“My dear Lady Jane,” said the vicar, shaking a mournful head, “such a contingency is against all experience. It is not to be thought of unless a fundamental change takes place in the heart of man.” “A change must take place,” said Lady Jane, “if the human race is to go on. Besides, doesn’t the Bible tell us that there will be a second coming of Christ, and that all wars will cease?” “It does,” said the vicar; “but that is the millennium, you know. And I am bound to say there’s no sign of it at present. I am convinced that only one thing now can save the human race and that is a second advent. Only that can bridge the chasm which has opened in the life of the nations.” “In the meantime,” said George Speke, “the watchers scan the heavens in vain. The miserable, childish futility of our present phase of evolution! So many little groups of brown grubs slaving night and day to make human life a worse hell than nature has made of it already. People talk of the exhilaration of war. Good God! they can’t have seen it. They can’t have seen colonies of organized hatreds, profaning all art and all science, poisoning the very air God gave us to breathe. It makes one loathe one’s species. We are little, hideous, two-legged ants, flying around in foul contraptions of our own invention. And to what end? Simply to destroy.” “In order to recreate,” said the vicar robustly. “I don’t believe it. The pendulum of progress--blessed word!--has swung too far. Unless we can contrive a means of holding back the clock, the doom of the world is upon us.” “It all comes of denying God, of banishing him from the planet,” said the host. “But is he banished from the planet? Take a man like Gervase Brandon. Life gave him everything. No man had a greater love of peace, yet when the call came he threw to the wind all his most cherished convictions, went to the war in the knightly spirit of a crusader, and for the rest of his days on earth is condemned to a state of existence from which death is a merciful release.” “By sacrifice ye shall enter,” said the vicar. “I am not competent to speak upon that. But one’s private conception of God is not banished from this corner of the planet as long as England teems with Gervase Brandons.” “There I am fully with you,” said the vicar. “To me Gervase Brandon will always be a symbol of what man can rise to in the way of deliberate heroism, just as the beaches of Gallipoli will be enshrined forever in the history of the race to which he belongs. I have only to think of Gervase Brandon to affirm that God is more potent in the world than he ever was--and that is the awful paradox.” “I don’t presume to question that,” said the host. “But the problem now for the world is, how shall his power be made supreme? That is what a ruined civilization has now to ask itself. All civilized people agree that war itself must cease, yet before it can do so there will have to be a conversion of the heart of man.”