ELIHU REPROVES JOB
possible; multitudes of brave young men are spoiled or killed. Is there any selection in it? Along such lines can you imagine men or life or the universe getting anywhere at all?
"Why do they do such things?
"They do not do it out of a complete and organised impulse to evil. If you took the series of researches and inventions that led at last to this use of poison gas, you would find they were the work of a multitude of mainly amiable, fairly virtuous, and kindly-meaning men. Each one was doing his bit, as Mr. Dad would say; each one, to use your phrase, doctor, was being himself and utilising the gift that was in him in accordance with the drift of the world about him; each one, Sir Eliphaz, was modestly taking the world as he found it. They were living in an uninformed world with no common understanding and no collective plan, a world ignorant of its true history and with no conception of its future. Into these horrors they drifted for the want of a world education. Out of these horrors no lesson will be learned, no will can arise, for the same reason. Every man lives ignorantly in his own circumstances, from hand to mouth, from day to day, swayed first of all by this catchword and then by that.
"Let me take another instance of the way in which human ability and energy if they are left to themselves, without co-ordination, without a common basis of purpose, without a God, will run into cul-de-sacs of mere horribleness; let me remind you a little of what the submarine is and what it signifies. In this country we think of the submarine as an instru-
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