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The majority of our men were clean-living and clean hearted fellows who struggled to come unscathed in soul from most of the horrors of war. They resisted the education of brutality and were not envenomed by the gospel of hate. Out of the dark depths of their experience they looked up to the light, and had visions of some better law of life than that which led to the world-tragedy.
A secret but resolute intention was forming in all minds to immolate those who had played any part in politics before and during the important world-tragedy which was then being enacted, especially such as continued to hold portfolios, or persisted in asking questions in the House of Commons, as it was then called.
An accursèd city, priest-ridden and pauperized, with cripples dragging about its shrines and lepers burrowing at the Zion gate; but a city infinitely pathetic, infinitely romantic withal, a centre through which pass all the great threads of history, ancient and mediæval, and now at last quivering with the telegraphic thread of the modern, yet only the more charged with the pathos of the past and the tears of things; symbol not only of the tragedy of the Christ, but of the tragedy of his people, nay of the great world-tragedy.
After this world-tragedy let us hope nations may have a little sense, less of that ghastly provincialism whence this war sprang; that no nation may teach in its schools that it is God's own people, entitled to hack through, without consideration of others; that professors may be no longer blind to all sense of proportion; Emperors things of the past; diplomacy open and responsible; a real Court of Nations at work; Military Chiefs unable to stampede a situation; journalists obliged to sign their names and held accountable for inflammatory writings.
"A good time!"... God!... Did people think it was amusing to be an onlooker of world-tragedy?... One of them remembered a lady of France with a small boy who had fled from Charleville, which was in flames and smoke. She was weak with hunger, with dirty and bedraggled skirts on her flight, and she had heard that her husband was in the battle that was now being fought round their own town.
Yet the Catholic Church, certain of its faith, and all other churches claiming that they teach the gospel of Christ, have been challenged to explain their attitude during the war and the relation of their teaching to the world-tragedy, the Great Crime, which has happened. It will not be easy for them to do so.
At that very hour a world-tragedy was being enacted over the dark and turbulent ocean, and the immensest of Empires was sinking into the sea. Darkly, quietly, with no mighty and multitudinous tumult of man.
But from the Christian point of view the complacency with which the world-tragedy is put down as a "purifying, cleansing draught" is somewhat disconcerting.
"Yes. I would rather be the central figure of a world-tragedy than die without having felt to the uttermost, even if it were sorrow. My whole nature revolts against the idea of being able to feel little or nothing really. It seems to me that when we begin to feel acutely we begin to grow, like the palm tree rising towards the African sun."
Two sayings, however, will be remembered long after many of her contemporaries are forgotten: Laugh and the world laughs with you, Weep, and you weep alone. Furthermore, in these days of world-tragedy, we all owe her a debt of gratitude for being the author of the phrase written many years ago: No question is ever settled Until it is settled right.
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