January, 1915

A FATEFUL year indeed! Born amid the darkest gloom that has ever rested upon the world — what shall we see and know in 1915?
The hate of man has wrought inconceivable horrors, and the track of its whirlwind fury is marked with ruined cities and desolated homes. And in the midst of it all there seems to stand a lonely figure with outstretched hand menacing the world. As he moves upon his way he is followed by the wail of breaking hearts; about his feet flow streams of human tears and blood. He is the embodiment of the teachings of men who hate Christ and have been “delirious with a drunken dream of world power.” He is an apt pupil of Treitschke and Nietzsche, men whose distorted ideas, the products of unbalanced minds, are responsible for the awful deeds that have marked this century with ineffaceable crimes.
This man, this German Emperor, regards himself as “the instrument of the Lord,” as the “vicegerent of celestial Omnipotence,” and as an embodiment of divine wisdom, and the expression of eternal purpose to the world. And this is the man who seeks to dominate the earth today — the man whose legions East and West are dying at his bidding by thousands every day. And this man has sworn to do in England worse deeds than have been done in Belgium and in France. He is pointing his finger of hate towards our shores.
This is the German menace today — the menace of 1915. Many in our midst are horrified at the thought of the Kaiser’s legions coming here. What would it mean? Ruin and death: the destruction of homes and property, the slaughter of tens of thousands, it would mean the massacre of little children and old men, and the vilest outrages on our wives and daughters. And what is there standing now between us and this awful peril? — for it is a peril. All along the East Coast of England one hundred thousand men are lining trenches to oppose the foe that threatens to come. Vast preparations on land and sea mark the imminence of the peril.