TOWARDS THE GREAT PEACE




I


A WORLD AT THE CROSSROADS

For two thousand years Christianity has been an operative force in the
world; for more than a century democracy has been the controlling
influence in the public affairs of Europe and the Americas; for two
generations education, free, general and comprehensive, has been the
rule in the West. Wealth incomparable, scientific achievements
unexampled in their number and magnitude, facile means of swift
intercommunication between peoples, have all worked together towards an
earthly realization of the early nineteenth-century dream of proximate
and unescapable millennium. With the opening of the second decade of the
twentieth century it seemed that the stage was set for the last act in
an unquestioned evolutionary drama. Man was master of all things, and
the failures of the past were obliterated by the glory of the imminent
event.

The Great War was a progressive revelation and disillusionment. Therein,