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GOD
clear trace of the action of God in the human order. He leaps occasionally at legends like that of the angels at Mons, or the miracles of Lourdes, which do not survive enquiry, but he is, as a rule, pained to find that the human order is precisely that in which the finger of God cannot be clearly traced. He murmurs that God works secretly, subtly, in the dim depth of the mind, that he has given men 'free will' and must respect it; that perhaps the highest from of kindness is to let a man grow strong by himself. Behind all these nervous apologies is the blank perception that the God he sees so clearly in sunsets and roses and birds of paradise cannot be definitely traced any where in the life of man. Has anything happened in this generation, anywhere on earth, in which one can plausibly trace the finger of God? Is there any event in this whole long record of man's career in which we detect it? Where is the event that we cannot satisfactorily resolve into its natural causes? It is this doubt that the war has clinched. It was not as if men did not need assistance. What an agonising record is that of our race! Hundreds and thousands of years were spent by primitive man in stumbling through the horrors of savagery toward the threshold of civilisation. Then this civilisation was so imperfect, and retained so many barbaric ideas, that pain and misery were still the lot of millions. Even to-day we gaze almost helplessly upon the wars, the diseases, the poverty, the crimes, the narrow minds and stunted natures which darken our life. And God, it seems, was busy gilding the sunset or putting pretty eyes in peacock's tails.......Religious writers say hat God permitted the war on account of sin. The motive matters little. Such 'permission' is still vindictive punishment of the crudest order. What would you think
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