The Spirit of Man: An Anthology in English and French from the Philosophers and Poets Made by the Poet Laureate in 1915 and Dedicated by Gracious Permission to His Majesty the King (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Spirit of Man: An Anthology in English and French From the Philosophers and Poets Made by the Poet Laureate in 1915 and Dedicated by Gracious Permission to His Majesty the King

How far the various Teutonic states that have been subjugated by Prussia are infected or morally enslaved by the machinery that overlords them, how far they are deluded or tempted by a vision of world-empire, how far their intellectual teachers willingly connive at the contradictory falsehoods officially imposed upon their assent, and what their social awakening will be, we can only surmise. We had accounted our cousins as honest and virtuous folk; some of us have well-loved friends among them whom we have heard earnestly and bitterly deplore the evil spirit that was dominating their country but we now see them all united in a wild enthusiasm for the great scheme of tyranny, as unscrupulous in their means as in their motives, and obedient to military regulations for cruelty, terrorism, and devastation.

From the consequent miseries, the insensate and interminable slaughter, the hate and filth, we can turn to seek comfort only in the quiet confidence of our souls; and we look instinctively to the seers and poets of man kind, whose sayings are the oracles and prophecies ofloveliness and lovingkindness. Common diversions divert us no longer; our habits and thoughts are searched by the glare of the conviction that man's life is not the ease that a peace-loving generation has found it or thought to make it, but the awful conflict with evil which philo sophers and saints have depicted; and it is in their abundant testimony to the good and beautiful that we find support for our faith, and distraction from a grief that is intolerable constantly to face, nay impossible to face without that trust in God which makes all things possible.

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