to
the Lord's promise, '_By the arm of my strength, surely I will no
more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies, and the sons of the
stranger shall not drink thy wine for which thou hast laboured_.'

"For our own land, England, if we are really to vindicate it out of
this struggle as Beulah--that is, 'married,' the bride of the Lord--I
wish you to consider how far the God of this noble oath has advanced
upon the old bloodthirsty Jehovah of the book of Joshua. He is not
yet, in Isaiah, the all-living, all-comprehending God the Father of
the Gospel: but if we halt on Him here, we are already a long way
advanced from that tribal and half-bestial conception of the Deity
which Joshua invoked and (as it seems to me) the German Emperor
habitually invokes.

"I see no harm in priding ourselves that we have advanced beyond the
German Emperor's schoolboyish conception of Jehovah. As a greater
and far more highly bred and educated Emperor--an Emperor of Rome--
once warned us, 'The best part of revenge is not to be like them.'

"Well, that is the point on which I would specially caution you this
morning. When an adversary suddenly and brutally assaults us, his
ferocity springing from the instinct of a lower civilisation--as when
a farm-dog leaps upon us in the road--our first instinct is to fall
back and meet him on the ground of his own savagery, to give him an
exact tit for his tat. But can you not see that, as we do this, and
in proportion as we do it, we allow him to impose himself on us and
relinquish our main advantage? It is idle to practise a higher moral
code, if we abandon it hurriedly as soon as it is challenged by a
lower.

"Bearing this in mind, you will not in the next few minutes say to
yourselves, 'Our minister has ill chosen his time--now, with the
enemy at our gates--to be preaching to us that we should be
confirming what little hold we have on the divine purpose, to advance
upon it; to counsel our striving to pierce further into the mind of
God; when all the newspapers tell us that, for success in war, we
should enter into the minds of our enemies.'

"For, let me tell you, all knowledge is one under God; and the way of
theology--which should be the head and crown of the sciences--not
different from the way of what we call the 'natural' sciences, such
as chemistry, or geology, or medicine. Of wisdom we may say with
Ecclesiasticus: _The first man knew her not perfectly, neither shall
the last man f