ich he
developed a powerful craving, in the place of the delicate China tea
Lady Ella procured him.

(5)

These doctrinal and physical anxieties and distresses were at their
worst in the spring and early summer of 1914. That was a time of great
mental and moral disturbance. There was premonition in the air of those
days. It was like the uneasiness sensitive people experience before a
thunderstorm. The moral atmosphere was sullen and close. The whole
world seemed irritable and mischievous. The suffragettes became
extraordinarily malignant; the democratic movement went rotten with
sabotage and with a cant of being "rebels"; the reactionary Tories and a
crew of noisy old peeresses set themselves to create incurable confusion
again in the healing wounds of Ireland, and feuds and frantic folly
broke out at every point of the social and political edifice. And then
a bomb burst at Sarajevo that silenced all this tumult. The unstable
polity of Europe heeled over like a ship that founders.

Through the swiftest, tensest week in history Europe capsized into war.

(6)

The first effect of the war upon the mind of the bishop, as upon
most imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it. Trivialities and
exasperations seemed swept out of existence. Men lifted up their eyes
from disputes that had seemed incurable and wrangling that promised to
be interminable, and discovered a plain and tragic issue that involved
every one in a common call for devotion. For a great number of men and
women who had been born and bred in security, the August and September
of 1914 were the supremely heroic period of their lives. Myriads
of souls were born again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those
tremendous days.

Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great thing;
it did this much for countless minds that for the first time they
realized the epic quality of history and their own relationship to the
destinies of the race. The flimsy roof under which we had been living
our lives of comedy fell and shattered the floor under our feet; we saw
the stars above and the abyss below. We perceived that life was insecure
and adventurous, part of one vast adventure in space and time....

Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances again,
but they could not altogether destroy the memories of this revelation.

For the first two months the bishop's attention was so detached from
his immediate surroundings and emp