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and fully to have entered the human stage of development."

The second force at work in the world leading men to a spiritual view of life is the teachings of the New Testament as leaven in society. In England it issued in the Magna Charta; in France it became a passion for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; in the United States of America it appeared as American Idealism. In a previous chapter we indicated the nature of this idealism, which is the growth of the ideals of justice, morality, benevolence, liberty and love in the individuals, as exemplified in the character and teachings of Jesus, and the firm belief that these same ideals can be made the governing principles of nations in their relations one to another. In spite of her rapid growth in material possessions and in political power America has refused to surrender her ideals to lust for wealth and territorial conquest. The philosophy of brute force has gone down under a vital idealism.

The events of the world war are changing profoundly our view of life. A complete analysis of the facts involved will be impossible for years; we can present only a few:

(a) Drunk with conscious power, Germany turned from commercial efficiency and intellectual conquest to a colossal organization of brute force and frightfulness. The result was one horrible, lurid day and then the bitter night of defeat. The truth is, that autocratic Germany, the logical cre

A few days afterward official Turkey and the diplomatic force paid their last tribute to this perfect embodiment of the Prussian system.

(d) The amazing and sustained response of a sensitive, sympathetic world to the cry of starving humanity, completely refutes the materialistic view. Sympathy expressed in liberal charity and sustained over a long period of time must have a spiritual source. For a long period Europe has been in the grip of famine and the end is not yet in sight. Little children are undergoing the torture of hunger and blindness and agonizing death until the heart grows sick and the mind reels at the suffocating thought of it all. People by thousands in the streets of Petrogad are pleading with the soldiers to shoot them down and end their misery. Others, crazed by hunger, have turned blindly to Bolshevism, plunder and murder. The meaning of all this is clear. Hunger lies at the base of human development and it is only by the application of art, invention, industry, sympathy, equity and education that man has mastered the problem and made progress possible. War has temporarily removed these forces and man has become, in a night, a hungry animal seeking survival by maw and claw. The result is appalling. Apart from Christian sympathy and charity and the timely restoration of the arts of industry, society would revert in a decade to the ethics of the jungle. Precisely the same situation confronts us in regard to disease. Remove the physician, the Red Cross nurse, the hospital, the

sanitary train and a multitude of volunteer workers actuated only by philanthropic motives and then contemplate the tragedy.

(e) In the winning of the war, the principle of coöperation has completely replaced competition. The law of national and moral survival has compelled this radical shift and society will never again return to the old competitive system.

(f) One more outstanding fact in connection with the war compels serious consideration, namely, the absolute dependence of the nation upon prayer. Instinctively, all of the governments and people and soldiers sensed the fact that the contending forces were spiritual and that therefore the help of the Deity was essential to victory. Germany cried to her war god to bare his bloody and revenging arm; Turkey implored her heartless Allah, while the Allied nations, in humiliation, sought Divine aid and asked for the conscious presence in their midst of the holy, conquering Christ. Think you that God could hear a ruler who would call upon Him after issuing the following command, "Everything must be put to fire and sword; men, women, and children and the aged must be slaughtered and no tree or house be left standing." Here is a self-confessed criminal whose rank offense smells to heaven. It is a blot on the escutcheon of Germany that will not out in a thousand years.

This incontrovertible fact protrudes itself! In the greatest crisis of the world's progress, both contending forces sought survival, not in physical force

alone, but in the conscious penetration of the human by the Divine Power. God proved Himself to be on the side of right and to be victorious, and because of this the world's development enters upon a new epoch.

Thus modified, the hypothesis of evolution becomes a vastly different thing than it is in the hands of the German materialist. What physical energy is to the world of matter, that religion is to the world of the soul. Both function through the operation of law and are not in any conflict except through misinterpretation or misuse. Evolution is not the extension of natural law into the spiritual world, but exactly the reverse. The ascendancy over natural law by spiritual law as a means of human progress finds its highest form of expression in the law of personality, therefore we are compelled to predicate a self-contained, creative person as the primary and determining force in evolution. This person we know and adore as God, and that which we know as evolution is simply God's way of working.

The conclusion of all of our thought thus far is that the most colossal war of all times was but a lurid, ghastly phase in the conflict between two forces each contending for the entire control of world progress. The one is the materialistic theory of evolution as expounded, organized and applied by German "Kultur." This system of thought includes not only a theory of society but the dethronement of Christianity and the substitution of a new

religion, Teutonic in its conception and aim. The other spiritual force at work in the world is the theory of an all-controlling personality revealed to men in the person of Christ and known as Christianity. Into one or the other of these two philosophies of life all the problems of the human soul and of society must be brought for reconciliation and final solution. In the defeat of the German army, Christian Idealism has won a great victory, but what of the future? As we have already said, the conflict has again been transferred from the field of battle to the arena of intellectual and social re-building. Who will triumph here? Will it be Selfishness or Sacrifice, Berlin or Bethlehem, Cræsus or Christ?

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