By Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States
The conviction that great spiritual forces will assert themselves at the end of the European war to enlighten the judgment and steady the spirits of mankind was expressed by President Wilson in an address of welcome delivered at the Maryland annual conference of the Methodist Protestant Church at Washington on April 8, 1915. The text of his address appears below.
These are days of great perplexity, when a great cloud of trouble hangs and broods over the greater part of the world. It seems as if great, blind, material forces had been released which had for long been held in leash and restraint. And yet underneath that you can see the strong impulses of great ideals.
It would be impossible for men to go through what men are going through on the battlefields of Europe and struggle through the present dark night of their terrible struggle if it were not that they saw, or thought that they saw, the broadening of light where the morning should come up and believed that they were standing each on his side of the contest for some eternal principle for right.
Then all about them, all about us, there sits the silent, waiting tribunal which is going to utter the ultimate judgment upon this struggle, the great tribunal of the opinion of the world; and I fancy I see, I hope that I see, I pray that it may be that I do truly see, great spiritual forces lying waiting for the outcome of this thing to assert themselves, and are asserting themselves even now to enlighten our judgment and steady our spirits.
No man is wise enough to pronounce judgment, but we can all hold our spirits in readiness to accept the truth when it dawns on us and is revealed to us in the outcome of this titanic struggle.
It is of infinite benefit that in assemblages like this and in every sort of assemblage we should constantly go back to the sources of our moral inspiration and question ourselves as to what principle it is that we are acting on. Whither are we bound? What do we wish to see triumph? And if we wish to see certain things triumph, why do we wish to see them triumph? What is there in them that is for the lasting benefit of mankind?
For we are not in this world to amuse ourselves with its affairs. We are here to push the whole sluggish mass forward in some particular direction, and unless you know the direction in which you want to go your force is of no avail. Do you love righteousness? is what each one of us ought to ask himself. And if you love righteousness are you ready to translate righteousness into action and be ashamed and afraid before no man?
It seems to me, therefore, that it is worth suggesting to you that you are not sitting here merely to transact the business and express the ideals of a great church as represented in the State of Maryland, but you are here also as part of the assize of humanity, to remind yourselves of the things that are permanent and eternal, which if we do not translate into action we have failed in the fundamental things of our lives.
You will see that it is only in such general terms that one can speak in the midst of a confused world, because, as I have already said, no man has the key to this confusion. No man can see the outcome, but every man can keep his own spirit prepared to contribute to the net result when the outcome displays itself.