giving service laying down their lives for peoples across the sea whom most of us have never seen, whose very language most of us cannot understand. The cross, which a few years ago was seen only on the breasts of a few ecclesiastics or on the spires of some of our churches, is now accepted as a symbol of their faith by twenty-three million members of the Red Cross who have the right to this symbol, and most of whom are wearing it on their persons or displaying it in their windows. Every man who wears this cross wears the symbol of a universal priesthood; every home adorned by it carries the symbol of Christ's Universal Church. The spirit of love, service, and sacrifice has burst through all barriers of creed and church, and is found to-day in the hearts and lives of Catholics and Protestants, Christians and Jews, believers and agnostics.

And this is more than self-sacrifice; it is sacrificial service. We are learning by experience what it is to suffer for the sins of the world, what it is for the innocent to suffer with and for the guilty, and how suffering redeems, saves, delivers. When a nation which has been poisoned by a century of pernicious teaching makes war upon civilization, civilization is doomed unless there are men and women willing to give up all they hold dear

property, home, husband, wife, children, life itself in brave battle against sins which they have never committed, for which they are not responsible, which they have done nothing to promote. Europe could not have been saved from a revival of Roman despotism, pagan alike in its philosophy and its spirit, if there had not been in Belgium, in France, in Great Britain, in Italy, in Russia, and in America men who were willing to suffer and to die for their faith in liberty. It is because there were no such sacrificial lovers of liberty in Germany that Germany has been given over to the spirit of autocracy. It is because there were such sacrificial lovers of liberty in Russia that Russia has been set free from the old autocracy.

Thus we are learning the meaning of Christianity, both as a theology and as a spirit.

As a theology, Christianity is the doctrine that there is a real battle in the universe between good and evil, the extent and full meaning of which we need not and cannot know, but in which we must bear a part whether we will or not; and that there is One greater than we think, our Companion in the great campaign, who voluntarily shares with us in all the pains and perils of the battlefield. As a spirit, Christianity is reverence for our Great Companion, not because he is the Almighty,

or the All-wise, but because he is our Leader in the sacrificial service.

We cannot revere in God what we despise in our fellow-men, and in our fellow-men we despise the power and the wisdom which are used in the service of self. The greater the power and wisdom, the greater is our contempt for its mean and selfish possessor. We cannot refuse our reverence to the autocratic emperor of Germany and give it to God if we think of him as an Almighty King governing only by his power, or if we think of Him as without emotions and living in eternal serenity looking upon the struggles of mankind with placid indifference; and we cannot give our reverence to the exiled king of Belgium laying down his life for his country and refuse our reverence to the Galilean who has laid down his life for the whole world, nor can we give our reverence to the fathers and mothers who have given their sons for the salvation of a foreign people and refuse it to the All-Father who so loved the world that he gave for it his only begotten Son.

Little children are sometimes great teachers because they naïvely express the feeling which they have not learned from their ill-instructed elders to repress. When the French children knelt in the streets of Paris as the American troops passed through that city,

they revered, not our wealth, nor our shrewdness, nor our power, but our sacrificial service; and taught us what in our kneeling ought to inspire our revering. This is the reason why Christendom, in spite of much semipagan teaching from our pulpits, reverences, not an enthroned Allah in the heavens, but a thorn-crowned Christ upon the earth, not a Buddha without passions, purposes or desires, but a human God, a man of sorrows and familiar with grief. Christians find Him on the battlefield a leader in its great campaign, sharing with them in the sacrificial service. And this experience is giving a new and deeper meaning to the declaration of the unknown writer of the book of Hebrews, "Without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin," and a broader and more universal meaning to the declaration of Paul, "I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and fill up on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ."

SIXTH LETTER

THE REPUBLIC OF GOD'

You say that you fear you have not put your question very clearly, that it is not very clear in your own mind. I think, however, that I understand it. Let me state it in my own words.

You are satisfied that this is a just war; that France had a right and duty of self-defense; that Belgium had a right and duty to maintain her neutrality on which France had depended for protection; that England had a right and a duty to come to the defense of Belgium whose neutrality she had guaranteed. But what had Italy to do with the war? What had we to do with it? How is it our war? Have we not problems enough of our own without taking upon ourselves the problems of other lands? Are we not in danger of forgetting the beam in our own eye in our excitement over what is more than a mote in our neighbor's eye? The President has said that the object of this war is to make the world safe for democracy. Are we so sure that democracy is the best form of govern