secret, has been absolved and strengthened. And not in St. Paul's in London only, but in St. Peter's in Rome, in Notre Dame in Paris, in St. Isaac in Petrograd, and among the ruined stones of the desecrated churches of Belgium, I see the same great scene. Out of the storm of battle a new spirit of brotherhood has been born into the world, and men who have shed their blood together are vowing before God that never again will they take up arms against each other.
And then the singing and the shouting being over, the streets once more full of the trade and traffic of peace, and the spring having come again, perhaps, to heal the battlefields with "the sweet oblivion of flowers," I see another scene, less splendid but more moving, a scene which, sooner or later, will only too surely find its way into innumerable houses in these islands, into palaces as well as cottages—that of an old mother, sitting alone with the memory of her only son. There, perhaps, and not in cathedrals or
