DRINK AND SACRIFICE.
[To TIM EDITOR OT THE " Spzernos."1
But,—Yon have urged the case against drink during war time with irresistible cogency, from the economic point of view, and your arguments would seem to be unanswerable. I should like, how- ever, to suggest that an even stronger case may be made out if the question is considered on its spiritual side. It has become a commonplace to say that the war is a spiritual yer—not merely a conflict between nations, but a war of good against evil, in which we are privileged to fight on the side of the good against the very powers of darkness. That being so, it is surely our duty to consider how beat such a war should be waged. In so far as evil manifests itself through matter, it is clear that we must employ material weapons against it; but in so doing let ns remem- ber that we are fighting only the symptoms, the material expres- sion, of evil, not the root of evil itself. This can only be fought by spiritual weapons—prayer and sacrifice; and if we could look at the whole matter sub specie acternitatis, no doubt we should see that this spiritual warfare is of infinitely greater importance than the other. Now, it is not enough to say that we have prayed as we never prayed before, or to point to the enormous sacrifices we have made. Sacrifice to be of avail must be complete: we must not, like Ananias and Sapphire, keep anything back. So long as there remains so much preventable evil, so much of self, among us, our duty is not done, and until we learn our lesson, until our " hugged and loved indulgences " are rooted out, the war will continue. Is it necessary to ask what is the greatest and most far-reaching sacrifice the nation as a whole could make? And is it not certain that, if we made this great renunciation and gave up drink, the effect would be incalculable? Not only should we be safe from the material point of view, as you have shown, but we should have won a victory over evil of more value than many battles on land or sea. There would still remain other forms of selfishness to be dealt with, but we should have taken the first and most difficult step on the road to peace. Mr. Lloyd George reminded us the other day that " it is not what a nation gains, it is what a nation gives, that makes it great." He, at least, knows that the way of victory lies through sacrifice, and if he would call his faith to his aid, and appeal to the people on these lines, I am convinced that the response would be immediate and overwhelming. A great outpouring of spiritual force is fooding the country, an ever-growing realization of the power of the Spirit,
a husked expectation of the Coming of the /faster, and these forces are none the less strong that they are working silently and invisibly. It needs only a spark to liberate them, and that spark
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