It is with a pathetic wistfulness we hear described by the prophet this Advent picture of the reign of peace, in which the wolf is to dwell with the lamb, and the leopard to lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and the sucking child to play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child to put his hand on the cockatrice' den, and in which the special feature of the holy mountain was to be that they should not hurt nor destroy. For we look round after nineteen hundred years of the religion which was to bring this "peace on earth and good will among men," and we see an outpouring of more blood and an outbreak of viler passions than has been seen in this world for a thousand years. One can little wonder that the cynics scoff, and those who refuse or fail to look below the surface speak openly of the breakdown of Christianity, and that some of the most earnest and loving of GOD'S children are deeply moved and disturbed. Is this beautiful picture a Will-of-the-wisp? they ask. Is it a mirage in the desert? or are the longing eyes of GOD'S children some day to see it realized? I. "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain." And first we see Belgium stabbed in the back and ravaged, then Poland, and then Serbia, and then the Armenian nation wiped out--five hundred thousand at a moderate estimate being actually killed; and then as a necessary consequence, to save the freedom of the world, to save Liberty's own self, to save the honour of women and the innocence of children, everything that is noblest in Europe, everyone that loves freedom and honour, everyone that puts principle above ease, and life itself beyond mere living, are banded in a great crusade--we cannot deny it--to kill Germans: to kill them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world; to kill the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well as the old, to kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant, who superintended the Armenian massacres, who sank the _Lusitania_, and who turned the machine-guns on the civilians of Aerschott and Louvain--and to kill them lest the civilisation of the world should itself be killed. And no doubt for many to-day this belief in Christianity is trembling in the balance; the world seems to have returned to the primitive chaos of paganism from which it came. "There's nothing left to-day But steel and fire and stone."[6] [6] Kipling. But this awful nightmare only besets those who fail to look below the surface. Two small publications will help those who are in this frame of mind; one is an excellent lecture by the Dean of Westminster (Dr. Ryle), entitled "The Attitude of the Church towards War," and the other a brilliant little book by the well-known American writer, Owen Wister, called "The Pentecost of Calamity."