ty to all who are at pains to inform themselves
of the facts: they have banished for ever the presence of that--

God whose ghost in arch and aisle
Yet haunts his temple--and his tomb;
And follows in a little while
Odin and Zeus to equal doom;
A God of kindred seed and line;
Man's giant shadow hailed Divine.

And now there comes a stanza of haunting beauty, the ethic creed set to
music, a pathetic pleading, a self-abasement, in the presence of the
Immensities around us, and yet a passionate vindication of man's right
to sit in judgment on an idol-god such as this!

O streaming worlds, O crowded sky!
O life, and mine own soul's abyss,
Myself am scarce so small that I
Should bow to Deity like this!
This my Begetter? This was what
Man in his violent youth begot.

The lesson of history and comparative religion could not be more
perfectly summarised. The sovereignty of conscience could not be more
masterfully asserted. Of old we learned that man was "made in the
image of God," but now we see that the--

God of our fathers, known of old--
Lord of our far-flung battle-line--

he to whom we still raise our supplicating cry--

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget--lest we forget!--[2]

we know that he is made in the image of man. Unless a movement of
retrogression sets in; unless we have to submit to a paralysis of moral
stagnation, the day must inevitably come when the "Lord God of Hosts,"
"the Man of War," "the God of Victories," whom Spanish viceroys and
captains are incessantly invoking in their proclamations, will be swept
into oblivion with the curse of war which gave them birth. But that
hour of retrogression and decay shall never sound for humanity. A
nation here, a people there, may drop out of the ranks; the last
remnant of empire may fall from their unworthy hands, but as I have
faith in the eternal order, as I bow before the everlasting Power which
makes for moral progress, I know that war has served its purpose
amongst men, and that the day _must_ come when it will be finally
abolished as unworthy of rational beings. At any rate, the war-god is
not he in whose image the perfected man was made, for--

This was what
Man in his violent youth begot.

This god was made in the image of man.

And as the mist of the phantom deity floats aside, there dawns a fairer
vision of the veritably Divine presence on the reverent soul of the