The Sentinel=Record

'THIS WAR GREATEST CRIME OF AGES'
GERMAN ATTITUDE

RABBI A. B. RHINE DISCUSSES THE FAR REACHING EFFECT OF NATIONS AT WAR.

Means a Set Back to All Civilization and Raises Doubt as to the Sincerity of Mankind in Declarations for Peace.

Dr. A. B. Rhine, of this city, who is a deep student of practical affairs, and who keeps in close touch with the history of the times, in an interview yesterday expressed a doubt of the sincerity of the peace compacts the civilized nations have made and remade in recent years, and incidentally characterizes the present war of nations as "the greatest crime of the ages."

Dr. Rhine says:

"European civilization has hitherto been considered as the highest expression of human achievement. Europe has made such tremendous strides in the nineteenth century that the twentieth century was looked forward to with hope and with pride, in which the promises of the past were to culminate. The civilized world has so lulled itself in a sense of security, that the wholesale massacre of human beings, called war, was impossible in this age of enlightenment, that a peace palace was erected, and nations came together to discuss universal peace.

"It seemed for a while that the great dream of the ancient seer would be fulfilled in our day: the dream that nations would 'beat their swords into plow shares, and their spears into pruning hooks,' that nations would no longer lift up swords against nations, and learn war no more.

"Such was the hope and the dream of the twentieth century dreamers. And now what a fearful disillusionment. The great European nations, the bulwarks of civilization, have relapsed into savagery once more. Is civilization, after all, only skin deep? Is man, despite his culture, only a savage, after all, with only a thin veneer of refinement? What a horrible spectacle Europe presents today. The great nations, with their millions of armed men, at each others throats; Belgium, the land of Waterloo, again the battlefield of nations, flowing with blood, filled with the bodies of the dead and the dying, and the air ringing with the moans and the cries of the wounded: the youth and the manhood led to the slaughter, homes broken up; women bereft of their loved ones; lands filled with widows and broken hearted mothers; commerce ruined; manufacture interrupted; communications broken; in a word, all the efforts and the toil of years for peace and prosperity annihilated within the twinkling of an eye—and this is called glory.

The present international war is the greatest crime of the ages. Whoever is responsible for it will have to give an account of his doings on the fearful day of reckoning before the judgment seat of God and of history. This war, started on such a palpable pretext, and that has assumed such large proportions, involving so many nations in ruin, is absolutely unjustifiable; and yet these very nations prate of justice, and call upon God to help their cause—the cause of hypocrisy and bloodshed. What a mockery on civilization; what a travesty on religion.

"But let us hope that even this calamity will not prove altogether useless; the darkness grows thicker before the dawn: the cause of peace will find its most eloquent advocate in the fearful lessons of this war; the nations of Europe, chastened by the ruin and desolation that this war has wrought in their midst, will finally realize that the morality which applies to an individual must apply to nations as well. They will come to see that a nation armed is a nation verged on war: and that the only guarantee of peace is disarmament. And out of this darkness of war, havoc, ruin and despair, there may yet dawn a perfect day of universal peace, justice and brotherhood."