It was no accident that the torch of the Hun and the Cross of the Christ should meet again on the old historic battle-ground between the Somme and the Rhine, and especially at the Marne. We thank God in victory’s hour that the Cross of the Christ is again triumphant, and we trust the torch of the Hun is extinguished forever. Autocracy’s serpent head has been crushed beneath the heel of a militant democracy. That bruised heel is our reminder of the cost of victory. It staggers the imagination to state in terms of manhood, materials, and money the price we have paid to make a world safe for democracy. The eyes of a world have been opened. Men have thought of Calvary, the price the Son of God paid to redeem the wayward, wicked world. Men through their Calvary have come to understand the message of Christ’s Cross--that all men are of equal value in the sight of humanity’s God, and therefore are entitled to equal privileges in the world he has made for their happiness. Out from the shambles of these war-torn years there has come forth, slowly and certainly, with ever-increasing clearness, the shining form of the ideal supreme, the truth triumphant, the principle of full, free, absolute soul-liberty. As the thirsty caravan turns to the springs, as the mariner turns to his compass in the darkest night, so the war-weary world--all parts of it, both that of friend and that of foe--looks beseechingly to America and to the ideal of which she is the great exemplar. From her shores there went forth an army which under God turned the tide against barbarism and made possible the final victory for civilization. That army was composed of men whose fathers represented every nation under heaven. Some who received the highest honor for distinguished service were born under the very flags they sought to overthrow. It was humanity’s army, dominated by ideals distinctly American, which fought, not for military glory, not for hellish hatred, not for selfish gain, but as the crusaders of a new order, of an international fraternity. The distinctive feature of America’s greatness is not her boundless wealth, not her limitless resources, not her inimitable versatility. It is the ideal which she has inherited from her fathers. That ideal, in the forefront of the world’s thought today, had its yesterday of suffering and of sacrifice.