IN GRAVER MOOD.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 203, 25 August 1916, Page 3 (Supplement)

IN GRAVER MOOD.

TilE GREATEST SPIRITUAL BATTLE IN HISTORY. AND WHAT HANGS ON IT. The "Hibbert Journal" is usually givea up to the mild debates of scholars, the discussion of abstract themes remote from everyday life. Its temper, says "Life," ia academic; its atmosphere is that of the study, not of the street. But in the latest number of the "Hibbert," its editor, Mr. L. P. Jacks, writes a tremendous indictment of Germany from the moral side, and we give some extracts from what is, in many respects, the most remarkable bit of literature the month has produced. A MORAL CHALLENGE. "There "are moments familiar. 1 suppose, to most of us. when a man must say to his soul, 'Fight now, fight to the uttermost, resisting, it may be, even unto blood, »r peace shall visit thee no more.' They occur to communities, also, but at rarer intervals. They are the moments when nations and empires are put to ihe test; when they must prove, by the tenof of their response, what vocation they have in the moral order of the world, or whether they have any vocation at all. When this happens, religion uncovers its other f.ace. My thesis is that such an occasion is before our country and our Allies at the present moment. "We are in the presence of a genuine spiritual drama played cut in the soul of a nation. Only as a drama can the story be fitly told; and so one day it will be—when the dramatist arises who can handle such a theme. NAKED WICKEDNESS. "There was a considerable number of Britons—the present writer was one of them —who owed, and were never ashamed to confess, a vast intellectual debt to Germany. To all such it seemed impossible that in any final sense Germany could be the foe even of our own nation. The quarrel was on the surface. It was the fruit of an intoxication, a fit of temporary insanity; and we know, or thought we knew, enough of the better mind of Germany to feel confident s at this * ould P resent re-assert itself and right reason prevail. We remembered our German friends. For many months a feeling of unreality re&tained us. It caused us to make reservations, perhaps unspoken reservations, to the doctrine that we were wholly in the right and our enemies wholly in the wrong. THE KEY TO GERMAN CHARACTER. "Had the Germans been as subtle as some imagine .them, they would have masked their purpose, even though the wearing of the mask had put them under the necessity, so irksome to them, of fighting clean. They, would have kept good men in England incredulous, bewildered, and careless until it was too late to recover the lost ground. They would have reserved their crimes for the last act of the drama. But they did otherwise. They began in Belgium with an orgy of treachery, cruelty, and bestiality such as the modern world has never seen. Amid the plaudits of their intellectuals they shattered the monuments of a civilisation nobler than their own. They sank the 'Lusitania' and bombarded defenceless towns on the English coast, and their professors and divines said. 'Well done!' They stood by, apparently approving, while their allies, the Turks, murdered a million Armenians In cold blood. Little by little the truth was dawning upon us. Little by little; for the fact was so monstrous and incredible that repeated demonstrations left us like men struggling with a bad dream. "Then they killed Nurse Cavell. Measured by the scale of the general bloodshed and brutality, this was a little thing. But its moral significance was immense. It drove re lesson home —'the little more' that was needed to render our illumination complete. It was the key to Germany's policy of crushing the weak. It awoke our sluggish imagination. It was a summary revelation of the whole meaning of Germany's part In this war, clear as the sun in heaven, the sophistries by which it was defended only serving to put the final seal to our conviction that the work we have to resist and overthrow is, from first to last, the devil's. COULD WE REFUSE THE CHALLENGE? "We recogntse what it is that calls us to battle. It is naked evil, shorn of the trappings which disguise it with the appearance of Good. It is no longer Germany, whom it were childish to hate, but a power behind her which has made her its victim and tool; a power we do hate, and must hate so long as we continue to be men and are capable of loving its opposite. We know what we are fighting again, and we know what we are fighting for. Knowing it, we make our resolution. Our cities are turned into arsenals; our peaceful country becomes a camp; in every town and village we see the preparations and the wreckage of war—and the conscience of the nation cries out, 'So be it. and so let it be, till the work is done!' "If there is a being who, on receiving the challenge of evil, refuses to fight, that being has forgotten his nature. Not all the forces of the world are man's coadjutors or his fellows; one of them fs his opposite and enemy; and it is precisely In exercising resistance to its opposition that man comes most fully to himself. "Name it as you will, there Is a power which is not amenable to the persuasions of renson, to the influence of nob'e character or personality. Christ encountered it when He faced the tempter, when Judas betrayed Him for thirty pieces of silver, when the mob crucified Him instead of Barabbas. Xurse Cavell encountered it in the men who slew her. It exists in Nature; it enters into man, nnd there are times when it dominates his will. At the present moment it has found an exponent in the policy and deeds of the German Government, nnd all, in the reasons given by Germans both for the policy and the deeds. The Zeppelins which kill ( vir women and children are its mes- ¥> iigera ind we might as well reason vjjtli the i.ursting bomb as with the th'i* sent it. forth. j*'.' h is evil. It is that which derUffS its own nature by the terms !«vhich it challenges its opposite. It i.s an ultimatum and a bribe; a threat of destruction to them that resist and a promise cf the kingdoms of the world to them that bow down. Mingled with god it Is- often hard to recognise; but when pure and unadul-

