10 moral element to the agony which makes it threefold, and leaves no oth^r woe in the world to be compared to it. Yet, strange to say, it has its compensation and redress. Even though it be the mother and the child of sin, God has many a time overruled its wrathful mission, to evoke all the better powers of humanity; to stir up slumbering energies of mind and heart, in persons and in nations; to hew the pathway of civilization, and to open the yet brighter path of grace and the Gospel. The savagery of fight is sure to give place at last to the gentlenesses of a better humanity. The reaction from the warlike is always towards the wTomanly and the tender, because the overworked passions collapse from sheer necessity of nature, and in their sleep and inanition they can only dream of the horrors which they have not strength enough to re-produce, and they shudder as they dream, and take on compunction. And at this first sign of sensibility the kindly sentiments raise their modest lips to the ears of the soul, and whisper “ love, fraternity, forgiveness, peace,” and when the nature wakes it is warlike no more. When the ugly passions have been thus quenched and drowned in blood, war leaves for its generation a surer heritage of peace, security and. social advancement, through the energies, moral and mental, that it waked into such forceful play. There is blood upon the arena; but it is the price that manhood
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