, from a severe theological education, with the more
learned language in which this theory is expressed by theologians, but
I prefer to deal with it as it exists in the words of most preachers
and the minds of most Christians.

It would be impossible here to deal at any length with the doctrine of
free will. Unless you conceive it in some novel and irrelevant sense, as
Professor Bergson does, it is a very much disputed thing amongst the
experts whose business it is to inform us on the subject--our
psychologists. The majority of modern psychologists seem to reject it
altogether. On the other hand, no theologian has ever yet reconciled it
in any intelligible scheme with the supposed omnipotence of God. But it
is not necessary to enter into these abstruse considerations. Let us
take the matter in the concrete.

We look back to-day on a long series of processes and circumstances
which culminate in the war. There is the whole history of Germany for a
hundred and fifty years inspiring the German people with a bias toward
aggressive war; there are the economic and geographical circumstances
which, at the end of the nineteenth century, begin to make it think
again of aggressive war; there is the overflowing population, bred by
order of the clergy who stupidly condemn an artificial restriction of
births; there is the coincident trouble of Austria with the Slavs, of
England with its subject peoples, and so on. In the eyes of the careful
student a hundred lines of circumstance and development have led to this
war. The melodramatic idea that it all springs from the free will of the
Kaiser, or of a group of soldiers and statesmen, need not be seriously
considered. Moreover, even when we introduce the personal element--and
the personality of the Kaiser has had a very considerable influence--it
is foolish to throw the whole burden on free will. The mood and outlook
and ambition of the Kaiser take their colour from his notoriously morbid
nervous frame. In a word, you have a mighty concurrence of movements,
whether acts of will or otherwise, converging in all parts of Europe
toward this war. Was God indifferent to the whole of those movements?

Those movements are particularly traceable in Europe during the last
fourteen years. Before that there was a similar concurrence of movements
eventuating in the South African War; and in the meantime a series of
processes and circumstances had given us the Russo-Japanese War and the
Balkan-Turk