It would be impossible here to deal at any length with the doctrine of free will. Unless you conceive it in some novel and irrelevant sense, as Professor Bergson does, it is a very much disputed thing amongst the experts whose business it is to inform us on the subject--our psychologists. The majority of modern psychologists seem to reject it altogether. On the other hand, no theologian has ever yet reconciled it in any intelligible scheme with the supposed omnipotence of God. But it is not necessary to enter into these abstruse considerations. Let us take the matter in the concrete. We look back to-day on a long series of processes and circumstances which culminate in the war. There is the whole history of Germany for a hundred and fifty years inspiring the German people with a bias toward aggressive war; there are the economic and geographical circumstances which, at the end of the nineteenth century, begin to make it think again of aggressive war; there is the overflowing population, bred by order of the clergy who stupidly condemn an artificial restriction of births; there is the coincident trouble of Austria with the Slavs, of England with its subject peoples, and so on. In the eyes of the careful student a hundred lines of circumstance and development have led to this war. The melodramatic idea that it all springs from the free will of the Kaiser, or of a group of soldiers and statesmen, need not be seriously considered. Moreover, even when we introduce the personal element--and the personality of the Kaiser has had a very considerable influence--it is foolish to throw the whole burden on free will. The mood and outlook and ambition of the Kaiser take their colour from his notoriously morbid nervous frame. In a word, you have a mighty concurrence of movements, whether acts of will or otherwise, converging in all parts of Europe toward this war. Was God indifferent to the whole of those movements? Those movements are particularly traceable in Europe during the last fourteen years. Before that there was a similar concurrence of movements eventuating in the South African War; and in the meantime a series of processes and circumstances had given us the Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan-Turkish War and the Mexican War. So we might go over the wars of the nineteenth century and all earlier wars. The "permissiveness" or indifference of the ruler of the universe grows amazingly. In the meantime we had mighty catastrophes like the sinking of the _Titanic_ and other ships, the earthquakes at Messina and elsewhere, famines and epidemics and floods in various places, and great numbers of murders, railway and other accidents, etc. We begin to ask _where_ the ruling of the universe comes in at all, and, as far as human events go, all that we can gather in the way of reply is that sometimes individuals who pray very fervently get their diseases healed or their coffers filled; and even these claims do not pass rational inquiry.