IS WAR A PURGE?

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2340, 23 December 1914, Page 5

IS WAR A PURGE?

Canon Scott, in a sermon preached In Oxford, said:—"We talk very freely of war purging and purifying people; and so it may, and so, pray God, it is doing now. But let us remember that; it may not.- It is no mechanical certainty that a people will come out the better for it. Sometimes one is inclined to ask whether this' purging does not come more often by way of defeat than victory. Franco was surely'purg, od by 1870, but was Germany? Do not its best friends traco the moral evil which they now deplore to that war of overpowering glory? Was-it not then that wo began to miss in tho Germans the traditional simplicity and goodness and piety whieh ;we :had always loved in him? 'Let.'it's remember for our continual warning that England never touched a lower moral spiritual level than in tho years in which she emerged from tho long war with Napoleon. Sho came out of that war not so much purged as coarscned. It' was a tirno in which hor politics were harsh and selfish and tyrannical. Sho reduced her industrial poor to sheer savagery. She crushed women and children under the prcssuro of hor commercial greed. It was a time in which religion nad almost died out of tho land. Tho Church was at 'its vety worst. Gambling; - corruption, and drink ato deep into tho life of the upper classes So we emerged from that war. These are years that.we are loath to recall.'^