ttp://www.gutenberg.net/etext02/nicbt10.zip

Chapter I
The Foreboding

1

What man may lay bare the soul of England as it was stirred during
those days of July when suddenly, without any previous warning, loud
enough to reach the ears of the mass of people, there came the
menace of a great, bloody war, threatening all that had seemed so
safe and so certain in our daily life? England suffered in those
summer days a shock which thrilled to its heart and brain with an
enormous emotion such as a man who has been careless of truth
and virtue experiences at a "Revivalist" meeting or at a Catholic
mission when some passionate preacher breaks the hard crust of his
carelessness and convinces him that death and the judgment are
very near, and that all the rottenness of his being will be tested in the
furnace of a spiritual agony. He goes back to his home feeling a
changed man in a changed world. The very ticking of the clock on the
mantelpiece of his sitting-room speaks to him with a portentous,
voice, like the thunder-strokes of fate. Death is coming closer to him
at every tick. His little home, his household goods, the daily routine of
his toil for the worldly rewards of life, his paltry jealousies of
next-door neighbours are dwarfed to insignificance. They no
longer matter, for the judgment of God is at hand. The smugness
of his self-complacency, his life-long hypocrisy in the shirking of
truth, are broken up. He feels naked, and afraid, clinging only to
the hope that he may yet have time to build up a new character,
to acquire new spiritual strength, and to do some of the things he
has left undone--if only he had his time over again!--before the
enemy comes to grips with him in a final bout.

That, with less simplicity and self-consciousness, was the spirit of
England in those few swift days which followed the Austrian ultimatum
to Serbia, and Germany's challenge to France and Russia. At least in
some such way one might express the mentality of the governing,
official, political, and so-called intellectual classes of the nation who
could read between the lines of diplomatic dispatches, and saw,
clearly enough, the shadow of Death creeping across the fields of
Europe and heard the muffled beating of his drum.

Some of our public men and politicians must have spent tortured
days and nights in those last days of July. They, too, like the sinner at
the mission service, must have seen the judgment of God
appr