THE MASTER WORD.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 12483, 23 November 1918, Page 6

THE MASTER WORD.

NOT PEACE BUT RIGHTEOUSNESS. THE DREAM OP 'WORLD CONQUEST. Dr Norman Maclean mft.de the following prophetic utterance in the “Scotsman ” in August last;— 11 There are sometimes heard voices summoning the nation to repent of tlio fact that we are at war. These are. however, the voices of false prophets who do not see deep enough to realise that peace requires mure frequently to bo repented of than even war. Twenty years ago the Armenians were foully massacred, but we kept the peace. That peace calls lor a repentance deeper than any war. In clays of ease and prosper! ty the nation made an idol 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 were smilingly sharpening their swords. “The prophet of peace forgot that the master word in tho 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 aud stagnant pool. “ To keep the peace when tho innocent are being massacred by brute force, when the weak are overwhelmed by greed and lust, that is damnation. “ In the centuries to come, when men will compute the greatest Christian deeds over enacted by nations in their' corporate capacity, they will doubtless place two in tho foremost—tho freeing of the world’s slaves and tho taking of tho foremost place in the battlefrout of tho war by Britain in the defence of the right. “The pacifists forgot that there are wild beasts yet loose in the world. Tho shepherd leads the flocks to the green pastures, a man of peace; but when the wolves come ho must seize his weapons and fight. Let Heaven be praised that in these last years we hare proved ourselves shepherds and not hirelings. Today, the wolves snarl ns does tho pack, despoiled of its prey, turning to its lair, THE LAST OF MANY. “If anything bo certain, it is this, that tho world-devastating war sprang from tho lust of world dominion. There is no thought more encouraging to-day than the thought how the dream of '■ world conquest lias always ended in I misery. The Kaiser is only the last of I many. Three hundred years before tho I Christian era Alexander tho Great swept through the ancient world like a tornado, but at the age of thirty-two he died at Bagdad, and his opalescent dream of world-dominion burst like a bubble. Home built up a world empire so great that Cicero could write: ‘ Wherever you are, remember vou aro equally within tho power of the Emperor ’ 5 but the men who wielded that sceptre 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/ lie declared when he set forth on the Russian campaign. ‘ ... In throe years wo 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 gag whence that dream springs. The American Ambassador, Mr Gerard, has recorded how the last of the Hohenzollerns said, ' Alexander, Ocsnr, Theodoric, Frederick, and Napoleon aimed at world-dominion: 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 uot 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 ol such ,a burden. Only colossal egotism can dream mudi ir dream, and v hen sjv:-

cgss seems within the grasp the egotism develops into mania. “Those would-be conquerors of the world all go the same way. Alexander, convinced that no mere man could win sucli victories, proclaimed liimself a god, and kills his friend for doubting bis divinity. Napoleon walks at last among men as if he were a god. ‘You say man proposes and God disposes! 1 propose and I dispose,’ declared the Corsican. The Kaiser has gone the same road. ‘On mo tho spirit of God descended,’ he declared; ‘ I am' His weapon, His sword, His vice-regent. ■Woo to tho disobedient. Heath 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 ho might gratify his nogaInmania; in four years the Kaiser has slain twenty millions. But tho fruit ot that is isolation at last in the midst ot a horrified world. Napoleon found himself in the end without a friend; and the Kaiser has set the world ablaze against him. The end is inevitable- The mesmerised awake, and then coraeth judgment. The sword of the Divine judgment is to-day suspended over Potsdam. The executioners of that judgment will he the people whom ho made the writhing tools and suffering vretims to his colossal and mad ambition.

THANKSGIVING DAY. “In tho after years there will doubtless bo a Thanksgiving Day, in which the nations will recall their deliverance from the last effort to enslave them. The source of the thankfulness will bo the memory of the awful fate from which the world has been saved. To this end the memory must be kept fresh of the crimes and barbarities wherewith the Germans have horrified humanity. Doubtless some will’ say: forget them, tho church is not tho place to recall them. But the church ie the place to remember them, for tho fluty 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 Houses of God churned into the tortured earth; tho martyred nations in which no child is left alive; the million Armenians massacred; the women and children perishing on tho high seas; tho war waged not on to-day alone, hut on tho centuries of piety and faith. HIS PLACE IN THE SUN. “ The Kaiser demanded a place in the sun. The nations must see that ho 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 be saved from another overflow of the same diabolic laws'. That 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.

i “Four years ago the eighty thousand from Mons to the Marne gathered to their breast the Prussian spears, and, dying, saved the world. Europe. Asia and 1 Africa have drunk deep of the blood of the sous of freedom. They are not dead. From their sacrifice will como the salvation 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. " Tlie _ horizon is aglow with the herald signs of victory. The men of Mons and Gallipoli head tho van of the conquering hosts, unseen. To-mor-row the free-born sons of tho Empire will _ solemnly vow to keep faith with their fallen sons and comrades unto the end. And that end will be the j fall and min of tho last of tnc | Capfiaw,” I