be interminable, and discovered a plain and tragic issue that involved
every one in a common call for devotion. For a great number of men and
women who had been born and bred in security, the August and September
of 1914 were the supremely heroic period of their lives. Myriads
of souls were born again to ideas of service and sacrifice in those
tremendous days.

Black and evil thing as the war was, it was at any rate a great thing;
it did this much for countless minds that for the first time they
realized the epic quality of history and their own relationship to the
destinies of the race. The flimsy roof under which we had been living
our lives of comedy fell and shattered the floor under our feet; we saw
the stars above and the abyss below. We perceived that life was insecure
and adventurous, part of one vast adventure in space and time....

Presently the smoke and dust of battle hid the great distances again,
but they could not altogether destroy the memories of this revelation.

For the first two months the bishop's attention was so detached from
his immediate surroundings and employments, so absorbed by great events,
that his history if it were told in detail would differ scarcely at all
from the histories of most comparatively unemployed minds during those
first dramatic days, the days when the Germans made their great rush
upon Paris and it seemed that France was down, France and the whole
fabric of liberal civilization. He emerged from these stunning
apprehensions after the Battle of the Marne, to find himself busy upon a
score of dispersed and disconnected war jobs, and trying to get all the
new appearances and forces and urgencies of the war into relations with
himself. One thing became very vivid indeed, that he wasn't being used
in any real and effective way in the war. There was a mighty going