conflict of England with the
overshadowing might of Spain that so vitalized the Elizabethan period.
The Revolution was behind the one important school of literature our own
country has produced hitherto.

Since this War is waged on a scale far more colossal than any other in
human history, and since liberty and democracy are at stake, not only in
one land, but throughout the world and for the entire future of
humanity, it is reasonable to expect that the stimulation to the
creation of art and literature will be far greater than that following
any previous struggle. Where the sacrifice for high aims has been
greatest, the inspiration should be greatest, as in France. The
literature currently produced, as in the books of Loti, Maeterlinck and
Rolland, is scrappy and disappointing, it is true; but that is to be
expected when the whole nation is strained to its last energy and
gasping for breath, under the titanic struggle, and is no test of what
will be. In spite of the destruction of so large a fraction of her
manhood, France will surely rise from the ashes of this world
conflagration regenerated and reinspired. The pessimism of her late
decades will be gone. The literature and other art she will produce
will be instinct with new earnestness and exalted vision, and she may
excel even her own great past.

We too are awakening. Since the War began, all over the United States,
men and women have been thinking more earnestly and have been more
willing to listen to the expression of serious thought than ever before
for the last quarter century. Now that the hour of sacrifice has
struck, this earnestness must greatly deepen. Perhaps we, too, may have
our golden age of art.

The same inspiration carries naturally into the religious life. It is
true, as we have seen, that there is a cross-current of reversion to
narrower orthodoxy, caused by the War. The Gods of War are all national
and tribal divinities. While they rule, the face of the God of Humanity
is veiled. The Kaiser's possessive attitude toward the Divine is but the
extreme case of what War does to the religious life. Even among
ourselves the tendency shows in such phenomena as the current popular
evangelism--an eloquent, if artfully calculated and vulgarized preaching
of the purely personal virtues, with an ignorance that there is a social
problem in modern civilization, profound as that displayed by a
mediaeval churchman. The evangelist's list of inmates,