"Why did GOD ever allow the War? and if there is a GOD, why does He not stop it?" is a question which is dinned into my ears from morning to night by anxious mothers and even by men who have not had time to think very deeply over the mystery of GOD's dealings with mankind. For nine years I used Sunday by Sunday to lecture and answer questions in the great East London Victoria Park. I can imagine the questions they are asking now. "Either He _cannot_ or He will not"--this was always the favourite dilemma on which they sought to impale me about the suffering in East London. "Either your GOD _cannot_ stop it or He will not." "Either He is a tyrant who gloats in it all or He is a weak ruler who has no control of His world." And these questions, which were difficult enough to answer then, are intensified in their point to-day. It is difficult to select out of the horrors which have passed before our eyes one worse than another, but probably the most hellish thing done on earth in the last five hundred years has been the attempted extermination of the Armenian race; even as described in the restrained pages of Lord Bryce, it has more tragedy than any battlefield, for there at least men die in the heat of battle for what they think a great cause, but here, in cold blood and with every circumstance of bestiality and lust, women and children were slowly done to death. And yet _"GOD does nothing_." This is the accusation. No thunderbolt comes from Heaven; the brave Russians do something to avenge the hideous crime, but GOD--where is GOD? He is like the ancient gods described by Tennyson-- "On the hills, like gods together, Careless of mankind," and all this cry from sinking ships and praying hands is to Him "A tale of little meaning, Though the words are strong." (2) But if the case against religion at all is strong owing to the War, still more is the War supposed to be fatal to the _Christian Religion_. Here into the world it came two thousand years ago with a great flourish of trumpets about "Peace on earth, good will to men," and what is the result? After two thousand years, the bloodiest war which has yet taken place on earth; waste of treasure beyond counting every day, and waste of something much more precious than material treasure, the precious blood of the best manhood of the world. I have received their broken bodies into my own arms in the front dressing stations; I have consecrated the graveyards where their dear bodies lie. I know that tens of thousands of those who would have been the fathers of the future race of mankind are lying beneath these little crosses in Flanders or Gallipoli, and that many a maiden will die childless to-day, because those who would have been husbands in the fair days of peace are buried now in a soldier's grave.