THEOLOGY AND THE WAR 41 



dear head or another the bullet may be averted, the shrapnel- 

 shard may be wrenched aside. The Germans, during the 

 first year of the war, at any rate, had not the slightest doubt 

 that the German God, an old and tried ally of the House of 

 Hohenzollern, was marching at the head of their columns, 

 diving in their U-boats, and sailing in their Zeppelins, for the 

 confounding of their impious foes, and the ultimate healing 

 of the world through the universal dissemination, at the 

 bayonet's point, of the unspeakably beneficent German spirit. 

 I am not caricaturing their views. I have read them in black 

 and white in a hundred places. It will one day be an 

 interesting task for a statistician to sum up the number of 

 times that, in German sermons, speeches, and articles, the 

 couplet of Geibel's, popularized by the Kaiser even before the 

 war, has been dragged in to account for the tactics of the 

 German God : 



Und es mag an deutschem Wesen 



Einmal noch die Welt genesen. 



It may be questioned whether they are now quite so confident 

 of Geibel's prophetic inspiration, the healing miracle having 

 been so unaccountably postponed. But I have no evidence 

 as to the present tone of their theology. Other nations have 

 from the first viewed the policy of God with more surprise 

 and, one may even say, misgiving ; but all alike have 

 appealed to him, sung to him, prayed to him, preached 

 about him, with undiminished perseverance and fervency. 

 There is nothing to show that there has anywhere been any 

 considerable revolt against the theory that events on earth 

 are directed in every detail by the will of an unseen Power 

 a will in all respects analogous to our own, save that it is 

 unquestionably free, while our belief in our power of self- 

 determination is by many believed to be an illusion. 



And to all this multitudinous and world-wide appealing 

 and beseeching this vocal and silent supplication for ever 

 thundering round the Throne the silent not the least 

 audible, we may be sure, if there be any ear to hear what 

 answer is vouchsafed from the empyrean ? Never a whisper, 

 never a sign, never a tremor of the ether. There sits God, 

 surveying the hideous spectacle of devastation and massacre, 

 and raising no finger to stay or to mitigate it. Does any one 

 believe that the men who survive are those who are prayed 

 for, and the men who fall are those who are not? There are 

 innumerable testimonies to the contrary testimonies of 

 mothers and wives who have " wrestled with God " for the 



