which good will and mutual coöperation shall take the place of suspicion and competitive struggle. We need not be blind to whatever motives of self-interest may have entered into the action of this or that one of our Allies in undertaking the war. The outstanding fact remains that while the German Government appeals to the self-assertion of the German State and seeks its aggrandizement through force at the expense of its neighbors, the allied governments appeal to national self-sacrifice for the sake of international redemption. It is to this appeal on behalf of the rights, the freedom, the happiness of mankind, that our soldiers respond; for humanity, not for national gain, that our peoples are prepared to give and to suffer. This hope takes concrete form in the word Democracy, and in the idea of a League or Federation of free, democratic nations, bound together for the defense of human rights, for coöperation in all that concerns human welfare and progress, and the repression of every attack upon the peace of the world. So viewed the war becomes definitely a war to end war, and as such it is engaged in and supported by peace-loving peoples, against the nation that glorifies war and would perpetuate it.

Is this great hope Christian? Is Christianity the religion which a hope so high and so difficult needs if it is to keep its height amid the many influences that tend to lower it, and if it is to prove possible and become actual in spite of powerful forces that work against it? It is not self-evident that Christianity will prove equal to this which is clearly the greatest task that the present imposes upon it. There are many who doubt its adequacy; many who see that it has brought division and warfare, and think it unfitted to create unity; many who see that it has withdrawn from the world, and think it unadapted to provide the moral principles and spiritual energies of the new social and political world-order. It is for us who believe in the sufficiency of Christ to prove that he alone provides those religious and moral principles and forces without which no democracy, still less any federation of democracies, can stand.

The ideal of human brotherhood which the war has revealed as the deepest desire and faith of men and has put before us as a goal that we must now set out to reach is of course old in its beginnings, and for a generation it has been taking ever stronger hold on the minds of men. Prophetic utterances of this ideal could be quoted in abundance. A striking example is a saying of Alexander Dumas in 1893: "I believe our world is about to begin to realize the words 'Love one another,' without, however, being concerned whether a man or a God uttered them.... Mankind, which does nothing moderately, is about to be seized with a frenzy, a madness, of love." And Tolstoy's comment on this at the time of the Russian revolution, in 1905: "I believe that this thought, however strange the expression, 'seized with a frenzy of love,' may seem, is perfectly true and is felt more or less clearly by all men of our day. A time must come when love, which forms the fundamental essence of the soul, will take the place natural to it in the life of mankind, and will become the chief basis of the relations between man and man. That time is coming; it is at hand."

The world war seems like a violent contradiction of the truth of such prophecies. It seems for the time to have made love inadequate as a summing up of morals and religion. We almost feel that the Sermon on the Mount must be kept in reserve for other times. The war has made love itself a hope. We renounce it for a time that we may resist a power that threatens to destroy it altogether and put selfishness and cruelty on the throne of the world. But the war has not in fact disproved the faith that God is love and that love is the supreme law and power among men. It has made mankind more conscious of its ideal of community and fellowship, and seems to be carrying us faster toward the realization of human brotherhood than peace and prosperity were doing. The greatest and most widely approved sentences of President Wilson's war papers are those that give expression to "what the thinking peoples of the world desire, with their longing hope for justice and for social freedom and opportunity." On the anniversary of our entering the war, Gilbert Murray declared that England needed our help in battle, but even more in upholding their true faith. "Americans instinctively believe ... in freedom, peace, democracy, arbitration, and international good will.... When the war is over there will be a world to rebuild, and the only principles on which to rebuild it are these principles." Germany denies the truth of these principles, but in doing so it denies human nature and derives from physical nature a state-ethics of struggle and the survival of the strong. It denies the prophet of Galilee, and looks for its example to Rome. Sometimes it has seemed as if the German denial of humanity and affirmation of material and brute force were in danger of justifying itself by the only test they admit, that of physical success. Where can we look for help toward a living faith in liberty and brotherhood over against the powerful demonstration we are offered of faith in material force and in the progress of nations through aggression and tyranny? We must look no doubt first of all to our own souls and oppose to the faith in physical and animal nature a faith in human nature and in the truth of its best instincts and ideals; and then to those who know best and most worthily express the human soul and the reality of its spiritual possessions. Not from the Bible alone, and not only from Christ are such reassuring testimonies to be gained; and we are not renouncing the unique value of the Christian religion when we find that the faith and hope which it teaches are the faith and the hope of the universal heart of man.

The poet laureate of England made his special contribution to his nation's needs in time of war in the anthology, "The Spirit of Man." "Our country," he says, "is called of God to stand for the truth of man's hope." "Truly it is the hope of man's great desire, the desire for brotherhood and universal peace to men of good will, that is at stake in this struggle." From the miseries and slaughter and hate of war, "we can turn," he says, "to seek comfort only in the quiet confidence of our souls; and we look instinctively to the seers and poets of mankind, whose sayings are the oracles and prophecies of loveliness and loving kindness." They help us gain the conviction our time most needs, "that spirituality is the basis and foundation of human life," that "man is a spiritual being, and the proper work of his mind is to interpret the world according to his higher nature, and to conquer the material aspects of the world so as to bring them into submission to the spirit."

But the Bible also is a witness to just these convictions and contains prophecies of just such hopes. Bridges includes very few citations from the Bible, chiefly because it is so well known, but also because "this familiarity implies deep-rooted associations, which would be likely to distort the context." Alas, for these associations, for the interpretations that confuse and the prejudices that blind the readers of the greatest literature of spirituality and of hope which the world contains. In spite of this, the Bible will be looked to by multitudes for guidance and support in those hopes on which the future turns, while the poet's fine work will be prized by few. It is only too possible to fail to find in the Bible its testimony to that "hope of man's great desire of brotherhood and peace" which constitutes the most living religion of our time; and this failure will mean loss to the hope itself of its most powerful support, and loss to the Christian religion of contact and sympathy with the most urgent spiritual need and aspiration of men today.

The Bible does contain various and contradictory hopes, and can encourage expectations that are not in accordance with the best conscience of our age, nor with