And yet it is impossible that the criminal showed no signs, no perversities of feeling, no heartlessness which should have revealed him to us from the outset. No one will say that we ought all to become wonderful aesthetes like the Greek sculptors, or as sensitive as the saints; but if we admit that it is a barbarous thing to pass by the beauties of art without perceiving them; that it is the mark of defective civilization to confound horrible coarseness and monstrosity with ideal beauty, to be unable to distinguish the strident noise of the tram-car wheels, or the deafening crash of ill-tuned instruments from the harmonies of Bellini or Wagner; that each of us would blush for such insensibility, and would conceal it--how is it we do not perceive that such obtuseness is habitual to us in moral matters? We see that we are capable of confusing virtuous persons and criminals, without any foreboding. How is it that so often in the case of judicial errors, the voice of the innocent did not resound in our ears, although his trial was a public one, and we allowed him to languish in prison for years? How is it that goodness should be so obscure a thing that we confound it with prosperity? How is it that those rich men of whom the gospel says "Woe unto you, rich men, for ye have your reward," can think of "improving the morals" of the poor, without any examination of their own moral lives or the lives of those belonging to them? almost as if they believed that the rich are essentially good and the poor essentially bad. If such darkness as this reigned in the intellectual field, we should be unable to conceive the form of madness which would present itself to our eyes. There are confusions in the moral field which it is impossible to imagine in any other domain of life. If some day the youth of the nations, more clear-sighted than those of to-day, hear that the Christmas feast was kept on the battlefields of the European war, they will understand the origins of the war itself. In such a situation, David (to whom indeed it would have been inconceivable) would have accepted the taunt of his enemies as well deserved, when they asked him: "Where is now thy God?" "We have lost God" would have been a fitting lamentation. But to celebrate His festival indifferently under such conditions is to be unconscious of having lost Him. How long ago did the soul die, and when did the building up on death begin? What a terrible episode of madness is this monstrous slaughter, upon which the tree of peace was planted in honor of the Savior! Far indeed are we from the delicate sensibility to evil of Santa Teresa, or the keenness of spiritual vision which enabled the man of God to see the white dove beneath the soiled feathers of the sinful woman. The difference is not as that between the taste of a peasant and that of an artist, but as that between a corpse and a living man. It is evident that we have suffered death, albeit we are unconscious of having died.