Ourselves have been ungrateful for His mercies and blessings; Ourselves have made Self our god, and Wealth our chief aim—and so now by the Divine Law shall Our Selves be slain and our wealth taken from us. Thus the Shadow darkens the mirror of my “reflections”—for I feel with Admiral Beatty that (as he expressed it) “until religious revival takes place at home just so long will the war continue. When England can look out on the future with humbler eyes and a prayer on her lips, then we can begin to count the days towards the end!”
Then—and only then! Then the Shadow will lift and the mirror will reflect the glorious figure of Victory....
“Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden Galaxy!”
But not till then! And meanwhile the Great War must be seen in its true light—as a Punishment of Nations for their unrepented wrongs to one another!
TRIUMPH OF WOMANHOOD
(Written for the Scottish Women’s Hospital)
As a light in deep darkness she has arisen—woman, pure womanly, with all the God-given attributes of her highest nature at last acknowledged by her self-styled “lord and master,” Man! She has shaken off the trammels which for many centuries he had fastened about her—as heroic maid and mother she has roused the better spirit in him. Out of the gloom and blood and slaughter of this world war—the most wicked war that ever devastated the earth—she has radiated upon him like an angel, clothed in a glory of love and pity; and, moving by his side through the poisonous smoke of battle and the thunder of the guns, she has cheered him on his way. When wounded and fallen she has been swift to rescue him, and first to soothe. Who will, who can, ever justly estimate the saving work of women in this terrific holocaust of nations!—this mad hurtling of man against brother—man without thought for the consequences of such wholesale murder! To Woman, in her mother-love and mercy, friend and foe are alike indifferent; all that her pitying eyes see are the gaping wounds, the flowing blood, the torn and disfigured limbs—her province is to save, heal, and comfort if she can. She knows that with God there are no nations, but that all men are human beings, subject to the same sufferings, the same deaths; she knows by the teaching of Christ that not a sparrow shall fall to the ground without Our Father, and that men are of “more value than many sparrows.” So, placing herself in tenderest unison with that “quality of mercy” which
“Is not strained,