וישלחני אלהים לפניכם לשום לכם שארית בארץ ולהחיות לכם לפליטה גדולה

In a time of effort, suffering and grief such as this country has never before known, it is well that we should have frequent occasions for a review of the position in which we stand for a strengthening of our sinews to continue the struggle in the spirit of the high and noble resolve which induced our participation in it.

This week-end will be a solemn occasion; it will draw together the religious bodies in a rare unity of thought and action. If there be in these times any who think themselves superior to the need of intercession and prayer they are not to be envied. For these are the days in which human values are changing and the folly of human pride and the weakness of human strength are brought home to men—the old-time wisdom of the humble heart is vindicated once more. And so we take advantage of the fact that we are again upon the threshold of a New Year to ask that the blessings of our God may still be poured upon us and those who, with us, are striving to right the wrong and to make the world the [pg 004] better and purer for our fight against injustice, barbarism and slavery. We of this generation feel that we are so ordering our actions—many of us so facing death—that we may be able to say to future generations: “God hath sent me before you to prepare for you a permanence on the earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.”

The land in which we live is overshadowed, its people perplexed and exasperated by the fears and resentments of a fierce and desperate War: and we must needs strive for balance, both mental and moral, if we would not be swallowed up in the morasses of hate and vengefulness. Whilst we turn to our God for help in maintaining our just cause, which we cannot doubt is indeed His cause, we still must guard our actions and our thoughts, to prevent the blotting out of the moral issues that are at stake.

It would be a wretched perversion of conscience to require of any man, condonation of the infamous cruelties and treacheries which have disgraced our foes during the last two years. The best elements in us rise in irrepressible repugnance before such pageants of wickedness as have clothed the famous name of Wittenberg with infamy and made the story of naval warfare a continuing record of wanton crime. No man can think, without shame, of the so-called civilisation and culture which could palliate such perversions of justice as those recalled by the fate of Nurse Cavell and Captain Fryatt.

Yet there are two considerations that may help us to feel that the German people, so far from being truly [pg 005] represented by the miscreants who have organised and carried through the atrocities on land and on sea, are wantonly misled and disgraced by them.

History includes the record of similar horrors perpetrated by other nations which nevertheless are justly reckoned among the best human material. May we not hope that the crimes of Germany in the twentieth century provide no truer index to the national character than did those of revolutionary France in the eighteenth?

Psychology unites its testimony to that of History. Civilised man stands as the latest link of a long chain of advancement from aboriginal beasthood, and he retains within himself the germ of all his earlier traits, though these are increasingly suppressed and held in check by higher habitudes. Civilisation represents an elaborate system of auxiliary disciplines, designed to stifle as far as may be the brute in man and to strengthen the acquired