One may trust that the war has reduced them to silence,
and that we need not linger over them.
Then there was the school which sought desperately to find good in evil.
A man or woman is stricken with disease. Very often it brings with it a
softening, an improvement, of character; either in the patient or in the
nurses, or in both. Our religious philosophers fancied they caught in
this a glimpse of the divine plan: cancer was an instrument of
righteousness in the hands of the Almighty, the bacillus of
tuberculosis was a moral agency. They detected cases in which adverse
fortune had sobered and softened a man: the finger of Providence. In
France there was a very considerable return to the Catholic Church, and
recovery of its power, after the disastrous war of 1870. In the south of
Italy there is always much less sexual freedom for a time after an
earthquake has buried a few tens of thousands under the ruins of their
houses. I would undertake to fill a quarto volume with instances of good
things which arose out of or followed upon evil experiences. We saw that
the present war is being examined in the same respect. There are "great
spiritual opportunities": hundreds of thousands of young men are being
compelled (by the authorities) to go to church who had not been for
years; the different denominations are fraternising as they never did
before; the churches are rather fuller than they had been of late:
charity is awakened on a prodigious scale; zeal for an ideal (the
violated peace of Belgium) is dragging men even from our slums to the
colours.
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