"Good-by, dear old Seddon Hall," she said, smiling, "I'm ready for the
next chapter."

THE END

THE POLLY PENDLETON SERIES

BY DOROTHY WHITEHILL

Polly Pendleton is a resourceful, wide-awake American girl who goes to a
boarding school on the Hudson River some miles above New York. By her
pluck and resourcefulness, she soon makes a place for herself and this
she holds right through the course. The account of boarding school life
is faithful and pleasing and will attract every girl in her teens.

  1 POLLY'S FIRST YEAR AT BOARDING SCHOOL
  2 POLLY'S SUMMER VACATION
  3 POLLY'S SENIOR YEAR AT BOARDING SCHOOL
  4 POLLY SEES THE WORLD AT WAR
  5 POLLY AND LOIS

_Cloth, Large 12mo., Illustrated._

Dorothy Whitehill Series

_For Girls_

Here is a sparkling new series of stories for girls--just what they will
like, and ask for more of the same kind. It is all about twin sisters,
who for the first few years in their lives grow up in ignorance of each
other's existence. Then they are at last brought together and things
begin to happen. Janet is an independent go-ahead sort of girl; while
her sister Phyllis is--but meet the twins for yourself and be
entertained.

5 Titles, Cloth, large 12mo.

Covers in color.

  1. JANET, A TWIN
  2. PHYLLIS, A TWIN
  3. THE TWINS IN THE WEST
  4. THE TWINS IN THE SOUTH
  5. THE TWINS' SUMMER VACATION

THE MARY JANE SERIES

BY CLARA INGRAM JUDSON

Cloth, 12mo. Illustrated.

With picture inlay and wrapper.

Mary Jane is the typical American little girl who bubbles over with fun
and the good things in life. We meet her here on a visit to her
grandfather's farm where she becomes acquainted with farm life and farm
animals and thoroughly enjoys the experience. We next see her going to
kindergarten and then on a visit to Florida, and then--but read the
stories for yourselves.

Exquisitely and charmingly written are these books which every little
girl from five to nine years old will want from the first book to the
last.

  1 MARY JANE--HER BOOK
  2 MARY JANE--HER VISIT
  3 MARY JANE'S KINDERGARTEN
  4 MARY JANE DOWN SOUTH
  5 MARY JANE'S CITY HOME
  6 MARY JANE IN NEW ENGLAND

THE TOMLINSON SERIES

BY EVERETT T. TOMLINSON.

Interest in school life is perpetual. The young student, facing new
surroundings, finds an element of romance and strong appeal; and to the
older graduate college days recall some of the most pleasant memories of
the past.

Here are stories of school life and athletics, full of action and human
interest. They deal with problems of life common to students and inspire
the manly attributes of self-reliance and strength of character.

  THE PENNANT.
  CAPTAIN DAN RICHARDS.
  CARL HALL OF TAIT.
  JACK STONE OF TAIT SCHOOL.

(Other volumes in preparation)

_Cloth, Large 12mo., Illustrated._

For sale at all bookstores or sent (postage paid) on receipt of price by
the publishers.

THE GO AHEAD BOYS

BY ROSS KAY.

  _I leave this rule for others when I'm dead:_
  _Be always sure you're right--THEN GO AHEAD._

  --_Davy Crockett's Motto._

The love of adventure is inborn in all normal boys. Action is almost a
supreme demand in all the stories they read with most pleasure. Here is
presented a series of rattling good adventure stories which every live
"go ahead" boy will read with unflagging interest. There is action, dash
and snap in every tale yet the tone is healthful and there is an
underlying vein of resourcefulness and strength that is worth while.

  1 THE GO AHEAD BOYS ON SMUGGLERS' ISLAND.
  2 THE GO AHEAD BOYS AND THE TREASURE CAVE.
  3 THE GO AHEAD BOYS AND THE MYSTERIOUS OLD HOUSE.
  4 THE GO AHEAD BOYS IN THE ISLAND CAMP.
  5 THE GO AHEAD BOYS AND THE RACING MOTOR BOAT.
  6 THE GO AHEAD BOYS AND SIMON'S MINE.

(Other volumes in preparation)

_Cloth, Large 12mo., Illustrated._

_Thrilling Tales That Teach True Patriotism_

FLAG & COUNTRY SERIES

By PAUL G. TOMLINSON

When the World War broke out, Bob Cook and his friend Hugh were in High
School. They chafed at being too young to enlist, but soon found that
there was plenty to do for their country right at home. And later they
found that they could do still bigger things.

These are real boys' books for real boys. Each story contains mystery,
excitement, or adventure from the very first chapter to the last.

_Cloth, Large 12 mo., Illustrated._

  Bob Cook and the German Spy
  Bob Cook and the German Air Fleet
  Bob Cook's Brother in the Trenches
  Bob Cook and the Winged Messengers
  Bob Cook and the Bomb Plot

BARSE & HOPKINS
NEWARK N. J.
NEW YORK N. Y.


When came the voice of Carroll,
      Distinct and measured, “Fire!”
    Oh! then you should have marked us
      Our volleys on them pour—
    Have heard our joyous rifles
      Ring sharply through the roar,
    And seen their foremost columns
      Melt hastily away
    As snow in mountain gorges
      Before the floods of May.

    They soon re-formed their columns,
      And, ’mid the fatal rain
    We never ceased to hurtle,
      Came to their work again.
    The Forty-fourth is with them,
      That first its laurels won
    With stout old Abercrombie
      Beneath an eastern sun.
    It rushes to the battle,
      And, though within the rear
    Its leader is a laggard,
      It shows no signs of fear.

    It did not need its colonel,
      For soon there came instead
    An eagle-eyed commander,
      And on its march he led.
    ’Twas Pakenham in person,
      The leader of the field;
    I knew it by the cheering
      That loudly round him pealed;
    And by his quick, sharp movement
      We felt his heart was stirred,
    As when at Salamanca
      He led the fighting Third.

    I raised my rifle quickly,
      I sighted at his breast,
    God save the gallant leader
      And take him to his rest!
    I did not draw the trigger,
      I could not for my life.
    So calm he sat his charger
      Amid the deadly strife,
    That in my fiercest moment
      A prayer arose from me—
    God save that gallant leader,
      Our foeman though he be!

    Sir Edward’s charger staggers;
      He leaps at once to ground.
    And ere the beast falls bleeding
      Another horse is found.
    His right arm falls—’tis wounded;
      He waves on high his left;
    In vain he leads the movement,
      The ranks in twain are cleft.
    The men in scarlet waver
      Before the men in brown,
    And fly in utter panic—
      The soldiers of the Crown!

