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THE WELSH OUTLOOK NOTES OF THE MONTH The New It may be true, as the preachers Year urge, that every day is the close of a year and not only the last day of December. But it is a helpful convention of mortal man which has accustomed him to think backward and live forward with unusual seriousness once in twelve months. And at the opening of this year our reflections are likely to take on a wider range and a deeper solemnity than ever before. For we are witnesses of and sharers in a world dis- turbance of unprecedented energy and magnitude, which has pursued its bloody and thundeious career sufficiently long, one would think, to awaken and appal the sleepiest conscience in our midst. The lengthening tale of killed and wounded, the imprison- ment of Belgium, the exile of Serbia, the slaughter of Armenia, the laying waste of large parts of Poland, France, and Flanders, are dimly realised by the dullest. The biithday of the Prince of Peace points the tragedy to imaginations fed on the Christian tradition. The kings of the modern world bring their tribute of shells and bombs and lay them at the feet of the infant Jesus. One of the most pacific of modern statesmen, with dramatic irnpressiveness, chooses Christmas Day to urge the mechanics of the Clyde to double their devotion in the manufacture of the implements of war. The war, he tells the trade unionists, is a deluge, a convulsion of Nature. It is a cyclone which is tearing up by the roots the ornaments plants of modern society and wrecking some of the flimsy trestle bridges of modern civilisation. It is an earthquake which is upheaving the very rocks of European life. It is one of those seismic disturbances in which nations leap forward or fall backward generations in a single bound. All this chaffering about relaxing a rule here and suspending a custom there is out of place. You cannot haggle with an earthquake." JANUARY, 1916 Divine There used to be a book much Government read in Wales thirty of forty years ago called The Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral. We have forgotten what, according to Dr. M'Cosh, the Divine Method was. Nor can we recall by what theological theories physical volcanoes and moral earthquakes were explained and justified by the learned President of Princeton. But the splendid title of his book has recurred to our memory in contemplating the tupturing of European civilisation which is now taking place. For the war challenges out faith in the providential ordering of the world as nothing has done within living memory. It raises the most stupendous questions and is fraught with most tremendous issues. Why does God permit this colossal evil ? How can it be squared with a Ruler Whose law is love ? Could not the goal be reached with less waste of precious human stuff? Is there a goal ? Are we but the sport of chance making for chaos ? Or is God for the time defeated ? Is He limited by devils from without? Or has He de- liberately limited His own power and made it possible for us, His creatures, to frustrate His will? He could do in Europe no mighty work because of their unbelief ? And as He cannot be indifferent to what is happening must He not be suffering with His creatures? We must ask these questions, but we cannot pretend to answer them. We could not foresee the course of the war twelve months ago, and we cannot foretell our national fortunes during the year now opening. Far less can we map out the destiny of mankind. We are encompassed about with much darkness and can only decipher a few syllables of the human story. There was once a modest Gifford Lecturer who complained that after he had been twenty years trying to expound Shakespeare, his University gave him two years in which to expound God. The time was too short, and though