this ought not to be, we do know, and here, in God's name, it shall
not stay.'

We repeat it: war, in some shape or other, is the normal condition
of the world. It is a fearful fact: but we shall not abolish it by
ignoring it, and ignoring by the same method the teaching of our
Bibles. Not in mere metaphor does the gospel of Love describe the
life of the individual good man as a perpetual warfare. Not in mere
metaphor does the apostle of Love see in his visions of the world's
future no Arcadian shepherd paradises, not even a perfect
civilisation, but an eternal war in heaven, wrath and woe, plague and
earthquake; and amid the everlasting storm, the voices of the saints
beneath the altar crying, 'Lord, how long?' Shall we pretend to have
more tender hearts than the old man of Ephesus, whose dying sermon,
so old legends say, was nought but--'Little children, love one
another'; and who yet could denounce the liar and the hater and the
covetous man, and proclaim the vengeance of God against all
evildoers, with all the fierceness of an Isaiah? It was enough for
him--let it be enough for us--that he should see, above the thunder-
cloud, and the rain of blood, and the scorpion swarm, and the great
angel calling all the fowl of heaven to the supper of the great God,
that they might eat the flesh of kings and valiant men, a city of God
eternal in the heavens, and yet eternally descending among men; a
perfect order, justice, love, and peace, becoming actual more and
more in every age, through all the fearful training needful for a
fallen race.

Let that be enough for us: but do not let us fancy that what is true
of the two extremes must not needs be true of the mean also; that
while the life of the individual and of the universe is one of