    I thought the work was over,
      But nearer shouts were heard,
    And came, with Gibbs to head it,
      The gallant Ninety-third.
    Then Pakenham, exulting,
      With proud and joyous glance,
    Cried, “Children of the tartan—
      Bold Highlanders—advance!
    Advance to scale the breastworks,
      And drive them from their hold,
    And show the stainless courage
      That marked your sires of old!”

    His voice as yet was ringing,
      When, quick as light, there came
    The roaring of a cannon,
      And earth seemed all aflame.
    Who causes thus the thunder
      The doom of men to speak?
    It is the Baratarian,
      The fearless Dominique.
    Down through the marshalled Scotsmen
      The step of death is heard,
    And by the fierce tornado
      Falls half the Ninety-third.

    The smoke passed slowly upward,
      And, as it soared on high,
    I saw the brave commander
      In dying anguish lie.
    They bear him from the battle
      Who never fled the foe;
    Unmoved by death around them
      His bearers softly go.
    In vain their care, so gentle,
      Fades earth and all its scenes;
    The man of Salamanca
      Lies dead at New Orleans.

    But where were his lieutenants?
      Had they in terror fled?
    No! Keane was sorely wounded
      And Gibbs as good as dead.
    Brave Wilkinson commanding,
      A major of brigade,
    The shattered force to rally
      A final effort made.
    He led it up our ramparts,
      Small glory did he gain—
    Our captives some; some slaughtered,
      And he himself was slain.

    The stormers had retreated,
      The bloody work was o’er;
    The feet of the invaders
      Were soon to leave our shore.
    We rested on our rifles
      And talked about the fight,
    When came a sudden murmur
      Like fire from left to right;
    We turned and saw our chieftain,
      And then, good friend of mine,
    You should have heard the cheering
      That rang along the line.

    For well our men remembered
      How little, when they came,
    Had they but native courage,
      And trust in Jackson’s name;
    How through the day he labored,
      How kept the vigils still,
    Till discipline controlled us—
      A stronger power than will;
    And how he hurled us at them
      Within the evening hour,
    That red night in December,
      And made us feel our power.

    In answer to our shouting
      Fire lit his eye of grey;
    Erect, but thin and pallid,
      He passed upon his bay.
    Weak from the baffled fever,
      And shrunken in each limb,
    The swamps of Alabama
      Had done their work on him;
    But spite of that and fasting,
      And hours of sleepless care,
    The soul of Andrew Jackson
      Shone forth in glory there.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Creole meant originally the native-born descendant of foreign
white parents. It is now applied to the native whites in Louisiana.
People outside of that state frequently misapprehend its meaning, and
think the word denotes mixed blood.

_EL MOLINO DEL REY._

  The continually triumphant march of the American troops, under
  Scott, from Vera Cruz to the City of Mexico, in spite of greater
  numbers of opposing soldiers, fighting for their own soil, led many
  to undervalue the courage and endurance of the enemy. There never
  was a more signal error. The Mexicans fought fiercely and well;
  they displayed daring and steadiness, though they were not always
  able to stand before the bayonet, to whose uses they had not been
  trained. Their signal defeats, occurring after obstinate and bloody
  resistance, were due to the inefficiency of their general officers.
  Properly headed the Mexicans would make as fine soldiers as any in
  the world.

  Among the successive battles which marked the invasion, that
  of _El Molino del Rey_ (The King’s Mill) was one of the most
  spirit-stirring. One of the objects of attack consisted of a range
  of buildings, five hundred feet in front and well fortified, known
  by the title of the poem. On the left and farther off was the
  _Casamata_ or arsenal, loop-holed, and surrounded by a quadrangular
  field-work. Ravines and ditches, irregularities of ground, the
  position of the Mexican troops, and their superiority in numbers,
  made the task exceedingly difficult. The attack was begun at
  daylight. The enemy fought desperately and bitterly. Carrying the
  Mexican guns in the open field, the Americans were driven back with
  great slaughter, but with sufficient support retook them. At right
  and left the battle raged with a fury that showed the courage and
  perseverance of both sides. The intrenchments were stormed, but not
  until after a severe contest, and until house after house within
  the intrenchments had been broken into, the Mexicans everywhere
  making a heroic resistance. The loss on both sides was heavy.

_BATTLE OF THE KING’S MILL._

    Said my landlord, white-headed Gil Gomez,
      With newspaper held in his hand—
    “So they’ve built from El Paso a railway
      That Yankees may visit our land.
    As guests let them come and be welcome,
      But not as they came here before;
    They are rather rough fellows to handle
      In the rush of the battle and roar.

    “They took Vera Cruz and its castle;
      In triumph they marched through the land;
    We fought them with desperate daring,
      But lacked the right man to command.
    They stormed, at a loss, Cerro Gordo—
      Every mile in their movement it cost;
    And when they arrived at Puebla,
      Some thousands of men they had lost.

    “Ere our capital fell, and the city
      By foreign invaders was won,
    We called out among its defenders
      Each man who could handle a gun.
    Chapultepec stood in their pathway;
      Churubusco they had to attack;
    The Mill of the King—well, I fought there,
      And they were a hard nut to crack.

    “While their right was assailing the ramparts,
      Our force struck their left on the field,
    Where our colonel, in language that stirred us,
      To love of our country appealed.
    And we swore that we never would falter
      Before either sabre or ball;
    We would beat back the foeman before us,
      Or dead on the battle-field fall.

    “Fine words, you may say, but we meant them;
      And so when they came up the hill
    We poured on them volley on volley,
      And riddled their ranks with a will.
    Their line in a moment was broken;
      They closed it, and came with a cheer;
    But still we fired quickly and deadly,
      And felt neither pity nor fear.

    “We smote the blue column with grape-shot,
      But it rushed as the wild torrent runs;
    At the pieces they slew our best gunners,
      And took in the struggle our guns.
    We sprang in a rage to retake them,
      And lost nearly half of our men;
    Then, baffled and beaten, retreated,
      And gained our position again.

    “Ceased their yell, and in spite of our firing
      They dressed like an arrow their line,
    Then, standing there moveless a moment,
      Their eyes flashed with purpose malign,
    All still as the twilight in summer,
      No cloud on the sky to deform,

[Illustration: THE LAST CHARGE.]

    Like the lull in the voices of nature
      Ere wakens the whirlwind and storm.

    “We had fought them with death-daring spirit,
      And courage unyielding till then;
    No man could have forced us to falter,
      But these were more demons than men.
    Our ranks had been torn by their bullets,
      We filled all the gaps they had made;
    But the pall o that terrible silence
      The hearts of our boldest dismayed.

    “Before us no roaring of cannon,
      Rifle-rattle, or musketry peal;
    But there on the ocean of battle
      Surged steady the billow of steel.
    Fierce we opened our fire on the column,
      We pierced it with ball here and there;
    But it swept on in pitiless sternness
      Till we faltered and fled in despair.

