al and inhuman qualities, is becoming a religious purpose
which unites Christians and non-Christians, atheists and agnostics,
and which carries with it at once a mordant condemnation of the
interpretations of the past, and an irrepressible demand for a future
free from the old menace and the old mistakes. All sane men and women
want to abolish war. General Smuts believes that a passion for peace has
been born which will prove stronger than all the passion for war which
has overwhelmed us in the past. President Wilson seeks a peace identical
with the freedom of life in which every people will be left free to
determine its own polity and its own way of development, "unhindered,
unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful."
Statesmen see the ultimate hope for a free humanity in a change of
heart. Mr. Asquith outlines the slow and gradual process by which a real
European partnership, based on the recognition of equal right and
established and enforced by a common will, will be substituted for
force, for the clash of competing ambition, for groupings and alliances,
and a precarious equipoise. Mr. Lloyd George insists that there must be
"no next time." Viscount Grey warns us that if the world cannot organize
against war, if war must go on, "then nations can protect themselves
henceforth only by using whatever destructive agencies they can invent,
till the resources and inventions of science end by destroying the
humanity they were meant to serve." Leagues of nations are proposed,
organization for peace on a scale commensurate with the past
organization for war is recognized as the principal task of
international co-operation.

This new revolt against war is inseparable from the religious revival of
the time. The word "revival" conjures up memories of less strenuous
times, when men were concerned with smaller problems, and uninspired by
the bitter experience of the present--Spurgeon thundering in his
Tabernacle, Salvation Army meetings, small gatherings in wayside
villages, at which howling sinners were converted and revivalists
counted their game by the dozen. The present revival is something for
which the past provides no analogy. It is not concerned so much with
individual salvation as with the salvation of the race and the world.
The petty sins and shortcomings which brought men to the confessional
and to the stool of repentance lose importance when compared with the
awful omissions which we now re