When was better justified the terrible but beautiful imagery in Milton’s poem of The Nativity, when he says of Nature:
“Only with speeches fair
She woos the gentle air
To hide her guilty front with innocent snow,
And on her naked shame
Pollute with sinful blame
The saintly veil of maiden white to throw;
Confounded that her Maker’s eyes
Should look so near upon her foul deformities.”
The snow cannot hide the horrors of the present conflict. Even night, in other wars more merciful, no longer throws its sable mantle of mercy over the dying and the dead. By the use of powerful searchlights the work of destruction continues. As though the surface of the earth were no longer sufficient for this malignant exercise of the genius of man, the heavens above and the waters under the earth have become at length the battlefields of the nations. Even from the infinite azure falls
“....a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies, grappling in the
central blue.”
Can all history afford a parallel in malignity to the submarine, which, having sunk one vessel with all its human lives, calmly awaits, with its periscope projecting above the water like the malignant eye of a devil fish, the arrival of rescuing ships to sink them also?
Was the gracious refrain of “Peace on earth, good will among men,” merely a mockery of man’s hope, making of his civilization a mere mirage? Will
“Cæsar’s spirit ranging for revenge
With Ate from his side come hot from Hell”—
forever crucify afresh and put to an open shame the gentle Galilean?
The angelic song of Bethlehem was neither the statement of a fact nor even a prophecy. In its true translation it was the statement of a profound moral truth, upon which in the last analysis the pacification of humanity must depend. The great promise was “Peace on earth to men of good will.”