    “After that all their movements were easy;
      At their storming Chapultepec fell,
    And that ended the war—we were beaten:
      No story is left me to tell.
    And now they come back to invade us,
      Though not with the bullet and blade;
    They are here with their goods on a railway,
      To conquer the country by trade.”

_A TALE OF THE WAR._

  The story that follows is, as the old magazines used to say of
  their tales, “founded on fact.” The foundation is rather slender.
  Similar incidents have occurred in all wars, ancient and modern;
  and nothing delights the old soldier more, when peace comes, than
  to meet a former antagonist, who, as in this instance, has “proved
  worthy of his steel.”

_THE FENCING-MASTER._

    You wish to improve yourself? Good! There’s a tool;
    Let us see of what stuff you are made; and—keep cool.
    Never hurry. On guard! When I thrust, parry so.
    Longe! Gracious! Disarmed me! Well, this is a go.
    “An accident?” Make me think that, if you can.
    You had better give lessons than take them, young man.
    Wrist of steel, form of whalebone, keen-eyed, supple, tall—
    You could manage that cut-and-thrust there on the wall.

    “A Toledo!” No doubt of it; here on the blade
    Is the name of the Spaniard by whom it was made,
    And the place where they forged it; its metal can tell
    It was made where such weapons they fashioned right well;
    But that, after all, has slight interest—I
    Well know how I got it, the where and the why;
    And thence comes a story—a memory, too.
    Will I tell it? Why, yes, I don’t care if I do.

    I was merely lieutenant—I never wore stars,
    Though it rained brigadiers at the time; and my scars
    Were got in the hours when I fought on my feet,
    And lucky to keep them at moments when sleet
    From some thousands of muskets upon us fell fast,
    And each breath that we drew seemed like drawing the last,
    And the foeman kept plying his bullets and shell,
    And to right and to left comrades they staggered and fell.

    ’Twas at Fredericksburg Heights, where we charged like such fools,
    And learned by experience—that saddest of schools—
    An experience that brought us a fire-rain beneath—
    Not to crack a hard nut, nor to try, with our teeth,
    That I got this old sabre, and with it a scar,
    From a small pistol bullet, my beauty to mar;
    And a narrow escape, for an inch t’other way,
    And a narrow earth-jacket I’d worn the next day.

    I hated the enemy, then—no offence,
    If you held ’tother side, each man acts on his sense—
    And I thought they were wrong, as I thought we were right;
    No doubt they thought otherwise. And they could fight.
    No man can deny it; and there well intrenched
    They awaited our coming, while none of us blenched,
    Though we knew it was madness to charge up that hill,
    That a child might have held had it courage and will.

    At the word we were off. It was glorious to see
    How we marched to the charge with a step fast and free.
    Flags flying, throats cheering, and every rank dressed
    To an inch in its straightness; when quick from the crest
    Opened loudly a hundred of cannon or more,
    And the path of the balls was mapped out in our gore.
    We were brave, but some tasks are too fearful for man;
    We faltered, we turned—who could help it?—we ran.

    We tried it again with another rebuff;
    And again, till we found we’d been hammered enough;
    And then by the river at close of the day,
    With the wounded, the men who came out of the fray—
    And I tell you right glad to be certainly back—
    Lay there on the ground. ’Twas a mournful bivouac,
    With few of us sure as we talked o’er our loss
    If they’d suffer us safely the river to cross.

    I strolled out to the picket—some thirty were there,
    With their arms in good order, their eyeballs kept bare—
    When, an hour before midnight, there came quick and hard
    The trample of horse charging down on the guard;
    And we met them—a squadron of dare-devils they—
    But a sharp edge of bayonets kept them at bay,
    While we emptied some barrels, with never a corse,
    Though we wounded one rider and crippled his horse.

    The rider pitched over; his comrades they heard
    His yell as he fell; but they turned and they spurred,
    For by this time our camp was aroused and poured in,
    And the visitors stayed not their laurels to win;
    When what does this Hotspur but spring to his feet,
    And, ready a regiment singly to meet,
    Draw weapon, and there, right in front of our line,
    To guard bring his sabre, and cross it with mine.

    ’Twas a regular duel: our men gathered round;
    Save the clash of the blades there was never a sound.
    ’Twas cut, thrust, and parry—the fellow fenced well—
    But at last on his shoulder a heavy blow fell,
    And his sword dropped to earth—in an instant he felt
    With his left for a pistol that hung at his belt,
    And he fired. O’er my temple the ball ploughed its track,
    When I tripped him, and threw my bold youth on his back.

    I said as I held him, “This rage has no use;
    You’re two-thirds a lion and one-third a goose.
    Do you want to fight armies! This passes a joke;
    Surrender at once, or your throttle I’ll choke.
    Stop the struggling, my madman, and tell us your choice—”
    “I give my parole.” ’Twas a musical voice,
    With a rather thin treble. Conceive my annoy
    When I found I had wasted my strength on a boy.

    ’Twas a boy of sixteen, with his lip free of down,
    Whose ball cut a groove ’twixt my temple and crown,
    And who handled his sabre as deftly and keen
    As a master of fence. Yes, a boy of sixteen.
    And I said, as I looked on him there where he stood,
    Defiant, though conquered, and dauntless in mood,
    “You crow well, my cockerel, ere you have spurs;
    Has your mother more such in that rare brood of hers?”

    Then he laughed, and his forefinger rose, as he said,
    “You carry the mark of my spur on your head—
    Who’ll give me a drink?” as at word of command
    A dozen canteens were thrust ready to hand;
    But ere he could choose, from his features there shrank
    The blood till he paled, then he staggered and sank.
    We raised him; I stooped there and pillowed his head
    On my knee; and I shivered—I thought he was dead.

    But no, sir, he rallied. We bore him away,
    When we crossed o’er the river, ere break of the day,
    Where our surgeon soon healed up his wound, and I nursed
    The boy, and grew fond where I’d liked from the first,
    Till, ready for prison, but hating confine,
    He fled one dark night and got over the line;
    And I never laid eyes on my bold shaver since.
    That’s his sword, and a weapon would honor a prince.

    You smile at the story—I’ve seen you, but where?
    What name did you carry? “George Gaston!”—well—there!
    Let me grapple your fist, boy? I’d never have known
    You, with all of those whiskers. Why, how you have grown!
    Twelve years! well, it _does_ make a difference, I see,
    In you, as it probably _has_ made in me.
    I can’t tell how glad I’m to see you at last.
    Sit down; take a pipe; and we’ll talk o’er the past.

