It is not strange that men should point to this, perhaps the greatest war of history, as an evidence that Christianity is a failure. If Christianity professed to be able by a miracle to transform human nature at once, such a war would be fatal to its claim. But no such claim can be made for Christianity. It is a great human movement, a phase of the gradual evolution of man, governed by conscience and reason, out of the brute, governed by appetite and passion. Man as he is seen in the world to day is an unfinished product. He is in the making. The best that can be said of a Christian is that he is further along toward the goal of humanity than the barbarian. Theological doctrines such as the Trinity, the Atonement, and the like are not the essential doctrines of Christianity. The essential doctrine is that life is a struggle for others as well as for self; that in this struggle every one owes a duty to his neighbor, and the stronger he is and the greater the need of his neighbor the more imperative is his duty; that as the father and the mother care for, educate and govern their child until he grows able to care for, educate and govern himself, so always the strong men and women owe the duty of protection, education, and, in some measure, government to the weaker of the human race until they have outgrown the need for it. In so far as autocracy is the rule of the few for the benefit of the few it is paganism. In so far as democracy is the rule of the many for the benefit of the many it is Christianity. He who believes this will perhaps believe with me that in a true sense this is a religious war, the war of conscience, honor, the moral sense against the rule of the bayonet and the bullet. The cynic who thinks this war demonstrates the failure of Christianity should not forget such facts as the heroic struggle of Belgium to maintain her neutrality, the resolve of England at every cost to maintain her pledges to Belgium, the Red Cross following the armies in the field and ministering to the sick, the wounded and the suffering, regardless of their nationality, the general kind treatment to prisoners, accentuated by some very horrible exceptions, and all this contrasted with the enslaving, torturing, the crucifying, the flaying alive of prisoners captured in war by barbaric nations before the dawn of Christianity. LYMAN ABBOTT. Cornwall-on-Hudson, Sept. 17, 1914. VIGIL By HORTENSE FLEXNER. I have waited with my mothers down the dim, uncertain ages, I have waited in the cave and hut and tower, From the first dawn's nameless fear To the death-list posted here I have slain my soul in waiting, hour by hour. Under pelt of beast, trap-taken, or the leaves by chance winds blow, Under tunic, peasant hemp, or cloth of gold, By the fire, in low flame burning, I have crouched in silence, yearning, And as now, my helpless heart has waited cold.