But has the promise, then, no bearing on the ordinary secular life of mankind? Are the instincts of men wrong in looking eagerly to it, as they have done from generation to generation, for the prophetic assurance of peace between men, as well as of peace between men and God--of goodwill from man to man, as well as from God to man and man to God. Most certainly they have not been wrong in that eager hope and expectation; but where they have been wrong, and still are wrong, is in their conception of the methods and means by which that secular peace and those purely human blessings and happiness are to be realized. If Christ is, as the angels said, the Saviour, the Saviour of the world; if He is the King Who alone can save His people from their sins; and if war and all the miseries of the world are, in one form or another, the consequences of those sins, then the only way of obtaining salvation from those sins, and deliverance from those miseries which are God’s judgments upon them, is by submitting ourselves entirely to Him, repenting of our failure in obedience to Him, living only by His laws, and seeking His grace and His Spirit for our guidance and inspiration. Have we done that? Has Europe at large been doing it these last fifty years? People ask how such a war as this can be possible after nineteen centuries of Christianity. What do you mean by Christianity? If you only mean that, during the greater part of those centuries, there has been a general and nominal acknowledgment of the authority of Christ and of His laws, such a description of the condition of the world during that time may be allowed. But if you mean a real submission of the mass of men and women, in heart and life, to the will, the love, and the Spirit of Christ, then we have not really had nineteen centuries of Christianity, and the state of the modern world, out of which this war has arisen, has not been a Christian state. It is notorious for instance, and not impugned anywhere, that the spirit of Germany, which has provoked this war, has not only not been a Christian spirit, but has been violently anti-Christian. The Divine authority of Christ as the King and Saviour of the world has been openly and vehemently impugned for at least a generation or two, especially in the public and authoritative teaching in the Universities, which have such immense influence in German life. Christ to them has not been the King of kings and Lord of Lords, the very incarnation of God, “the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person.”