‘_They chose new gods ... then was war in the gate_;’ so runs an ancient Hebrew psalm, explaining a dark page in a dark history. In those words, cause and effect are set side by side. Germany has certainly chosen ‘a new god’; a god of war; the god of high explosives, of poison gases, of submarines; a god of material forces, of battles and bloodshed—as ultimate arbiter in the struggle to spread the Pan-German ideal. Everyone remembers how Nietzsche inverted the Beatitudes. ‘Blessed,’ he said, ‘are’—not the meek—but ‘the strong, for _they_ shall inherit the earth.’ ‘Blessed are’—not the peacemakers—but ‘the war-makers, for they shall be called the sons of Odin.’ Cramb said that in Europe two great spiritual forces, Napoleon and Christ, oppose each other, and their conflict is ‘the most significant spiritual phenomenon of the twentieth century.’ He adds that, in Germany, ‘Corsica has conquered Galilee’; Napoleon, or what Napoleon represents, is worshipped; not Christ, or what Christ teaches. But the Germans do not understand even the Napoleon they accept as their ideal. That great master of the art of war himself said that ‘in war moral forces were to material forces as three to one.’ It is true that by ‘moral’ Napoleon did not exactly mean ‘ethical’; but the ethical is an essential part of the moral. Germany forgets—or inverts—the ethical; and that is the most fatal of blunders. For, as Carlyle teaches, this is a world of facts, and the first condition of success in any realm is fidelity to facts. And certainly the most important kinds of ‘facts’ are in the ethical order. They have the quality of eternity in them. This world has been so constructed by its Maker that a falsehood is in quarrel with the very system of things, and the Prussianised Germany, which has set the world in a flame with its greeds, and hates, and envies, is fighting against the ‘system of things.’ We, on our part, have greater allies than the nations knitted to us by formal treaties. With the change of a single word we can adopt Wordsworth’s memorable lines: ‘... Thou hast great allies, Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And Love, and man’s unconquerable mind.’ But in this war we have still mightier allies than these. All the forces that make for truth, for humanity, for honour, for justice, for freedom, are our allies. These are the enduring forces of the universe; and the Maker and Ruler of these forces, of whose character they are the reflex and of whose will they are the servants, is on our side too.