Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. WHY ARE WARS PERMITTED? FOR years this little verse has admonished me. When events and circumstances have been dark, so that the ways of the Divine Providence have seemed inexplicable, it has bade me remember a principle, which should never for a moment have passed out of mind. What principle? This: God never ordains, never sends an evil. He only permits it to the extent that it can subserve some use. Anything less, or anything more than this, He does not allow to come to pass. The residue of evil in any form, natural or spiritual, individual or collective, which cannot be made to serve any useful purpose whatsoever?that is restrained; it is divinely overruled or suppressed. Only that which, in the end, can lead to some good, is allowed to gain actuality in the world. "The wrath of man shall praise Thee: The residue of wrath shalt Thou restrain." This is the truth which I would urge upon you to-day, in the face of conditions so dreadful that they fairly stagger us. During the last days of July, when rumors of war multiplied and became increasingly ominous, and the mobilization of armies was actually begun, I, with others, could not bring myself to believe that a general war, such as was being predicted, could really break forth. True, the mines Were laid, as every one was being warned. It needed but a spark to ignite them. If this should happen, every one was forewarned how terrific the explosion would be. And still it seemed as if there must be some intervention that would make this impossible, and that at the last moment some word would be spoken, some incident would occur, which would save us from the dread catastrophe. It seemed as if the nations at issue were too far advanced in civilization, and as if there was too much enlightenment, too much altruism to ma...