Excerpt from The Eve of a Great War: A Sermon Preached in Westminster Abbey, on Sunday Afternoon, August 2, 1914, by the Archbishop of Canterbury So let the fair white-winged peacemaker fly To happy havens under all the sky, Till each man find his own in all men's good, And all men work in noble brotherhood Breaking their mailed fleets and armed towers. Such were the hopes, such the expectations of not a few And what happened? Englishmen must have thought over those hopes with a grim feeling in the icy trenches of Sebastopol, or in the noonday glare upon the ridge at Delhi. And they formed a startling memory for many others besides Englishmen, for our gathering in I85I was cosmopolitan, and some of the strongest speeches and the rosiest prophecies came from other nationalities than our own. What did those prophets think, a little later, about Magenta and Solferino? How were their hopes illustrated, later still, on the hillside at Gravelotte or in the corn fields of Sedan? What are we to say of Plevna, of Port Arthur? The strifes were hotter, some of the fields were bloodier than any that our grandsires had known. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.