in our day.

The amazing thing is that men should {178} ever have been blind to
this--that, however much God may hide Himself at the end of other
avenues of approach, at the end of this He stands forth clear before
our eyes. There is nothing predicated regarding God which we cannot
doubt and deny save this, that there is operative in the world a moral
order conformity to which means life and disobedience death. It is
thus with individuals and thus with nations. Let a man surrender to
evil, and instantly nature begins to marshal its forces against him and
digs for him the grave. The road by which humanity has marched is
marked by the ruins of empires and civilisations upon which destruction
came through the very same laws that we see working to-day, if we
choose to look. Whatever race or empire surrendered to the base,
sacrificed purity to sensuality, the good of the common weal to its own
selfish ends, made selfishness and pleasure its aim, upon that race or
empire, sooner or later, fell the consuming sword and the {179}
devouring flame. There is no sentence in all literature more pregnant
than that which tells how the stars in their courses fought against
Sisera. So it has been and ever will be. The whole forces of the
universe are arrayed against evil, and carry on a ceaseless war against
it. It is because of this divine surgery that humanity has been saved
from a corruption which would have entailed the world's destruction.
All history is the proof that there is a mandate which means life or
death for individuals and nations. Along this road we can touch the
hand of God and see the sword of His divine justice. Righteousness is
the law of the world, the will of the Supreme Ruler who orders the
universe that righteousness must at last prevail. The source of
morality and all righteousness is--God.

II

It is manifest, then, that there is but one safety for individual or
race, and {180} that lies in getting into line with the Moral Order of
the world--with God. But the startling thing is that though we have
come through a discipline such as no generation ever experienced
before, at the end of two years of it there is no sign that we have
learned our lesson. The measure of our blindness is that politicians
summon the nation to cultivate its brains that it may be saved, without
ever a hint that salvation lies along the road of character and
morality--the road that leads to God. (If salvation lay in the