3. But if this is the negative side what about the positive? I am almost ashamed to ask and answer the question in public again, "For what are we fighting?" If we are fighting for the freedom of the world, for the right to live for the small nations of the earth, for nationality against pan-German tyranny, for international honour as the essential condition of a future brotherhood of nations, then the GOD who has been the refuge from generation to generation of the down-trodden and oppressed, who planted in us the love of liberty, and who has been the champion of the free, must be the God on whose side we are to-day. 4. We are right, then, to look for victory and help to a GOD who through one generation to another has shown Himself a lover of peace and chivalry and mercy and liberty, against a delight in war, against brutality and massacre and tyranny; yet we should have ill-read the lessons of Trafalgar Day if we were to stop here. Nelson never dreamt that GOD was on his side in the sense that he could relax for an instant his vigilance, or ruin his whole settled plan by impatience, or win a final victory without the self-sacrifice and trust of the nation behind him. If we do look to GOD, then we must remember this bracing fact that "GOD helps those who help themselves." It is a far-reaching saying that the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light; certainly it is a formidable fact to be faced that for a thoroughly bad cause, carried out in a thoroughly bad way, the authors of this greatest crime in history have succeeded in evoking from the hard-working people of Germany, who are under the impression, doubtless, that they are "saving the Fatherland," a far more universal spirit of organised and efficient self-sacrifice than in the most glorious cause ever entrusted to man has yet[9] been evoked from all in these islands. It was one of our great statesmen who truly said that he feared what he called the "potato spirit" in Germany more than all their guns and shells--the spirit, that is, which was content with potato bread, content to make any sacrifice, if only their cause would be victorious; and it is unwise as well as ungenerous not to recognise the gallantry with which both the individual sailors and soldiers of the enemy have fought. [9] This sermon was preached in 1915. There has been a great improvement in 1916.