The war is generating prophets as the Nile generated frogs under the mandate of Moses, and there is a similarity in the speech of both products. The prophets are too cautious to risk their reputation in predicting the events of the war; their forecasts relate to the sort of a world we shall find ourselves in after peace returns. But even this measure of prediction is a by-product of the soothsayers who, whether their lips have been touched with a coal from off the altar, or not, certainly wield the pen of the ready writer. The main industry of the busy prophets is to expound to us the meaning of the war, and to disclose to us those causes of the war which we should never have discovered for ourselves. The ordinary uninspired man feels when he has read the diplomatic correspondence of a couple of weeks at the end of July and the beginning of August, 1914, that he knows fairly well what were the immediate causes of the war, and where the responsibility lies. If he carries his reading back as far as the annexation of Bosnia in 1908, he is satisfied that he has a pretty comprehensive view of the forces that precipitated the war. And if he has read pretty abundant selections from the Pan-German literature and the panegyrics on war--such a literature as no branch of the human race, Christian or pagan, ever produced before--he thinks he understands how it was possible to plunge the German nation into this attack on the world. But all this is merely a matter of reading and reflection. Any one can reach such conclusions. The prophet must reach some different conclusion in order to sustain his claim to inspiration: If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me, Why, what a very singularly deep young man this deep young man must be. The prophet has got to attribute the war to causes that would not have occurred to the common mortal, and see in it meanings that ordinary eyes cannot trace, or abdicate his tripod. It is equally unreasonable and equally immoral to say that the war proves that Christianity is a failure, and to say that it proves Christianity has never been tried. Because if either of these hypotheses be correct, one set of belligerents is as deep in the mud as the other is in the mire, and there is no personal culpability for this war, and no national culpability either. We are all guilty of not being Christians, or all unfortunate in having grown up in ignorance of revelation, and beyond that there is no blame for the war.