It is a noble and touching episode, worthy of France, and there were many such as Sister Julie in the dark days of retreat. Innumerable, patient, fearless women tended the poilu back to health, won the whole nation to the height of resolution and confidence from which it now so confidently confronts the future. These books are a rich, even an inexhaustible repository of Catholic heroism. It will be a pity, and a grave loss to the literature of the war, if they are not made available for English readers. France has long enough been judged for her sins; it is time that there was some celebration of her virtues. She has been long enough condemned on a bill of indictment drafted by her enemies, and would-be conquerors: it is time that we listened to her speaking for herself. Nor in praising France do I, or do my fellow-writers, think it necessary to blacken German Catholicism. Simple, misled, unfree units of the Central Powers are dying all over Europe at the bidding of two disastrous Emperors: these plain soldiers, obeying the call of patriotism and deprived of any true vision of things, are dying in good faith, in our good Faith, and dying well. But over all the leaders of German Catholicism lies the red cloud of blood with which the statecraft of their country has enveloped the world. When they burned Louvain, the barbarians lit a fire which is not easily to be put out. THE GOSPEL OF THE DEVIL I.--BISMARCK What is the Devil’s Gospel? I take it that the three main articles are violence, intellect, and a certain malign splendour of domination. If that is the formula of the Courts of Hell, it is certainly the formula of Prussianism. There is here no question of mere instinctive egotism. We are in presence of an Evangel of Conquest, fully worked out, and completely conscious of itself. Later in this series we shall have an opportunity of examining the wild work of some of the Berlin theorists of blackguardism. But before there was a theory, there was a fact. In the world of action Prussia had thrown up two huge mountain-peaks of achievement: Frederick the Great, so grossly flattered by Carlyle, and Bismarck. Between them yawns that Valley of Purification to which Jena marks the entrance. For that interregnum of humility Prussia is truly great: your heart beats with Körner, with Fichte, even with the cloudy Hegel. But two generations later the type is once more master: Frederick, reincarnated, calls himself Otto Eduarde Leopold Bismarck Schönhausen. He is the modern Wotan to whom Germany has built her altars.