This overwhelming catastrophe has brought the issues squarely before us. It is well that the forces we have to fight have come into the open; we know at last the world we live in. We are face to face, with a distinctness never before presented, with two great principles: the law of brute force, of the survival of the fittest, made into a code of conduct; the law of Christianity, with its possibility of higher development, finer progress than brute force dreamed,--the growth of the greater through sacrifice of the less; soul-achievement at the expense of flesh. In this great hour of need shall we let the shallow intellectualism of much recent thought dominate, or shall we boldly choose that faith in which the best of human life, from its first dim stirring to triumphant self-sacrifice, is summed up? One way lies inevitable slipping backward; the other way lies progress in inner life too great for word or present vision. These are crucial moments; how great the crisis none may understand. Many an idealist, lost in the more than forty years of materialism of our time, is praying that out of the horror of the present may come better things: a deeper sense of the deepest needs of life; a knowledge that neither material comfort, nor physical health, nor materialistic thought can wholly satisfy; a hunger and thirst for which only the spiritual can suffice. Suffering bears strange fruit, and the suffering of the present days and of the days to come is incalculable. Even the mental anguish of mere watchers of the strife may help reveal to the modern world as profound need of faith. One thing is evident in all this awful crash: men still are brave; never before, perhaps, have they fought against such great odds. The splendor of their courage dims our eyes. Shall the fighters in the world of spirit, “fighters in the noblest fight,” be less brave in defending in the face of odds, perhaps never so great before, these inner truths, deeper than dogma, deeper than theology, deeper than life itself, the immemorial heritage of the race,--longing unutterable for righteousness, for faith in the spiritual, for enlarging and unending life? THE END =The Riverside Press= CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . A