but it should want a great deal of evidence before I believe that it does more than prove to people that they are braver than they know.  I can’t believe vaguely in death and sorrow and disablement and waste being good things.  It is merely a question of what you are paying so ghastly a price for.  In the Napoleonic wars the price was paid for the liberties of Europe, to show a great nation that it must abandon the ideal of domination.  That is a great cause; but it is great because men are evil, and not because they are good.  War seems to me the temporary triumph of the old bad past over the finer and more beautiful future.  Do not let us be taken in by the romance of it.  That is the childish view, that loves the sight and sound of the marching column and the stirring music.  People find it hard to believe that anything so strong and gallant and cheerful can have a sinister side.  And no doubt for a young, strong, and bold man the excitement of it is an intense pleasure.  But what we have to ask is whether we are right in taking so heavy a toll from the world for all that:  I do not think it right, though it may be inevitable.  But then I belong to the future, and I think I should be more at home in the world a thousand years hence than I am to-day.”

“But I go back to my point,” said Lestrange:  “does not a great war like that send people to their knees in faith?”

“Depend upon it,” said Father Payne, “that anything which makes people acquiesce in preventable evil, and see the beautiful effects of death and pain and waste, is the direct influence of the devil.  It is the last and most guileful subtlety that he practises, to make us solemnly mournful and patient in the presence of calamities for which we have ourselves to thank.  The only prayer worth praying in the time of war is not, ’Help us to bear this,’ but ‘Help us to cure this’; and to behave with meek reverence is to behave like the old servant in The Master of Ballantrae, who bore himself like an afflicted saint under an illness, the root of which was drunkenness.  The worst religion is that which keeps its sense of repentance alive by its own misdeeds!”

He was silent for a moment, and then he said:  “No, we mustn’t make terms with war, any more than we must do with cholera.  It’s a great, heartbreaking evil, and it puts everything back a stage.  Of course it brings out fine qualities—­I know that—­and so does a plague of cholera.  It’s the evil in both that brings out the fine things to oppose it.  But we ought to have more faith, and believe that the fine qualities are there—­war doesn’t create them, it only shows you that they are present—­and we believe in war because it reassures us about the presence of the great qualities.  It shows them, and then blows them out, like the flame of a candle.  But we want to keep them; we don’t want just to be shown them, with a risk of extinguishing them.  Example can do something, but not half as much as inheritance; and we sweep away the inheritance for the sake of the romantic delight of seeing the great virtues flare up.  No,” he said, “war is one of the evil things that is trying to hurt mankind, and disguising itself in shining armour; but it means men ill; it is for ever trying to bring their dreams to an end.”