We must add to this the fact--which no one would be more ready to recognize than these leaders and rulers, Kings, Ministers, or Presidents, themselves--that the affairs with which they have to deal, the problems they have to solve, are too vast and mysterious to be fully grasped by any human brain, and that they are liable to the most grievous miscalculations. If you need evidence of this, look at the outbreak of the present war. Our rulers in this country had no idea at all, within a few days of the event, that such a war was about to break upon us; the rulers of all other nations have been loudly proclaiming, ever since it began, that they are not responsible for it, and that it would not have happened but for circumstances which they could not foresee or control. There seem, indeed, to have been wild and unscrupulous spirits in Germany who were eager for it, and who had long been intriguing for it; but none the less it burst upon Europe suddenly and unexpectedly, and it baffled the foresight of European statesmen in general. In the face of such imperfect competence for these problems of statesmanship, and of such enormous responsibility for them, are we not compelled to stretch out our hands towards Heaven, and implore God’s guidance for the rulers who are feeling their way amidst such dim lights--“for kings and for all in authority,” upon whose words and actions the fate of the world and its peace, the happiness and the very life of millions of men and women are dependent? If, indeed, we could not do so, we might well despair. We should behold before us a mass of nations rising against one another, blinded--as we see in Germany that nations can be blinded--by passion and pride, and fighting wildly, almost like men in the dark, and we might well feel helpless before such a chaos. But knowing, as it is the privilege of Christians to know, that “the Lord sitteth above the water-floods,” that “the Lord remaineth a King for ever,” knowing, as another Psalm says, that “the Lord is King, be the people never so impatient. He sitteth between the cherubim, be the earth never so unquiet,” we cry unto the Lord in our trouble, and implore Him to deliver us out of our distress.