One would be indeed presumptuous to predict the effect of this war upon foreign missionary operations. Indeed, to report fully the present effect of this world war upon the work of the various foreign missionary societies of the world is an impossible task. Missionary leaders are, however, attempting to estimate the significance of the present bearing of war conditions, while few would be so bold as to suggest even what the future may be.

Whatever the outcome of the war, it has already rendered the world an immense service in defining with unexampled clearness and on a hitherto unmatched scale an ethical issue of the profoundest and most far-reaching significance. I do not mean the old issue raised by every war since the time of Christ—whether war is ever right and to engage in it ever Christian. That question is largely academic and in existing circumstances of altogether minor importance. In a situation like the present, Christian men as well as other men will fight, and fight with a good conscience, whatever may be said as to the abstract right or wrong of war, or as to its consonance with Christian principles. It would be easy to show that to identify Christianity with pacifism, as many devout and eager Christians are doing, is profoundly to misinterpret it and to lose sight altogether of its great controlling principles. But I am concerned this morning with another matter altogether—the fundamental moral issue raised by this particular war and Christianity's relation to that issue. I refer—to put it in a single phrase—to the issue between autocracy and democracy.

When the momentous news of an armistice in the world-war stirred vociferous multitudes to turbulent rejoicing, they were thrilled by the one overwhelming thought that peace at last had come. The war was at an end, and it must be the last of wars. A huge wave of grateful surprise surged up from the common level of national life and broke into a foam of high emotion. The thought of millions flashed across the sea by the wireless telegraphy of the spirit to those who on land and water and in the air had borne the part of America in the great adventure; and this message of thanksgiving could find no better words than the ancient Beatitude: “Blessed are the Peace-Makers, for they shall be called the children of God.”

“In evil times men turn their minds more anxiously to religion.” Thus wrote that hearty atheist, Lucretius, amidst the alarums of those far-off, uneasy, Roman days. Equally true is the saying of the still more desperate years through which the world has lately been passing. Even before the torrent of war broke, in the confused and restless prelude of the opening century, many hands were outstretched, many hearts yearning for a new vision of God. For God, or for something to take His place, something to give an ultimate meaning to life, an ideal dimension, an underglow of purpose and a deep tide of peace—

“Round our restlessness His rest.”

“I have never had any contemporaries,” said Lord Acton toward the close of his life; and, in the main, he was right. His broad cosmopolitanism made him impatient of English insularity. His belief in the necessity of freedom of conscience alienated him, in spirit if not in form, from the church of his birth. His insistence upon the absolute validity of the moral law as the final measure of all things isolated him in the midst of a century which seemed largely to have concluded that morality and success are synonymous. Certain it is that his own age did not estimate him over highly. At his death in 1902 there were not a few who asserted that for all his depth of erudition, Acton had contributed nothing to the sum of human knowledge. He had been an omnivorous reader and possessed a greater knowledge of the sources of modern history than any other man of his day. Yet all this store of learning had been of no avail to the world, for Acton had written nothing. At his death, a lecture in English, a letter in German, were all that represented Acton on the shelves of the library of his own university, Cambridge. Even today, after his lectures, his letters, and his periodical writings have been collected and edited, his output remains small: two volumes of lectures, three of letters, two of historical essays contributed to the reviews of his time. Yet in spite of the scantiness of his written work, Acton must be numbered among the great historians of the last century.