"Bend down upon thy knees, my son, And take into thy hand, Thy wounded hand, and mine, somewhat Of the earth of this good land, That dreaming of our home, we two May kiss the soil of England!" EMILE CAMMAERTS _From "War Poems and Other Translations"--By Lord Curzon. By permission of John Lane, The Bodley Head, London_ EXTRACT FROM "THE WAR AND THE SOUL" I do not for one moment believe that the world is less Christian than it was before the war, or less intent on spiritual things. The exact contrary is the case as far as my experience goes. I have more than once stated that, if any man wants to be cured of religious pessimism, or any other kind of pessimism, he had better go to the front. If I had been an unbeliever before I went there, I should speedily have been cured. There one sees things every day, almost every hour, to make one marvel at the greatness of the human soul. You will see hell wide open, it is true, but you will see heaven likewise. Such heroism, patience, self-devotion, cheerfulness under affliction, readiness to fling life away to save a comrade or a position--surely these mean more, and are worth more, than the immediate object of their exercise. . . . . . . . . . . As humanity has been constituted up to the present, war has been the means, more than any other agency, of bringing out on the grand scale that truth of sacrifice without which flesh can never be made to serve the ends of spirit, and the kingdom of the soul be won. This could be realized without war if only the race as a whole could be lifted to the requisite level. It often has been realized without war in individual cases, but never for long on the wider basis of the communal life. . . . . . . . . . . What men are learning on the battle-fields of Europe of the glory of sacrifice and its mystical potencies is drawing them back to God by way of the cross of Christ; our vulgar, blatant, worldly, commercial, pleasure-loving age is seeing meanings in that cross it never saw before, and getting rid of many delusions in the process. We are being saved as by fire. Let us recover the simplicities of life, and we recover faith. We are re-learning the old, old lesson that man cannot live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. We are realizing almost with the surprise of a new discovery, that not what we have but what we are, is the secret of blessedness or wretchedness, that there is nothing to mourn over but the evil in our own hearts, and that death, however sad and dreadful in its accompaniments, is but the prelude to vaster ventures of the soul and unimaginable joys. Nothing can be killed that is worthy to be kept alive or essential to our highest well-being here or hereafter.