EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN
WE WHO SIT AFAR OFF
I, SKEPTIC though I am, am, like every Englishman, a mystic. I see in this war almost literally a fight between God and the Devil.… With all my soul I believe that the ideal of pity is the noblest thing we have, and that its denial which waves on every German flag is the denial of all that the greatest men have striven for for centuries. … I feel that the two enormous spirits that move this world are showing their weapons almost visibly, and that never was the garment of the living world so thin over the gods that it conceals.
"I am not much elated by the thought. I have little opinion of Providence as an ally, and I am surprised at the weakness the Kaiser shows for his pocket deity. What we have to do, in my opinion, we do ourselves, and our task is none the lighter that we defend the right. But I am hardened and set by the thing I believe. We feel that we are fighting for the life of England—yes, for the safety of France—yes, for the sanctity of treaties—yes, but behind these secondary and comparatively material issues, for something far deeper, far greater, for something so great and deep that if our efforts fail I pray God I may die before I see it."
These are words from a letter of an English physician with the British expeditionary force to an American physician who had sent him Dr. Eliot's war-book. He, in the war, disclosing how he feels about it, has described also how it seems to thousands of us who are looking on. We too are mystics in our feelings about this war. We too have, and have had almost from the first, this profound sense of a fundamental conflict between the powers of good and evil, the soul of the world at grips with its body.
And while we feel so profoundly that the Allies are on the Lord's side, a good many of us at least prefer the English doctor's small reliance on Providence as an ally to the Kaiser's proprietary confidence in the Almighty's backing. It is not safe to count on Providence to win for us.
[ 129 ]
