ls of peoples we were
inclined to think that he was right. When, in answer to our nation's
call, our men went out to fight and all our people were bound up in a
fellowship of devotion to a common cause, so stimulated were we that we
almost were convinced that out of such an experience there might come a
renaissance of spiritual quality and life. Is there anybody who can
blind his eyes to the facts now? Every competent witness in Europe and
America has had to say that we are on a far lower moral level than we
were before the war. Crimes of sex, crimes of violence, have been
unprecedented. Large areas of Europe are to-day in a chaos so complete
that not one man in a thousand in America even dimly imagines it, with
a break-down of all the normal, sustaining relationships and privileges
of civilized life, and with an accompanying collapse of character
unprecedented in Christendom since the days of the Black Plague. If we
are wise we will never again go down into hell expecting to come up
with spirits redeemed.

To be sure, there are many individuals of such moral stamina that they
have come out of this experience personally the better, not the worse.
There are people who would build into the fiber of their character any
experience that earth could offer them. But if we are thinking of the
moral stability and progress of mankind, surely there is nothing in the
processes of war, as we have seen them, or the results of war, as they
now lie about us, that would lead us to trust to them for help. War
takes a splendid youth willing to serve the will of God in his
generation before he falls on sleep and teaches him the skilful trick
of twisting a bayonet into the abdomen of an enemy. War takes a
loyal-spirited man who is not afraid of anything under heaven and
teaches him to drop bombs on undefended towns, to kill perchance the
baby suckled at her mother's breast. The father of one of our young
men, back from France, finding that his son, like many others, would
not talk, rebuked him for his silence. "Just one thing I will tell
you," the son answered. "One night I was on patrol in No Man's Land,
and suddenly I came face to face with a German about my own age. It
was a question of his life or mine. We fought like wild beasts. When
I came back that night I was covered from head to foot with the blood
and brains of that German. We had nothing personally against each
other. He did not want to kill me any more than I w