THE MASTER WORD.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XII, Issue 1155, 31 December 1918, Page 6

THE MASTER WORD.

NOT PEACE BUT RIGHTEOUSNESS. THE DREAM OF WORLDCONQUEST. Dr. Norman Maclean made the following prophetic utterance in the Scotsman in August last:— "There are sometimes heard voices summoning the nations to repent of the fact that we are at war. These are, however j the voices of false prophets, wo do not see deep enough to realise that peace requires more frequently to be repented of than even war. Twenty years ago the Armenians were foully massacred, but we kept the peace. That peace calls for a repentance deeper far than any war- In days of ease and prosperity the nation made an ideal of peace" There were peace societies carrying on a ceaseless propaganda, and* Peace Sundays and Peace Congresses; but while our enemies spoke continuously of peace in public, in secret they wore smilingly sharpening their swords. "The prophets of peace forgot that the master word in the ethical vocabulary of humanity is not peace, but righteousness. Peace is only the byproduct of righteousness; and _ the peace that has not its roots in righteousness is only the scum on the surface of the foul and stagnant pool. "To keep the peace when the innocents are being massacred by brute force, when the wealc are overwhelmed by greed and lust, that is damnation. "In the centuries to come, when men will compute the greatest Christian deeds ever enacted by nations in their corporate capacity, they will doubtless place two in the foremost—the freeing of the world's slaves, and the taking of the foremost place in the battle front of this war by Britain in the defence of the right. "The pacifists forget that there are wild beasts yet loose in the world. The shepherd leads the flocks to the green pastures, a man of peace; but when the wolves come he must seize his weapons and fight. Let heaven be praised that in these last yenrs we have, proved ourselves shepherds, and not hirelings. To-day the wolves snarl, as does the pack, despoiled of its prey, turning to its lair.

THE LAST OF MANY. "If anything be certain, it is this, that the world-devastating war sprang from the lust of world-dominion. There is no thought more encouraging to-day than the thought how the dream of world-conquest has always ended in misery. The Kaiser is only the last of many. Three hundred years before the Christian era Alexander the Great swept through the ancient world like a tornado, but at the age of 32 he died at Bagdad, and his opalescent dream of world-dominion burst like a bubble. Rome built up a world empire so great that Cicero could write: ' Wherever you are, remember you are equally within the power of the Emperor '; but the men who wielded thatsceptre came almost all to a violent end, and the Empire fell tottering to the earth.

"Napoleon dominated the world with the dynamic force of his personality, making- emperors and kings the servants of his will. 'We are going to make an end of Europe,' he declared when he set forth on the Russian campaign. . . 'ln three years we shall be masters of the universe.' But the would-be master of the universe left his armies frozen on the Russian plains, and St. Helena was waiting for him even as he spoke. "The Kaiser is the last victim of the intoxicating gas whence that dream springs. The American Ambassador, Mr Gerard, has recorded how the last or the Hohenzollens said, 'Alexander, Caesar, Theodoric, Frederick and Napoleon aimed at world domination; they failed, I shall succeed.' But the same unseen powers that brought his predecessors to ruin will doom him also."

HOW JUDGMENT IS WROUGHT. "It is not by cataclysmic acts that judgment is wrought, but by the regular working of the normal laws that govern life. The ambition of worldconquest is doomed because no human personality is equal to the strain of such a burden. Only colossal egotism can dream such a dream, and when success seems within the grasp the egot-ism develops into mania. ' ''These would-be consequences of the world all go the same way. • Alexander, convinced that no mere man could win such victories, proclaims himself a god, and kills his friend for doubting his divinity. Napoleon walks at last among men as if he were a god. 'You say man proposes and God disposes"! I propose and I dispose,' declared the Corsioan. The Kaiser has gone the same road. c On me the Spirit of God descended,' he declared. ' I am His weapon. His sword. His vice-re-gent. Woe to the disobedient. Deaths to cowards and unbelievers.' On the altar of this mad vanity judgment and wisdom are sacrificed. To achieve the end humanity is slain in hecatombs. "In eleven years Napoleon slew four millions of the youth and manhood of Europe that he might gratify his negalomania; in four years the Kaiser has slain 20 millions. But the fruit of that is isolation at last in the midst of a horrified world. Napoleon found himself in the end without a friend; and the Kaiser has set the world abla/.e against him. The end is inevitable. The mesmerised awake, and then cometh judgment. The sword of Divine judgment is to-dav suspended over Potsdam. The executioners of that judgment will be the people whom he made the writhing tools and suffering victims to his colossal and mad ambition. •

THANKSGIVING DAY. "In the after yenrs there will doubtless be a Thanksgiving Day, in which the nations will recall their deliverance from the last effort to enslave them. The source of the thankfulness will be the memory of the awful fate from which the world has been saved. To this end the memory must bo kept fresh of the crimes and barbarities wherewith the Germans have horrified humanity. Doubtless some will say. forget them, the church is not the place to recall them. "Rut the church is the place to remember them, for the duty of the church is to convince the world of iniquity. "This is the measure of all iniquity —the poison gas that damned for ever the chivalry of war; the house of God churned into the tortured earth; the martyred nations in which ns child is left alive; the million Armenians massacred; the women and children perishing 011 the high seas; the war waged not on to-dav alone, but -on the centuries of piety and faith.

TITS PLACE TN THE SUN. "The Kaiser demanded a place in the sun. The nations must see that he gets it—that every crime and every murder that have made men ashamed of their

humanity shall have a place in the sun, illumined by the rays of noonday. "It is not by paper treaties that the world is to lie saved from another overflow of the same diabolic lava. Their deliverance can only come by the wrath that worketh judgment and by the change of heart that judgment brings. It is only by remembering the pit of hell they have escaped that the nations will steel their souls to be the ministers of judgment. We have escaped a fate that is appalling to contemplate. That we have escaped it we owe to the heroic hearts of our sailors and soldiers. Through the watch and ward of our seamen no enemy boatload have landed on these shores save as prisoners. Four years ago the eighty thousand from Mons to the Marne gathered to their breast the Prussian spears, and. and Africa have drunk deep of the blood of the sons of freedom. Thoy are not dead. From their sacrifice will come the sacrifice of the world. The men of the British breed—Americans, Canadians, Australians, Scots, English, whatever their name—have died joyously, counting not their lives dear to' them. They died not in vain. "The horizon is aglow with the herald sijafis of victory. The men of Mons and Gallipoli head the van of tho conquering hosts, unseen. To.morrow the. free-born sons of the Empire will solemnly vow to keep faith with their fallen sons and comrades unto the end. And that end will be the fall and ruin of the last of the Caesars."