brain,
the Greeks would have saved the world, for theirs was the greatest
brain-power ever developed on the earth.) And even the Church is
uncertain, and fails to summon the nation with clear and uncertain
sound back to God. For it is manifest that there can be no penitence
where there is no consciousness of transgression. There can be no
return except for those who realise that they have strayed.

The first step, then, back to God must spring from the soul wakened to
the {181} realisation that it has sinned and that God is fighting
against sin. But so far from the nation realising its true state, the
amazing fact is that the nation is hypnotised with the sense of its own
righteousness. It is only conscious of its own shining virtues. It
has drawn the sword for freedom and in defence of little nations. It
is waging a 'holy war.' Self-blinded, unable to believe that virtues
such as shine on its face could suffer repulse, in days of humiliation
and of defeat it has shouted 'Victory.' And from pulpit after pulpit
the doctrine is propounded that this war is not a judgment of our sins;
that to speak of war as a judgment of sin is 'antiquated.' The Church
has thus cut itself adrift from the teaching of prophet and seer, and
the Bible, which is aflame with the judgments of God upon sin, is but
the antiquated record of unenlightened ages. Thus the conscience of
the nation is narcotised. And it is manifest that a nation whose
conscience is chloroformed can hear no {182} call summoning to
repentance. When the Church is blind to the sword of God flaming in
the heavens, how can any expect the nation to behold it, and,
beholding, to repent?

This obsession that we are not living in a great day of divine judgment
is all the stranger when we consider that every day of our lives is a
day of divine judgment, and that we are ever standing at the bar of the
great assize. No sooner does a man sin than judgment begins to
operate. Let him surrender to intemperance, and the judgment of
disordered nerves and enfeebled frame is immediately declared. And so
with every violation of the divine order. And the judgment ever
operative against the individual is also ever operative against the
nation. It requires but little thought to see how the national sins
brought on the nation the judgment of these dread days.

For what was it that brought down upon us the cataclysm of war? It was
the degeneration into which the nation {183}