to be," said the Englishman, and thought. He was struck by
what seemed to him an amazingly novel idea.

"If it weren't for religions all men would serve God together," he
said. "And then there would be no wars--only now and then perhaps just a
little honest fighting...."

"And see here," said the Angel. "Here close behind this frightful
battle, where the German phalanx of guns pounds its way through the
Russian hosts. Here is a young German talking to two wounded Russian
prisoners, who have stopped to rest by the roadside. He is a German of
East Prussia; he knows and thinks a little Russian. And they too are
saying, all three of them, that the war is not God's will, but the
confusion of mankind.

"Here," he said, and the shadow of his hand hovered over the
burning-ghats of Benares, where a Brahmin of the new persuasion watched
the straight spires of funereal smoke ascend into the glow of the late
afternoon, while he talked to an English painter, his friend, of the
blind intolerance of race and caste and custom in India.

"Or here."

The Angel pointed to a group of people who had gathered upon a little
beach at the head of a Norwegian fiord. There were three lads, an old
man and two women, and they stood about the body of a drowned German
sailor which had been washed up that day. For a time they had talked in
whispers, but now suddenly the old man spoke aloud.

"This is the fourth that has come ashore," he said. "Poor drowned souls!
Because men will not serve God."

"But folks go to church and pray enough," said one of the women.

"They do not serve God," said the old man. "They just pray to him as one
nods to a beggar. They do not serve God who is their King. They set up
their false kings and emperors, and so all Europe is covered with dead,
and the seas wash up these dead to us. Why does the world suffer these
things? Why did we Norwegians, who are a free-spirited people, permit
the Germans and the Swedes and the English to set up a king over us?
Because we lack faith. Kings mean secret counsels, and secret counsels
bring war. Sooner or later war will come to us also if we give the soul
of our nation in trust to a king.... But things will not always be thus
with men. God will not suffer them for ever. A day comes, and it is no
distant day, when God himself will rule the earth, and when men will do,
not what the king wishes nor what is expedient nor what is customary,
but what is manifestly right."....

"But