Page 159 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

140 The Future in Relation to

the century open would have thought too re-
mote for its concern, and certainly wholly
beyond its power to influence.
Religious creeds, dealing with eternal veri-
ties, may be susceptible of a certain per-
manency of statement yet even here we in
;
this day have witnessed the embarrassments
of some religious bodies, arising from a tradi-
tional adherence to merely human formulas,
which reflect views of the truth as it appeared
to the men who framed them in the distant
past. But political creeds, dealing as they do
chiefly with the transient and shifting condi-
tions of a world which is passing away con-
tinually, can claim no fixity of allegiance,
except where they express, not the policy of
a day, but the unchanging dictates of right-
eousness. And inasmuch as the path of ideal
righteousness is not always plain nor always
practicable ; as expediency, policy, the choice
of the lesser evil, must control at times ; as
nations, like men, will occasionally differ, hon-
estly but irreconcilably, on questions of right,
— there do arise disputes where agreement
cannot be reached, and where the appeal must
be made to force, that final factor which under-