The Spiritual and the Material
In the brief address which the Prime Minister delivered to the Free Church Council on Tuesday, he sounded a note which Lord Halifax had already struck in his speech to the National Defence Council the previous week. The war, he said, would be won by the spiritual forces of the world as much as by the material power of their defenders. It is not completely easy to believe that true. Unless absolute non-resistance is to be practised, material force must be met with material force, and, other things being equal, the more powerful material force will gain the day. It is well to be reminded that in this fight other things are not equal. On the one side there is a good conscience, on the other a guilt one or none at all. Men fighting for freedom are better soldiers than men fighting for domination. Rescuers of nations stricken down have forces to sustain them unknown to Liz strikers-down. The fact that we are accepting immense sicrifice with no thought or desire of obtaining anything for ourselves, to frustrate the diabolical machinations of a hand- ful of criminal men in whom we see evil incarnate, gives the Allied cause not merely a justice, but a strength, it could derive from no other source. It is true that in this perplex- ing world good is often defeated and evil often triumphs, but it is no less true that at crises when issues of life and death are hanging in the balance and one side or the other must yield, spiritual forces may inspire a nation to an endurance against which mere material power will break. If the Prime Minister meant that, as no doubt he did, his words were both true and timely.
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