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“Thank you,” she said; “you, at least, have a heart.”

“No, madam,” said the German; “it is broken.”

Goethe said: “He who wishes to exert a useful influence must be careful to insult nothing…. We are become too humane to enjoy the triumphs of Caesar.” Ninety years after he said this Germany took the Belgian women from their ruined villages–some of these women being so infirm that for months they had not been out-of-doors–and loaded them on trains like cattle, and during several weeks exposed them publicly to the jeers and scoffs and insults of German crowds through city after city.

Perhaps the German soldier whose heart was broken by Louvain will be one of a legion, and thus, perhaps, through thousands of broken German hearts, Germany may become herself again. She has hurled calamity on a continent. She has struck to pieces a Europe whose very unpreparedness answers her ridiculous falsehood that she was attacked first. Never shall Europe be again as it was. Our brains, could they take in the whole of this war, would burst.

But Calamity has its Pentecost. When its mighty wind rushed over Belgium and France, and its tongues of fire sat on each of them, they, too, like the apostles in the New Testament, began to speak as the Spirit gave them utterance. Their words and deeds have filled the world with a splendor the world had lost. The flesh, that has dominated our day and generation, fell away in the presence of the Spirit. I have heard Belgians bless the martyrdom and awakening of their nation. They have said:

“Do not talk of our suffering; talk of our glory. We have found ourselves.”

Frenchmen have said to me: “For forty-four years we have been unhappy, in darkness, without health, without faith, believing the true France dead. Resurrection has come to us.” I heard the French Ambassador, Jules Jusserand, say in a noble speech: “George Eliot profoundly observes that to every man comes a crisis when in a moment, without chance for reflection, he must decide and act instantly. What determines his decision? His whole past, the daily choices between good and evil that he has made throughout his previous years–these determine his decision. Such a crisis fell in a moment on France; she acted instantly, true to her historic honor and courage.”

Every day deeds of faith, love and renunciation are done by the score and the hundred which will never be recorded, and every one of which is noble enough to make an immortal song. All over the broken map of Europe, through stricken thousands of square miles, such deeds are being done by Servians, Russians, Poles, Belgians, French and English,–yes, and Germans too,–the souls of men and women rising above their bodies, flinging them away for the sake of a cause. Think of one incident only, only one of the white-hot gleams of the Spirit that have reached us from the raging furnace. Out from the burning cathedral of Rheims they were dragging the wounded German prisoners lying helpless inside on straw that had begun to burn. In front of the church the French mob was about to shoot or tear to pieces those crippled, defenseless enemies. You and I might well want to kill an enemy who had set fire to Mount Vernon, the house of the Father of our Country.

For more than seven hundred years that great church of Rheims had been the sacred shrine of France. One minute more and those Germans lying or crawling outside the church door would have been destroyed by the furious people. But above the crash of rafters and glass, the fall of statues, the thunder of bombarding cannon, and the cries of French execration, rose one man’s voice. There on the steps of the ruined church stood a priest. He lifted his arms and said:

“Stop; remember the ancient ways and chivalry of France. It is not Frenchmen who trample on a maimed and fallen foe. Let us not descend to the level of our enemies.”