_AN AMBUSCADE._

  The incident which gave rise to the following poem happened about
  1861, in Western Virginia, somewhere in the Gauley River region.
  The story may be correct, or not. I do not vouch for its accuracy.
  At all events, I have considered it to be _si non e vero, e ben
  trovato_, as the Italian proverb has it. If it be not true, it is
  well feigned.

_THE CHARGE BY THE FORD._

    Eighty and nine with their captain
      Rode on the enemy’s track,
    Rode in the grey of the morning:
      Nine of the ninety came back.

    Slow rose the mist from the river,
      Lighter each moment the way;
    Careless and tearless and fearless
      Galloped they on to the fray.

    Singing in tune, how the scabbard
      Loud on the stirrup-irons rang,
    Clinked as the men rose in saddle,
      Fell as they sank with a clang!

    What is it moves by the river,
      Faded and weary and weak?
    Grey-backs—a cross on their banner—
      Yonder the foe whom they seek.

    Silence! They see not, they hear not,
      Tarrying there by the marge;
    Forward! Draw sabre! Trot! Gallop!
      Charge like a hurricane! Charge!

    Ah! ’twas a man-trap infernal;
      Fire like the deep pit of hell!
    Volley on volley to meet them,
      Mixed with the grey rebels’ yell.

    Ninety had ridden to battle,
      Tracing the enemy’s track;
    Ninety had ridden to battle,
      Nine of the ninety came back.

    Honor the nine of the ninety,
      Honor the heroes who came
    Scathless from nine hundred muskets,
      Safe from the lead-bearing flame.

    Eighty and one of the troopers
      Lie on the field of the slain—
    Lie on the red field of honor:
      Honor the nine who remain.

    Cold are the dead there, and gory,
      There where their life-blood was spilt;
    Back come the living, each sabre
      Red from the point to the hilt.

    Give them three cheers and a tiger!
      Let the flags wave as they come!
    Give them the blare of the trumpet!
      Give them the roll of the drum!

A NEW FOLK SONG.

  The following is an attempt to add one more to the few patriotic
  songs of the country. Whatever may be said of the words, the melody
  and the music are undoubtedly marked by spirit and vigor.

_FLAG OF THE RAINBOW._

PATRIOTIC SONG—SOLO AND CHORUS (MIXED VOICES).

  WORDS BY THOMAS DUNN ENGLISH.        MUSIC COMPOSED BY MAX BRAUN.

[Illustration: _Marciale._

_Soprano and Tenor._

    Flag of the rainbow and banner of stars,
    Emblem of might and the shield of the lowly,
    Never to droop while our soldiers and tars
    Rally to guard it from outrage unholy.
]

  _Words—Copyrighted, 1880, by Arthur English._     _Music—Copyrighted, 1885, by Max Braun._

    Never may shame or misfortune, attend it,
    Enmity sully, or treachery rend it
    While but a man is alive to defend it—
    Flag of the rainbow and banner of stars.

_CHORUS.—Soprano._

_Alto._ _Tenor._ _Bass._

    Flag of the rainbow, resplendently streaming,
    Banner of stars in the blue above gleaming,
]

    Ensign, whose story is record of glory—
    Flag of the rainbow and banner of stars.
]

    Flag of a land where the people are free,
      Ever the breezes salute and caress it;
    Planted on earth, or afloat on the sea,
      Gallant men guard it, and fair women bless it.
    Fling out its folds o’er a country united,
    Warmed by the fires that our forefathers lighted,
    Refuge where down-trodden man is invited—
      Flag of the rainbow and banner of stars.
          CHORUS.—Flag of the rainbow, etc.

    Flag that our sires gave in trust to their sons,
      Symbol and sign of a liberty glorious,
    While the grass grows, and the clear water runs,
      Ever invincible, ever victorious.
    Long may it ’waken our pride and devotion,
    Rippling its colors in musical motion,
    First on the land and supreme on the ocean—
      Flag of the rainbow and banner of stars.
          CHORUS.—Flag of the rainbow, etc.

  The Orchestra Music (eight instruments) can be had from the
  Composer, at Newark, N. J.

SELECTED HOME READING.

Carleton’s Poetical Works.

Illustrated. Square 8vo, Ornamental Cloth, $2 00; Gilt Edges, $2 50.

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  FARM LEGENDS. By WILL CARLETON.

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  CITY BALLADS. By WILL CARLETON.

  YOUNG FOLKS’ CENTENNIAL RHYMES. By WILL CARLETON. Illustrated. Post
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English’s Poetical Works.

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Harper’s Cyclopædia of British and American Poetry.

  Harper’s Cyclopædia of British and American Poetry. Edited by EPES
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Poets of the Nineteenth Century.

  Poets of the Nineteenth Century. Selected and Edited by the
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  Transcriber’s Notes

  pg 117 Changed: Yelped the dark and red-eyed sluthhound
              to: Yelped the dark and red-eyed sleuthhound


dignity, and leaving behind him a memory that will rapidly fade. But I
cannot see him so clearly in the midst of a storm. A great industrial
upheaval, for example, where would that land him? The very fact that one
does not ask, How would he direct it? shows perhaps the measure of
distrust one may feel in his strength--not of character--but of
personality. He would remain, one is sure, a perfectly good man, and a
man of intelligence; but would any great body of the nation feel that it
would follow him either in a fight or in a retreat? I am not sure. On
the whole I feel that his personality is not so effective as it might
have been if he had not inherited the ecclesiastical tradition, had not
been born in the episcopal purple.

By this I mean that he gives me the feeling of a man who is not great,
but who has the seeds of greatness in him. Events may prove him greater
than even his warmest admirers now imagine him to be. A crisis, either
in the Church or in the economic world, might enable him to break
through a certain atmosphere of traditional clericalism which now rather
blurs the individual outline of his soul. But, even with the dissipation
of this atmosphere, one is not quite sure that the outline of his soul
would not follow the severe lines of a High Anglican tradition. He does
not, at present, convince one of original force.

Yet, when all doubts are expressed, he remains one of the chief hopes of
the Church, and so perhaps of the nation. For from his boyhood up the
Kingdom of God has meant to him a condition here upon earth in which the
soul of man, free from all oppression, can reach gladly up towards the
heights of spiritual development.

He hates in his soul the miserable state to which a conscienceless
industrialism has brought the daily life of mankind. He lays it down
that "it is the duty of the Church to make an altogether new effort to
realise and apply to all the relations of life its own positive ideal of
brotherhood and fellowship." To this end he has brought about an
important council of masters and men who are investigating with great
thoroughness the whole economic problem, so thoroughly that the Bishop
will not receive their report, I understand, till 1923--a report which
may make history.

