We may even dare to hope that the next half-century will see a great development of noble literature in our own land.  War for liberty, justice and humanity always tends to create such a productive period in literature and the other fine arts.  The struggle with Persia was behind the Periclean age in Athens.  It was the conflict of England with the overshadowing might of Spain that so vitalized the Elizabethan period.  The Revolution was behind the one important school of literature our own country has produced hitherto.

Since this War is waged on a scale far more colossal than any other in human history, and since liberty and democracy are at stake, not only in one land, but throughout the world and for the entire future of humanity, it is reasonable to expect that the stimulation to the creation of art and literature will be far greater than that following any previous struggle.  Where the sacrifice for high aims has been greatest, the inspiration should be greatest, as in France.  The literature currently produced, as in the books of Loti, Maeterlinck and Rolland, is scrappy and disappointing, it is true; but that is to be expected when the whole nation is strained to its last energy and gasping for breath, under the titanic struggle, and is no test of what will be.  In spite of the destruction of so large a fraction of her manhood, France will surely rise from the ashes of this world conflagration regenerated and reinspired.  The pessimism of her late decades will be gone.  The literature and other art she will produce will be instinct with new earnestness and exalted vision, and she may excel even her own great past.

We too are awakening.  Since the War began, all over the United States, men and women have been thinking more earnestly and have been more willing to listen to the expression of serious thought than ever before for the last quarter century.  Now that the hour of sacrifice has struck, this earnestness must greatly deepen.  Perhaps we, too, may have our golden age of art.

The same inspiration carries naturally into the religious life.  It is true, as we have seen, that there is a cross-current of reversion to narrower orthodoxy, caused by the War.  The Gods of War are all national and tribal divinities.  While they rule, the face of the God of Humanity is veiled.  The Kaiser’s possessive attitude toward the Divine is but the extreme case of what War does to the religious life.  Even among ourselves the tendency shows in such phenomena as the current popular evangelism—­an eloquent, if artfully calculated and vulgarized preaching of the purely personal virtues, with an ignorance that there is a social problem in modern civilization, profound as that displayed by a mediaeval churchman.  The evangelist’s list of inmates, whom he relegates to the kingdom of the lost, makes the place singularly attractive to the lover of good intellectual society.