And so, gentlemen, what we have to do in the realm of re ligion is to develop a faith and reverence and hope and love that is more fundamental than any church, more fundamental than any creed or ritual, more fundamental than any priest or preacher, yes, more fundamental than any book, Bible or prayer book or what you will, and faith, and hope, and reverence, and love, in the hearts of man and blossoming in their lives, so deep, so broad, so humane, that still maintaining our different creeds, still using our different rituals, still seeing our little fragments of life, we shall work together hand in hand and heart to heart for that justice, that peace and that universal prosperity which has been called the Kingdom of God. We shall work together in a faith as broad as that of the Master of some of us who saw more faith in a pagan Roman than he found in all Israel; a faith as broad as that of Paul, who said that in Christ there was neither bond nor free, Jew nor Gentile; a faith as broad as that of John in whom the apocalyptic vision saw men gathered up out of every nation, in all the world, recognizing a kingdom of God and a common father. For not until we have, in spite of our differences, a faith in one Father of the whole human race shall we have a real, deep, abiding faith in our fellow-men as the children of God, the only basis of a true, democratic brotherhood.

PRESIDENT HEPBURN: Our last toast is

"THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER."

The geography of Europe, Asia and Africa is being rewritten, national boundaries readjusted, forms of government perhaps changed, the currents of commerce, vexed and obstructed, are forming new channels and seeking new termini, and when peace shall dawn upon the impoverished and blood-stained world what change shall we find to have taken place in the relative standing of our country in the sisterhood of nations?

This question is in the air, it permeates everything and everywhere, it possesses such commanding interest that we are all intuitively and subconsciously pondering

the same. In view of the great interest we are very fortunate in having this general subject discussed by a past master in the power of crucial analysis and logical deduction. A few weeks ago he reviewed in the New York Times the issues culminating in the present war, a review judicial in form, judicial in temperament, and possessing such force and fairness and general excellence that it attracted world-wide attention and won general commendation and approval.

I have great pleasure in presenting our fellow-townsman, the Honorable James M. Beck, advocate, jurist, orator.

SPEECH BY THE HONORABLE JAMES M. BECK.

Mr. President and gentlemen of the New England Society:

This Society has justified its reputation on this occasion for high thinking and plain speaking. If it were not for that circumstance it might possibly have been better if at this fateful hour for humanity the dinner had been altogether omitted. But such a dinner as the New England Society gives, and with two such speakers as Dr. Eliot and Dr. Lyman Abbott to impress upon this audience the lessons of the hour, fully justifies the action of your Society in not following an action which some other societies have taken.

I wish I felt that I could in any way follow suitably in the path thus laid for me or in any way justify the compliment which your distinguished President has been pleased to pay me. I feel very much with respect to that flattering introduction as Dr. Johnson did when he returned from the visit to King George III and told the ever-faithful Boswell that the King had been pleased to praise in the highest terms Dr. Johnson's dictionary. And Boswell said, "Well, what did you say when the King thus praised your work?" And Dr. Johnson replied, "Am I the man to bandy words with my sovereign? If he said so, it must be so. And I accept his estimate that my dictionary is the best work of its kind."

Before addressing myself to the very few remarks which at this hour I propose to make, I must follow the last witty speaker with one New England anecdote which has the merit of being an actual occurrence, and it is also a story relating to one of my New England forebears. Some years ago I was up in the Penobscot Valley gathering all that I could with respect to my maternal ancestors, and while some of them had led a sufficiently conspicuous life in the early Colonial days for me to gather considerable data, there was one great-grand

father about whom I could learn very little, except that he was a New England deacon of unexceptional piety. This particular deacon was given to rather longwinded prayers in the meeting-house, and on one occasion, having delivered a very lengthy extemporaneous prayer, in which he gave a great deal of miscellaneous advice to the Almighty, he sat down, and there was throughout the congregation a fervent "Amen," and suddenly, to the unwelcome surprise of the congregation, the old gentleman arose again, and everyone thought he was about to break out afresh, but with a sorrowful and contrite heart manifested in his voice he said, "My brethren, I have a sorrowful confession to make," and everyone wondered what was coming. He added, "When I sat down after delivering that prayer to the Throne of Grace, Satan whispered in my ear, 'Eliakim, that was a good prayer,' and I believed him."

I am going to cut short very much what I had hoped to say with reference to a very serious theme, because Mr. Hepburn warned me before dinner commenced that all good New Englanders expected to go home by half-past ten, and it is already almost a half-hour beyond that limitation.

This is the blackest Eve of Christmas in the memory of living man. I was about to say that it was about the blackest Christmas Eve since that first of Christmas Eves when the beatific vision was seen by the shepherds, and the refrain was heard upon the plains of Bethlehem, "Peace on earth, good will to men. Certainly there never was before in all recorded history such an amazing demonstration of the power and genius of man devoted to his own extermination. All past records are broken, not merely in the dimensions of the universal slaughter, but in the atrocity of the methods, which have apparently violated many merciful regulations of civilization with respect to the code of civilized warfare, and has resulted in a seeming breakdown of civilization itself. It is true that from the time of that gracious refrain of the angels

which we are about to celebrate that there has been through all the nineteen hundred and more years past hardly a single year of peace; the car of civilization has been that of a Juggernaut rolling over the necks of the slain. If nature did not of its own volition remove the debris of the wars, as it removes each succeeding autumn the leaves of the trees, no circle in all Dante's Inferno would be comparable to this blood-stained earth.

The nineteenth century hardly knew a single year of peace. It began with the thunder of Napoleon's on the plains of Marengo, continued to its end, and the twentieth century is already beginning with even greater infractions of the world's peace. The dream of the poet has literally come true in our time, in these first years of the twentieth century, of the nations' aerial navies grappling in the central blue; while as for the malignity of the submarine, I think it can be most strikingly manifested by that one incident of the current war where a submarine, having sunk one single warship, with its periscope projected above the water like the eye of some malignant sea monster, calmly waited the approach of other rescuing vessels, sent to save the lives of sailors in the water, in order that they too, by one swift torpedo, could be sent to the bottom of the

sea.

The lament of Burke a hundred years ago has come literally true, that the age of chivalry is past and the glory of Europe, at least for the time being, has departed.

It is a black Christmas Eve, because the awful contrast between the present hour, with armies to which no forces in the past are for one moment comparable in numbers, with battles extended over an area to which the battles of preceding wars are, at least in dimensions, mere skirmishes, has a tendency to make atheists of men when we think after almost two thousand years that all that mankind can present as a record of completed progress in the art of peace is an almost continuous series of wars. We still hear the insistent cry of Him who walks in the garden of the world,