terated no man can mistake it for anything else, for it is simply the op. posite of himself and declares itself as such. Here Is an unmistakable sample: HYMN OF THE GERMAN SWORD. "It is no duly of mine to be either Just or compassionate; it suffices that I am sanctified by my exalted mission, and that I blind the oyes of my enemies with such streams of tears as shall make the proudest of them cringe in terror under the vault of heaven. "1 have slaughtered the old and the sorrowful; I have struck off the breasts of women; and I have run through the body of children who gazed at me with the eyes of the wounded lion. "Day afer day I ride aloft on the shadowy horse in the valley of cypresses; and as I ride, I drawforth the life blood frpm every enemy's son that dares to dispute my path. ' "It Is meet and right that I should cry aloud my pride, for am r not the flaming messenger of hte Lord Almighty? "Germany is so far above and beyond the other nations that all the rest of the earth, be they who they may, should feel themselves well done by when they are allowed to fight with the dogs for the crumbs that fall from her table. "When Germany the divine Is happy, then the rest of the world basks in smiles; but when Germany suffers. God in person is rent with anguish, and, wrathful and avenging, He turns all the waters into rivers of blood." Tf that is not evil, the genuine brew of hell, then no such thing as evil exists. "When Bunyan's Pilgrim encountered Apollyon in the Valley of Humiliation he might have argued thus: 'This person looks uncommonly like the Evil One. But what if. in so naming hfm. I am merely yielding to the biassed judgment of a belligerent? It may be that, for all his black locks, my opponent is a very worthy gentleman. Obviously he so regards himself. Obviously, also, he has a very low opinion of me. What if his opinion of me is nearer the truth than mine of him? Say what you will, he ic an active, enterprising, ingenious fellow. Perhaps I shall be well advised in waiting for some blacker apparition than this before drawing my'sword.' "So Christian might have mused, if time had been given hini. But time would not have been given; for. lone: before his musings could be concluded. Apollyon would have hewn him to pieces. And Christian would have deserved his fate. THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS. "From now onwards till the work be finished nothing else really matters. At last we understand the Cause, and we know that if this is defeated. life would be intolerable. No sacrifice can be too great to avert the disaster.no period of endurance can be too long; no strain on our tenacity can be too severe. We throw everything into the scale; our wealth to the last penny; the treasures of Empire; the garnered fruits of progress: the last ounce of mental and moral energy; the loss of cur noblest and best; our own lives as a matter of course. For we are fighting against an enemy whose triumph would be the flefeafof our souls: and the vow has been vowed that he shall hot prevail. "I write with deliberation when I say that we are fighting hell. What hell has meant to the vulgar concerns us not; but all that hell has ever meant to minds conversant with the tragedy of life is represented, embodied, realised in the power that we are fighting to-day. Cruelty and treachery are ouly the superficial manifestatinos of its nature. The essence lies in the directing mind. Beginning with a doctrine which subtly confuses the distinction between right and wrong, It grows, through ever bolder perversions, into a State philosophy in which right and wrong are transposed and moral reason turned into an instrument for the advocacy and justification of crime. This is~the very Genius of the Pit; the spirit which proves every object of desire the worst to be illusion; the parent of all sophistries and lies: the archenemy cf mankind, doubly dangerous by its appeal to something intensely active in human nature everywhere, but held under restraint wherever man has learnt to know himself. Once let this spirit prevail and there is an end to the hopes of the world. LET US THANK GOD. "Let us, then, have no more complaining of our lot! Let us thank God that, since the great trial was to come, we are alive to share its actual perils and possible glories. It will be a glad thought hereafter to all of ua who survive that we were found worthy to stand in the breach —that the trial came to us arid not to our posterity. Welcome the hour which tests the manhood of this nation to the uttermost! Welcome the call to show ourselves, worthy of the great inheritance our fathers have bequeathed to us! Welcome the opportunity of proving the words we have bo often uttered, that there are things dearer than life! Welcome the summons which brings us face to face with the business for which men were created! "I can imagine nothing worse for my native Mind than another century or such a life as we were living before the war. Before the end of it we should have gone to pieces, and It would have needed no attack from without to lay our Empire in ruins. A Bhock was necessary to bring us to our senses and to seno 1 our quacks 0 the right-about. It came in a form for which we were ill prepared. It has come, and how good a thing it Is to sec so many proofs that the spirit which can answer the summons is not dead! Many ol us feared it was. But now our fears have vanished, and we see the dawning of a better day, not for ourselves alone, but for all mankind."