There are those who hold our case to be desperate, to whom the disillusionment of peace, after the high optimism engendered by the vast heroism and the exalted ideals instigated by the war, has brought nothing but a mood of deep pessimism.  The sentiment is perhaps natural, but it is none the less both irrational and wicked.  If it is persisted in, if it becomes widespread, it may perfectly well justify itself, but only so.  We no longer accept the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination, we believe, and must highly believe, that our fate is of our own making, for Christianity has made us the heirs of free-will.  What we will that shall we be, or rather, what we are that shall we will, and if we make of ourselves what, by the grace of God, we may, then the victory rests with us.  It is true that we are in the last years of a definite period, on that decline that precedes the opening of a new epoch.  Never in history has any such period overpassed its limit of five hundred years, and ours, which came to birth in the last half of the fifteenth century, cannot outlast the present.  But these declining years are preceding those wherein all things are made new, and the next two generations will see, not alone the passing of what we may call modernism, since it is our own age, but the prologue of the epoch that is to come.  It is for us to say what this shall be.  It is not foreordained; true, if we will it, it may be a reign of disaster, a parallel to the well-recognized “Dark Ages” of history, but also, if we will, it may be a new and a true “renaissance,” a rebirth of old ideals, of old honour, of old faith, only incarnate in new and noble forms.

The vision of an old heaven and a new earth was vouchsafed us during the war, when horror and dishonour and degradation were shot through and through with an epic heroism and chivalry and self-sacrifice.  What if this all did fade in the miasma of Versailles and the cynicism of trade fighting to get back to “normalcy,” and the red anarchy out of the East?  There is no fiat of God that fixes these things as eternal.  Even they also may be made the instruments of revelation and re-creation.  Paris and London, Rome, Berlin and Washington are meshed in the tangled web of the superannuated who cannot escape the incubus of the old ways and the old theories that were themselves the cause of the war and of the failure of “modern civilization,” but another generation is taking the field and we must believe that this has been burned out of them.  They may have achieved this great perfection in the field, they may have experienced it through those susceptible years of life just preceding military age.  It does not matter.  Somehow they have it, and those who come much in contact in school or college with boys and men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five, know, and thankfully confess, that if they can control the event the future is secure.