As a member of the Society of Spirits, he says, "I have a particular
destiny to fulfil." He is a moral being, conscious of his dependence on
other men. He traces the historic growth of the moral judgment:

     The growth of morality is twofold. It is partly a growth in
     content, from negative to positive. It is partly a growth in
     extent, from tribal to universal. And in both of these forms of
     growth it is accompanied, and as a rule, though my knowledge would
     not entitle me to say always, it is also conditioned by a parallel
     development in religious conviction.

     We are all aware that early morality is mainly negative; it is the
     ruling out of certain ways of arriving at the human ideal, however
     that is to be defined, which have been attempted and have been
     found failures. Whatever else may be the way to reach the end,
     murder is not, theft is not, and so on. Thus we get the Second
     Table of the Decalogue, where morality commits itself to
     prohibitions--this is not the way, that is not the way; then
     gradually, under the pressure of experience, there begins to emerge
     the conception of the end which makes all this prohibition
     necessary, and which these methods when they were attempted failed
     to reach.

And so we come at last to "the Kingdom of God as proclaimed by Christ,
and the supreme law of ethics, the demonstrably final law of ethics, is
laid down--Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."

     Of course the words come from the Old Testament. Some critics used
     to say: "You will find in the Rabbis almost everything, if not
     quite everything, which you find in the teaching of Christ." "Yes,"
     added Wellhausen, "and how much else besides." It was the singling
     out of this great principle and laying the whole emphasis upon it
     that made the difference.

To a man who believes that Christ came to set up the Kingdom of God,
clearly neither the Conservative nor Liberal Party can appeal with any
compelling force of divinity. How far the Labour Party may appeal must
depend, I should think on the man's knowledge of economic law. As Dean
Inge says, Christ's sole contribution to economics is "Beware of
covetousness"--an injunction which the Labour Party has not yet quite
taken to its heart. But Dr. Temple has a right to challenge his clerical
critics for Christ's sanction of the present system, which is certainly
founded on covetousness and produces strikingly hideous results.

His theological position may be gathered from the following reply which
he made, as a Canon of Westminster, to a representative of the _Daily
Telegraph_ nearly two years ago. I do not think he has greatly changed.
He was asked how far the Church could go in meeting that large body of
opinion which cannot accept some of its chief dogmas. He replied:

     I can speak freely, because I happen to hold two of the dogmas
     which most people quarrel about--the virgin birth and the physical
     resurrection. There are other heresies floating about! One of our
     deans is inclined to assert the finitude of God, and another to
     deny anything in the nature of personality to God or to man's
     spirit! Rather confusing! Philosophic questions of this kind,
     however, do not greatly concern mankind. To believe in God the
     Father is essential to the Christian religion. Other doctrines may
     not be so essential, but they must not be regarded as unimportant.
     Personally I wish the Church to hold her dogmas, because I would do
     nothing to widen the gulf which separates us from the other great
     Churches, the Roman and the Eastern. The greatest political aim of
     humanity, in my opinion, is a super-state, and that can only come
     through a Church universal. How we all longed for it during the
     war!--one voice above the conflict, the voice of the Church, the
     voice of Christ! If the Pope had only spoken out, with no reference
     to the feelings of the Austrian Emperor!--what a gain that would
     have been for religion. But the great authentic voice never
     sounded. Instead of the successor of St. Peter we had to content
     ourselves with the American Press--excellent, no doubt, but hardly
     satisfying.

     Let me tell you a rather striking remark by an Italian friend of
     mine, an editor of an Italian review, and not a Roman Catholic. He
     was saying that every Church that persisted for any time possessed
     something essential to the religion of Christ. I asked him what he
     saw in the Roman Church that was essential. He replied at once,
     "The Papacy." I was surprised for the moment, but I saw presently
     what he meant. The desire of the world is for universal peace,
     universal harmony. Can that ever be achieved by a disunited
     Christendom? The nations are rivals. Their rivalry persisted at the
     Peace Conference, disappointing all the hopes of idealists. Must it
     not always persist, must not horrible carnage, awful desolation,
     ruinous destruction, and, at any rate, dangerous and provocative
     rivalries, always dog the steps of humanity until Christendom is
     one?

     Personally, I think reunion with Rome is so far off that it need
     not trouble us just now; there are other things to do; but I would
     certainly refrain from anything which made ultimate reunion more
     difficult. And so I hold fast to my Catholic doctrines. But I tell
     you where I find a great difficulty. A man comes to me for adult
     baptism. I have to ask him, point by point, if he verily believes
     the various doctrines of the Church, doctrines which a man baptised
     as an infant may not definitely accept and yet remain a faithful
     member of Christ's Church. What am I to say to one who has the
     passion of Christian morality in his heart, but asks me whether
     these verbal statements of belief are essential? He might say to
     me, "It would be immoral to assert that I believe what I have not
     examined, and to examine this doctrine so thoroughly as to give an
     answer not immoral would take a lifetime. Am I to remain outside
     the Church till then?" Here, I think, the Church can take a step
     which would widen its influence enormously. No man ought to be shut
     out of Christ's Church who has the love of God and the love of
     humanity in his heart. That seems to me quite clear. I don't like
     to say we make too much of the creeds, but I do say that we don't
     make half enough of the morality of Christ. That's where I should
     like to see the real test applied.

     What I should like to see would be a particular and individual
     profession of the Beatitudes. I should like to see congregations
     stand up, face to the East, do anything, I mean, that marks this
     profession out as something essential and personal, and so recite
     the Beatitudes. There might be a great sifting, but it would bring
     home the reality of the Christian demand to the heart and
     conscience of the world. After all, that's our ideal, isn't
     it?--the City of God. If we all concentrated on this ideal,
     realising that the morality of Christ is essential, I don't think
     there would be much bother taken, outside professional circles,
     about points of doctrine.

Then, writes the interviewer, arose the question of fervour. "Can the
City of God be established without some powerful impulse of the human
heart? Can it ever be established, for example, by the detached and self
satisfied intellectual priggishness of the subsidised sixpenny review,
or by the mere violence of the Labour extremist's oratory? Must there
not be something akin to the evangelical enthusiasm of the last century,
something of a revivalist nature? And yet have we not outgrown anything
of the kind?

"To Canon Temple the answer presents itself in this way: Rarer than
Christian charity is Christian faith. The supreme realism is yet to
come, namely, the realisation of Christ as a living Person, the
realisation that He truly meant what He said, the realisation that what
He said is of paramount importance in all the affairs of human life.
When mankind becomes consciously aware of the Christian faith as a
supreme truth, then there will be a realistic effort to establish the
City of God. The first step, then, is for the Church to make itself
something transcendently different from the materialistic world. It must
truly mean what it says when it asserts the morality of Christ. Blessed
are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the
peacemakers. The fervour is not to be born of an individual fear of hell
or an individual anxiety for celestial safety, but of an utterly
unselfish enthusiasm for the welfare of the world."

