more horrifying to the enlightened consciousness than the dying groans
of the stricken can be to the more bodily nerve. The thing to fear is
not pain, but trespass; not suffering, but sin--the peculiar sin of
war is that it corrupts while it consumes, that it demoralizes whilst
it destroys. It is not because war kills that it is the devil, but
because it depraves; and it is because it depraves that it is condemned
by the religious consciousness. The damage that it inflicts upon the
persons and property of men is trifling beside the damage it inflicts
upon morals; and it is this that is exciting in thoughtful minds a
fresh interest in the whole military conception. The ominous thing is
not the body prostrate on the battlefield, but the brute rampant in
the mother-land; the general lowering of ideal, the blatant materialism
and defiant selfishness." [Footnote: Walter Walsh--The Moral Damage
of War.]

Home Missions must consider the responsibility of our Christian
nation toward the attitude of world thought that made possible
this war. It was John Hay in his instructions to our American
delegates to the First Hague Conference who said: "Next to the
great fact of a nation's independence is the great fact of its
interdependence." [Footnote: William I. Hull--The New Peace
Movement.]

Through travel, cultural influences, commerce, the rapid circulation
of news, the cultivation of sympathy, there is a recognized oneness
of the world to-day; a solidarity which, notwithstanding all the
differences arising from remoteness, race, legislation, and religion,
binds together the world as never before.

The world is realizing to-day, as one of the results of this