons who laid the world away; poured out the red, Sweet wine of youth: gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene That men call age; and those who would have been Their sons they gave--their immortality. A second regrettable result in the minds of some will be the discrediting of the ministry. There have been too many un-Christian utterances from the pulpits of all lands, though we are naturally especially sensitive to those "made in Germany"; too many petty, superstitious prayers addressed to tribal deities as little like the God of Jesus as Moloch and Mars; too reckless dealing with "high literary explosives" on the part of preachers possessing neither the wisdom of Solomon nor the restraint of Paul; too flamboyantly patriotic utterances from orators who apparently forgot their obligations as citizens of heaven and makers of a new world. So far as the writer knows, there have been no blasphemies from the pulpits of the Allies equal to the saying of Pastor W. Lehmann: "The German soul is God's soul; it shall and will rule over mankind"; or that still more brutal and unblushing pronouncement of Pastor D. Baumgarten: "Whoever cannot prevail upon himself to approve from the bottom of his heart the sinking of the 'Lusitania,' whoever cannot conquer his sense of the gigantic cruelty to unnumbered innocent victims, and give himself up to the honest delight at the victorious exploit of German defensive power--him we judge to be no true German." But if none have descended to these depths of theological blindness and ethical madness, there has been a certain kinship with the spirit of the imprecatory psalms, used as convenient and refreshing outlets for pent-up tempers, together with more or less pagan treatment of ethical and religious questions, camouflaged with felicitous phrases, which lulled the listener with the assurance that the preacher was quoting from the Litany. All this has not redounded to the respect of the thoughtful for the pulpit, or for the leadership of men supposed to be