" It is the idea when
that oppressing the lowest we may actually be oppressing the highest,
and that not even impersonally, but personally. We may be, as it were,
the victims of a divine masquerade; and discover that the greatest of
kings can travel incognito.
Such a picture, therefore, as the cartoonist has drawn here can be found
in all ages of Christian history as a comment on contemporary
oppression. But while the central figure remains always the same, the
types of the tyrant and the mocker hold our temporary attention; for
they are sketched from life and with a living exactitude. Upon one of
them especially it would be easy to say a great deal: the grinning
Prussian youth with the spectacles and the monkey face, who is using a
Prussian helmet instead of the crown of thorns.
Such a scientific gutter-snipe is the real and visible fruit of
organized German education; he is a much truer type than any gory and
hairy Hun. In the face of that young atheist there is everything that
can come from the congestion of the pagan with the _parvenu_; all the
knowingness that is the cessation of knowledge; and that something which
always accompanies _real_ atheism--arrested development.
G. K. CHESTERTON.
[Illustration: EASTER, 1915
"And they bowed the knee before Him."]
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PAN GERMANICUS AS PEACE MAKER
Imagine the feelings of the hindlegs of a stage elephant on being told
that the performance is to be a continuous one and you will have some
inkling of the dismay of the Kaiser and his henchman, concealed in the
plumage of the War Eagle and the Dove of Peace respectively.
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