I should give a false impression of this very interesting man, who is so
sincere and so steadfast, if I did not mention the significant fact of
his happiness. He has always struck me, in spite of his formidable
intellect and a somewhat pedagogic front and the occasional accent of an
ancient and scholarly ecclesiasticism, as one of the happiest and most
boy-like of men--a man whose centre must be cloudlessly serene, and who
finds life definitely good. His laughter indeed, is a noble witness to
the truth of a rational and moral existence. His strength is as the
strength of ten, not only because his heart is pure, but because he has
formulated an intelligent thesis of existence.

He has pointed out that the Pickwick Papers could not have been produced
in any but a Christian country. "Satire you may get to perfection in
pagan countries. But only in those countries where the morality of
Christ has penetrated deeply do you get the spirit that loves the thing
it laughs at."

PRINCIPAL W.B. SELBIE

SELBIE, Rev. WM. BOOTHBY, M.A.; Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford,
since 1909; b. Chesterfield, 24 Dec., 1862; e.s. of late Rev. R.W.
Selbie, B.A. of Salford; m. Mildred Mary, 2d d. of late Joseph Thompson,
J.P., LL.D., of Wilmslow, Cheshire; two s. one d. Educ.: Manchester
Grammar School; Brasenose and Mansfield Colleges, Oxford; incorporated
M.A., at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1904; Hon. D.D. Glasgow, 1911.
Lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament at Mansfield College, Oxford,
1889-90; Minister Highgate Congregational Church, London, 1890-1902;
Emmanuel Congregational Church, Cambridge, 1902-1909; Editor of the
_British Congregationalist_, 1899-1909; Lecture in Pastoral Theology at
Cheshunt College, Cambridge, 1907-1909; Chairman of Congregational
Union, 1914-1915; President of National Free Church Council, 1917.

[Illustration: PRINCIPAL W.B. SELBIE]

CHAPTER XI

PRINCIPAL W.B. SELBIE

     _I make not therefore my head a grave, but a treasure of knowledge;
     I intend no Monopoly, but a community in learning; I study not for
     my own sake only, but for theirs that study not for themselves.

     I envy no man that knows more than my self, but pity them that know
     less. I instruct no man as an exercise of my knowledge, or with an
     intent rather to nourish and keep it alive in mine own head, then
     beget and propagate it in his; and in the midst of all my
     endeavour, there is but one thought that dejects me, that my
     acquired parts must perish with my self, nor can be Legacied among
     my honoured Friends_.--SIR THOMAS BROWNE.

Mansfield College, Oxford, has been happy in its Principals. Dr.
Fairbairn created respect for Nonconformity in the very citadel of High
Anglicanism; Dr. Selbie has converted that respect into friendship.
There is no man of note or power at Oxford who does not speak with real
affection of this devoted scholar, who has been dubbed up there "an
inspired mouse."

He is a little man, with quick darting movements, a twinkling bright
eye, an altogether unaggressive voice, and a manner that is singularly
insinuating and appealing. As it is impossible to think of a blustering
or brow-beating mouse, or a mouse that advances with the stride of a
Guardsman and the minatory aspect of a bull-terrier, so it is impossible
to think of Dr. Selbie as a fellow of any truculence, a scholar of any
prejudice, a Christian of any unctimoniousness. Mildness is the very
temper of his soul, and modesty the centre of his being.

He is a Hebrew scholar who has advanced into philosophical territory and
now is pushing his investigations into the field of psychology. Modest
and wholly unpretentious he sets up as no original genius, and is
content with his double rôle of close observer and respectful critic. He
is rather a guide to men than a light. He has nothing new to say, but
nothing foolish. His words are words of purest wisdom, though you may
have heard them before. You feel that if he cannot lead you to the
Promised Land, at least he will not conduct you to the precipice and the
abyss.

Above everything else he is a scholar who would put his learning at the
service of his fellow-men. Education with him is a passion, a part of
his philanthropy, a part of his religion. It is the darkness of man, not
the sinfulness of man, that catches his attention. He feels that the
world is foolish because it is ignorant, not because it is wicked. And
he feels that the foolishness of the world is a count in the indictment
against religion. Religion has not taught; it has used mankind as a
dictaphone.

He has spoken to me with great hope and confidence of the change which
is coming over the Church in this matter of religious teaching. Dr.
Headlam, the Regius Professor of Divinity, has lighted a candle at
Oxford which by God's grace will never be put out. There is now a fairly
general feeling that men who enter the ministry must be educated not to
pass a test or to prove themselves capable of conducting a service or
performing as rite, but educated as educators--apostles of truth,
evangelists of the higher life.

Religion, according to Dr. Selbie, is something to be taught. It is not
a mystery to be presented, but an idea to be inculcated. The world has
got to understand religion before it can live religiously.

But all education stands in sore need of the trained teacher. Our
teachers are not good enough. They may be very able men and women, but
few of them are very able teachers. The first need in a teacher is to
inspire in his students a love of knowledge, a hunger and thirst after
wisdom. But, look at our schools, look at our great cities, look at the
pleasures and recreations which satisfy the vast masses of the
population! As a nation, we have no enthusiasm for education. This is
because we have so little understanding of the nature and province of
education. We have never been taught what education is.

With his enthusiasm for education goes a perfervid spiritual conviction
that intellect is not enough. He tells the story of an old Scots woman
who listened intently to a highly intellectual sermon by a brilliant
scholar, and at the end of it called out from her seat, "Aye, aye; but
yon rope o' yours is nae lang enough tae reach the likes o' me."
Something much more mysterious and much more powerful than intellect is
necessary to change the heart of humanity; but when love and knowledge
go hand in hand there you get both the great teacher and the good
shepherd. Knowledge without love is almost as useless to a teacher as
love without knowledge.

In his study at Mansfield, a large and friendly room book-lined from
floor to ceiling, with a pleasant hearth at one end of it, where he
smokes an occasional pipe with an interrupting fellow scholar, but where
he is most often to be found buried in a great book and oblivious of all
else besides, this little man with the darting eyes and soft voice is
now invading, with sound good sense to save him from nausea or
contamination, the region of morbid psychology.

He would perfectly agree with Dr. Inge's characteristic statement, "The
suggestion that in prayer we only hear the echo of our own voices is
ridiculous to anyone who has prayed"; but he is, I think, much more
aware of the power and extent of this suggestion than is the Dean of St.
Paul's, and therefore qualifies himself to meet the psychologists on
their own ground.

