“I agree,” said George Speke. “The other day, Bellman, the air minister, told me it is quite within the bounds of possibility to drop a poison from the clouds that will exterminate whole cities.”
“Which merely goes to prove what I have always contended,” said the hostess. “Sooner or later all nations will be forced into an agreement for the abolition of war.”
“My dear Lady Jane,” said the vicar, shaking a mournful head, “such a contingency is against all experience. It is not to be thought of unless a fundamental change takes place in the heart of man.”
“A change must take place,” said Lady Jane, “if the human race is to go on. Besides, doesn’t the Bible tell us that there will be a second coming of Christ, and that all wars will cease?”
“It does,” said the vicar; “but that is the millennium, you know. And I am bound to say there’s no sign of it at present. I am convinced that only one thing now can save the human race and that is a second advent. Only that can bridge the chasm which has opened in the life of the nations.”
“In the meantime,” said George Speke, “the watchers scan the heavens in vain. The miserable, childish futility of our present phase of evolution! So many little groups of brown grubs slaving night and day to make human life a worse hell than nature has made of it already. People talk of the exhilaration of war. Good God! they can’t have seen it. They can’t have seen colonies of organized hatreds, profaning all art and all science, poisoning the very air God gave us to breathe. It makes one loathe one’s species. We are little, hideous, two-legged ants, flying around in foul contraptions of our own invention. And to what end? Simply to destroy.”
“In order to recreate,” said the vicar robustly.
“I don’t believe it. The pendulum of progress—blessed word!—has swung too far. Unless we can contrive a means of holding back the clock, the doom of the world is upon us.”
“It all comes of denying God, of banishing him from the planet,” said the host.
“But is he banished from the planet? Take a man like Gervase Brandon. Life gave him everything. No man had a greater love of peace, yet when the call came he threw to the wind all his most cherished convictions, went to the war in the knightly spirit of a crusader, and for the rest of his days on earth is condemned to a state of existence from which death is a merciful release.”