THE KING’S BUSINESS 965 Him to help him out of his troubles and to fight his battles for him, to cry “God mit uns” and then violate every law of God and canon of decency. We would do well to lay to heart the inspired words of the Psalmist ‘‘The wicked shall be turned into Sheol, even all the nations that forget God.” (Ps. 9:17). This is exactly what we see occurring in Europe today. By the millions the members of the nations of the earth that have forgotten God are going down into Sheol, the land of the dead, and it is what we will see in America sooner or later, no matter how the present war terminates, unless we repent.
A certain class of preachers are trying hard to make us believe that war develops the better side of man’s nature, but as a matter of experience* war develops all that is vile and worst in man. In a recent number of
The Demoralizing Effects of War.
the London Christian we read: “Some of the chaplains who are returning from the Front have anything but a pleasant story to tell of the moral condi tion of some of the troops. So far from the war having made them serious, it has had precisely the opposite effect. Life has become cheapened and many moral values have been completely changed in the estimation of the men. Saddest of all is the story of lust. What this must mean in the after-war days we can only dimly imagine; but of one thing we may be assured at once, that a large number of men will return to their homes with their purity vanished. War always has this effect unhappily, and the scale of the present war renders the problem today one of profoundest seriousness. Donald Hankey’s diagnosis is proving to be correct: the chief hindrance to the acceptance of the Gospel is not intellectual, but sensual. A chaplain who holds the respect of all the Churches declares that the lads who have successfully weathered the moral tempest which has beaten upon them are neatly all drawn from our Churches and Sunday Schools. It is a great testimony to the value of religious teaching, as the looseness of morals is the greatest condemnation of Paganism in Britain.” . A recent issue of the Berliner Tageblatte sums up the results of the war to date (August 25) as follows: “War^ loans, $87,000,000,000; loss in' dead and wounded, 24,000,000 men; killed, 7,000,000 men; crippled for life, 5,000,000 men; loss through, decrease of birth rate in all belligerent countries, 9,000,000 men. “The gold production of the world during the last 500 years amounted to $15,000,000,000, or less than one-fifth of the "cost of the world war,” the paper continues. “In $5 gold pieces, the $87,000,000,000 raised in war loans would form a belt th at could be wound around the earth nine times. j> “The funeral cortege of the 7,000,000 men killed would reach from Paris to Vladivostock, if one hearse followed the other. “When the war began the combined public debt of all European States was a little over $25,000,000,000, and now it is over $112,000,000,000. The British m erchant fl^et in 1914 represented a value of about $950,000,000. T hat is less than the annual interest England now has to pay for her war debt. Before the war Germany exported goods to the amount of $113,000,000 per year to the B ritish colonies. By cutting off this export England can eventually reimburse herself for her losses, but this will take more than 200 years. “Germany, with the amount spent by her for the war, could have bought all the cotton fields, the copper mines and the whole petroleum industry of the United States and still would have had several billion dollars left over. “Russia, w ith /her war expenses, m ight have covered her immense territories with a net of railways as close as th at of Belgium^ and France, whose losses in men are larger than the entire male population of Alsace-Lorraine, could have bought all the Portugese and Dutch colonies with the -money she sacrificed for the war. “W ith the enormous wealth destroyed by the war Europe m ight have been made a paradise on earth instead of a howling wilderness. There is no doubt th at the awful struggle would have been avoided if the nations had any idea of its enorm ity when it started.” The Folly of War.
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