with the Protestant conception in Scotland, or the Mohammedan conception in Bengal. The real divisions of all those ideals, which the critic enumerates, cut right across State divisions, disregarding them entirely. Yet, again, it is only the State divisions which military conflict has in view.
What was one of the reasons leading to the cessation of religious wars between States? It was that religious conceptions cut across the State frontiers, so that the State ceased to coincide with the religious divisions of Europe, and a condition of things was brought about in which a Protestant Sweden was allied with a Catholic France. This rendered the conflict absurd, and religious wars became an anachronism.
Is not precisely the same thing taking place with reference to the conflicting conceptions of life which now separate men in Christendom? Have not we in America the same doctrinal struggle which is going on in France and Germany and Great Britain? To take one instance—social conflict. On the one side in each case are all the interests bound up with order, authority, individual freedom, without reference to the comfort of the weak, and on the other the reconstruction of human society along hitherto untried lines. These problems are for most men probably—are certainly coming to be, if they are not now—much more profound and fundamental than any conception which coincides with or can be identified with State divisions. Indeed, what are the conceptions of which the divisions coincide with the political frontiers of the British Empire, in view of the fact that that Empire includes nearly every race and nearly every religion under the sun? It may be said, of course, that in the case