He has confessed to me that in reading Freud he had to wade through much
almost unimaginable filth, and he is driven to think that Freud himself
is the victim of "a sex complex," a man so obsessed by a single theory,
so ridden by one idea, that he perfectly illustrates the witty
definition of an expert--"an expert is one who knows nothing else." All
the same, Dr. Selbie assures me that his studies have been well worth
while, that modern psychology has much to teach us of the highest value,
and that religion as well as medicine will more and more have to take
account of this daring science which advances so swiftly into their own
provinces.

So far as my experience goes no man of the first rank in Anglican
circles is preparing himself for this inevitable encounter with anything
like the thoroughness of Dr. Selbie, a nonconformist.

He makes it a rule never to interfere with the troubles of another
communion; but I do not think I misrepresent him when I say that he
regrets the immersion of the Church of England in questions of
theological disputation at a time when the true battle of religion is
shifting on to quite other ground.

Not many people in Anglo-Catholic circles realise perhaps that to the
educated nonconformist all this excitement about modernism seems
strangely old-fashioned. Long ago such matters were settled. The scholar
nonconformist is no longer concerned with dogmatic difficulties; he has
abandoned with the old teleology the old pagan theology, and now,
believing in an immanent teleology, in an evolution that is creative and
that has direction, believing also that Christ is the incarnation of
God's purpose and the revelation of His character, he is pressing
forward not to meet the difficulties of to-morrow, but to equip himself
for meeting those difficulties when they arise with real intelligence
and genuine power.

"If medicine," said Froude, "had been regulated three hundred years ago
by Act of Parliament; if there had been Thirty-Nine Articles of Physic,
and every licensed practitioner had been compelled, under pains and
penalties, to compound his drugs by the prescriptions of Henry the
Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy to conjecture in what state
of health the people of this country would at present be found."

Christendom does not yet realise how greatly, how grievously, it has
suffered in spiritual health by having sent to Coventry or to the stake
so many theological Simpsons, Listers, and Pasteurs simply because they
could not rest their minds in the hypotheses of very ill-educated men
who strove to grapple with the highest of all intellectual problems at a
time when knowledge was at its lowest level.

It will perhaps rouse the vitality of the Church when it finds twenty or
thirty years from now that the great protagonists of Christianity in its
future battles with science and philosophy are drawn from the ranks of
nonconformity.

Dr. Selbie is certainly preparing his students for these encounters, and
preparing them, too, with an emphasis on one particular aspect of the
old theology, and a central one, which the apologists of more orthodox
communions have either overlooked or find it convenient to ignore.

One of his first postulates is that man inhabits a moral universe, and
from this postulate he has no difficulty in moving forward not only to
contemplate the hypothesis of immortality, but to confront the
difficulty of punishment for sin. In a little book of his called _Belief
and Life_ he has the following passages:

     In the long last men cannot be persuaded to deny their own moral
     nature, and they will not be content with a theory of the universe
     which does not satisfy their sense of right.

And because of this very sense of right they entertain no soft and
sentimental notions concerning the universe:

     They believe in judgment, in retribution, and in the great
     principle that "as a man sows, so shall he also reap." They
     therefore require that room shall be found in the scheme of things
     for the working out of this principle. They recognise that such
     room is not to be found in this present life, and so they accept
     the fact that God hath set eternity in our hearts, and that we are
     built on a scale which requires a more abundant life to complete
     it.

     In corroboration of their faith, it may be said, as John Stuart
     Mill used to argue, that wherever belief in the future has been
     strong and vivid, it has made for human progress. There is no doubt
     that the deterioration of religion and the more material views of
     life so prevalent just now are due to the loss of faith in the
     future.

Religion, he says, can never live or be effective within the narrow
circle of time and sense. Nevertheless he has the courage to say: "The
future life, like the belief in God, is best treated as an hypothesis
that is yet in process of verification."

But this hypothesis explains what else were inexplicable. It works. And,
confronting the hypothesis of immortality, he insists that a future life
must embrace retribution. "As a man sows, so shall he also reap."
Immortality is not to be regarded as a sentimental compensation for our
terrestrial experience, but as the essential continuity of our spiritual
evolution. "For many, no doubt, it will mean an experience of probation,
and for all one of retribution."

He sees clearly and gratefully that "the moral range of the work of
Christ in the human soul, His gifts of grace, forgiveness, and power,
lift men at once on to the plane of the spiritual and fill their
conception of life with a new and richer content." But he does not shut
his eyes to the fact of the moral law, and with all the force of his
character and all the strength of his intellect he accepts "the great
principle that as a man sows, so shall he also reap."

In this way Dr. Selbie prepares his students, not only to meet the
intellectual difficulties of the future, but to stand fast in the
ancient faith of their forefathers that the moral law is a fact of the
universe. He helps them to be fighters as well as teachers. They are to
fight the complacency of men, the false optimism of the world, the
delusive tolerance of materialism. There is no need for them to preach
hell fire and damnation, but throughout all their preaching, making it
a real thing and a thing of the most pressing moment, must ring that
just and inevitable word, Retribution. In a moral universe, selfishness
involves, rightly and inevitably, suffering--suffering self-sown,
self-determined, and self-merited.

He is the last man in the world from whom one would expect such teaching
to emanate. He seems, in his social moments, a scholar who is scarcely
aware of humanity in his delicious pursuit of pure truth, a man who
inhabits the faery realm of ideas, and drinks the milk of Paradise. But
approach him on other ground and you find, though his serenity never
deserts him, though he is always imperturbable and unassertive, that his
interest in humanity and the practical problems of humanity is as vivid
and consuming as that of any social reformer.

There, in Oxford, among his books, and carrying on his duties as
Principal of Mansfield College, Dr. Selbie, back from holidays spent in
watching the great working world and listening to the teachers of that
world, finds himself not alarmed, but anxious. The voice of religion, he
feels, is not making itself heard, and the voices of churches are making
only a discord. Men are going astray because they have no knowledge of
their course, and the blind are falling into the ditch because they are
led by the blind. How is this dangerous condition of things to be
remedied?

He replies, By the teachers.

What we need at this hour above all other needs is the great teacher,
one able to proclaim and explain the truths of religion, and filled with
a high enthusiasm for his office. We need, he tells me, men who can
restore to preaching its best authority. At the present time preaching
has fallen to a low ebb because it is despised, and it is despised
because it has lost the element of teaching. But let men recover their
faith in the moral law, let them see that retribution is inevitable
justice, let them realise that the life of man is a progress in
spiritual comprehension, let them understand that existence is a great
thing and not a mean thing, and they will feel again the compulsion to
preach, and their preaching, founded on the moral law and inspired by
faith in the teaching of Christ, will draw the world from the
destructive negations of materialism, and wake it out of the fatal
torpors of dull indifference.

