When your heart is cleft in twain and one part stays on this side, and the other over the dim borderland--there's a straining of eyes into the Unseen, a picture making out of the creative materials of human spirit. Life of the soul begins again--out of pain--always out of pain. We have not yet learned to accept life from the higher masters, Joy and Beauty. We still learn through Pain. We forget the meaning of death, even as we gather our things of death about us, and war comes along to remind us again. Always those who answer to Master Pain must look to death to find their relation to God. The faith that comes with peace at last to the human heart, is energised by a love that crosses the abyss of life and death.... A grand old teacher, Master Pain. When we know all his lessons, and take his hand from our shoulder, and touch it to our lips (for we shall know well his wonderful work when the time comes for us to part with him), then we shall find that he is not a black man at all--but a Sunburnt God.... * * * * * Four at a supper table--a little child, its young mother, and the old father and mother of a grown son, who has just died for France. The old man's eyes roved from the child to its mother, back to the old woman, and lingered there, something rough and deep and wise in his look. The child suffered vaguely. There was much suffering in the house.... The young mother asked coldly if they could feel _him_ in the room. Then just as coldly she asked if there were a God. Then she ran from the room with a cry like a night animal. The silent child began to weep. The old man and the old woman stared at each other and wondered what their daughter-in-law meant about _him_ being in the room. A picture of the chastened world. The child turned from the strange, sad human beings to the fairies that played upon the peasant hearth. The child's mother had rushed forth into the twilight to find a vision or a memory or a breath of God. The old man and the old woman looked so long at each other in the darkness--that the soul of the son of their flesh stood for one healing instant between them. Thus the enduring figures of the Unseen reveal themselves to those who have suffered to the end. The nations are but names to fight for. These battle-lines are for humanity's soul. If America is fighting for humanity, let it be with surgical calm and healing in her hands. Hate spoils everything. * * * * * The babe knows a room; the child knows a house and looks out into a street; the youth learns the street and then the city; the young man learns his country, but the man should learn the world. You can never be the great lover of America by hating the rest of the world; no human mind can see what is best, what is even good for America, when the interests of other countries are forgotten. No man's country ever suffered because he turned his love and service to the feet of humanity.