30 WILL CHRISTIANITY SURVIVE THE WAR? 



outbursts, and tidal waves ; the pestilences and famines ; the 

 Goths and Germans, the Huns, the Magyars, and the Tatars 

 invading Italy and Greece, the Normans attacking France, 

 the Danes devastating Ireland, the massacres of the Amer- 

 indians by the Spaniards, the holocausts of the Turks and 

 Tatars, the Thirty Years' War between Protestants and 

 Catholics, the Seven Years' War, and the ruin these wars 

 brought to Southern Germany ; the Napoleonic wars, the 

 African slave trade and slavery in America, the existence in 

 London and in great American cities of sweated women, 

 working incessantly from dawn to near midnight to gain a 

 mere pittance ; the life in classical and medieval times of the 

 galley slaves, the torments of the Inquisition, the prisoners 

 in the sulphur mines, and the agonies undergone during the 

 great sieges of history. We know absolutely nothing con- 

 cerning the Force we call God ; and, assuming such an 

 intelligent ruling force to be in existence, permeating this 

 universe of millions of stars and (no doubt) tens of millions 

 of planets, we do not know under what conditions and limita- 

 tions It works. We are quite entitled to assume that the end 

 of such an influence is intended to be order out of chaos, 

 happiness and perfection out of incompleteness and misery; 

 and we are entitled to identify the reactionary forces of brute 

 Nature with the anthropomorphic Devil of primitive religions, 

 the power of darkness resisting the power of light. But in 

 these conjectures we must surely come to the conclusion that 

 the theoretical potency we call " God " makes endless experi- 

 ments, and scrap-heaps the failures. Think of the Dinosaurs 

 and the expenditure of creative energy that went to their 

 differentiation and their well-nigh incredible physical develop- 

 ments. But they were tossed aside as a mistake. The 

 tree-climbing mammalia, with supple hands and fingers, were 

 taken up, became the chosen race, and finally evolved Man, 

 while the discarded ungulates and carnivores were dying out. 



" Such splendid purpose in his eyes, 



Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies, 

 Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer. 



" Who trusted God was love indeed 

 And love Creation's final law, 

 Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw, 

 With ravine, shriek'd against his creed. 



" Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills, 

 Who battled for the True, the Just. 