Happy, I think, is the church which has such a teacher at the head of
its disciples. Though its traditions may not reach far back into the
historic twilight of ignorance, the rays of the unrisen sun strike upon
its banners as they advance towards the future of mankind.

ARCHBISHOP RANDALL DAVIDSON

CANTERBURY, Archbishop of, since 1903; Most Rev. Randall Thomas
Davidson, D.D., D.C.L., LL.D.; Prelate of the Order of the Garter,
1895-1903; G.C.V.O., cr. 1904; Royal Victorian Chain, 1911; Grand Cross
of the Royal Order of the Saviour (Greece), 1918; Grand Cordon de
l'Ordre de la Couronne (Belgium, 1919); First class of the Order of St.
Sava (Serbia), 1919; b. 7 April, 1848; s. of Henry Davidson, Muirhouse,
Edinburgh, and Henrietta, d. of John Swinton, Kimmerghame; m. Edith, 2d
d. of Archbishop Tait of Canterbury, 1878. Educ.: Harrow; Trinity
College, Oxford (D.D.), Curate of Dartford, Kent, 1874-77; Chaplain and
Private Secretary to Archbishop Tait of Canterbury, 1877-82; to
Archbishop Benson, 1882-3; Examining Chaplain to Bishop Lightfoot of
Durham, 1881-83; Sub-Almoner to Queen Victoria, 1882; one of the six
preachers of Canterbury Cathedral, 1880-83; Dean of Windsor and Domestic
Chaplain to Queen Victoria, 1883-91; Clerk of the Closet to Queen
Victoria, 1891-1901; to H.M. the King, 1905-3; Trustee of the British
Museum from 1884, Bishop of Rochester, 1891-95; Bishop of Winchester,
1895-1903.

[Illustration: ARCHBISHOP RANDALL DAVIDSON]

CHAPTER XII

ARCHBISHOP RANDALL DAVIDSON

     _Let us be flexible, dear Grace; let us be flexible!_--HENRY JAMES.

     . . . _the Archbishop recalled both to the gravity of the
     issue_.--LORD MORLEY.

Because of his great place and his many merits, both of heart and head,
and also because his career raises the question I desire to discuss in
my Conclusion, I have left the Archbishop of Canterbury to the last of
these brief studies in religious personality.

More admirably, I think, because more entirely, than any of the other
men I have attempted to study, Dr. Davidson sums up the virtues of
Anglicanism. He stands, first and foremost, for order, decency, and good
temper. If he has a passion it is for the _status quo_. If he has a
genius it is for compromise. Lord Morley, who knows him and respects
him, describes him as "a man of broad mind, sagacious temper, steady and
careful judgment, good knowledge of the workable strength of rival
sections." Pre-eminently the Archbishop is a practical man.

I know not out of how many crises he has contrived, both as a fisher of
men and a good shepherd, to lift the Church of England by hook or by
crook.

When he was a youth a serious accident threatened to destroy his health
and ruin his prospects. A charge of gunshot struck him at the bottom of
the spine. The shot still remain in his body, and every autumn he is
visited with an attack of quasiperitonitis which reduces him to a sad
state of weakness. For long weeks together--once it was for a whole
year--his diet is restricted entirely to milk foods.

In spite of this grave disability, I am inclined to doubt if there is a
harder worker in any church of the world. Dr. Davidson's knowledge of
the Church of England, not only in these British Islands but in every
one of the Dominions, is a knowledge of the most close and intimate
nature. He knows the names and often the character of men who are
working in the remotest parishes of the uttermost parts of the Empire.
He knows also their thousand difficulties and is often at pains to
relieve their distresses. This devotion has an ideal origin. He has
cherished the dream all his life that the Church of England, so sane, so
moderate, so sensible, and so rightly insistent on moral earnestness,
may become, with the growth and development of the British Commonwealth,
the greatest of all the Christian Churches--greater, more catholic, than
Rome.

To this end he has worked with a devotion and a strain of energy which
only those immediately about him can properly appraise.

Such is the exhaustion of this labour that when he can find time to take
a day off he spends it in bed.

His policy has always been to keep men reasonable, but with no ignoble
idea of living a quiet life. His powers of persuasion, which have
succeeded so often in making unreasonable men temporarily reasonable,
have their source in the transparent sincerity of his soul. No one who
encounters him can doubt for a moment that the Primate is seeking the
good of the Church of England, and seeking that good because he believes
in the English Church as one of the great spiritual forces of
civilisation. No one, I mean, could think that he is either temporising
for the sake of peace itself or that his policy of moderation masks a
secret sympathy with a particular party. Clear as the sun at noon is the
goodness of the man, his unprejudiced devotion to a practical ideal, and
his unselfish ambition for the reasonable future of the great Church of
the English nation.

He gives most of us the feeling of a very able man of business, an ideal
family solicitor; but there is a quite different side to this character.
He is by no means a mystic, as that word is usually understood, but he
is a man who deeply believes in the chief instrument of the mystic's
spiritual life, that is to say, in prayer. He is not a saint, in the
general acceptance of that term, but his whole life is devoted with an
undeviating singleness of aim to effecting the chief ambition of the
saint--a knowledge of God in the hearts and minds of men. Because he
believes that the best method of achieving that consummation, having
regard to the present level of human intelligence, is by moderate
courses, one must not think that he is lukewarm in the cause of
religion. With all the force of his clear and able mind, he believes in
moderation. Anything that in the least degree savours of extravagance
seems to him impolitic. He does not believe in sudden bursts of
emotional energy; he believes in constant pressure.

In my intercourse with him I have found him eminently sane and judicial,
cold towards excessive fervour, but not cold at all towards ardent
faith, inclined perhaps to miss the cause of spiritual impatience,
constitutionally averse from any understanding sympathy with religious
ecstasy, but never self-satisfied, intolerant, or in the remotest
fashion cynical. Always he expresses his views with modesty, and
sometimes with healthy good-humour, disposed to take life cheerfully,
never moved to mistake a molehill for a mountain, always quietly certain
that he is on the right road, whatever critics may care to say about his
pace.

It is perhaps unreasonable to expect height and depth where there is
excessive breadth. The Archbishop might make a bad captain, but he could
have few rivals as an umpire. He is an admirable judge if an indifferent
advocate.

His grave earnestness is balanced by a conviction that humour is not
without a serious purpose. He looks upon life in the average, avoiding
all abnormality, and he sees the average with a genial smile. He
thoroughly appreciates the oddities of English character, and would ask
with Gladstone, "In what country except ours (as I know to have
happened) would a Parish Ball have been got up in order to supply funds
for a Parish Hearse?"

His attitude to the excitements and sensations of the passing day may be
gathered from a simple incident. During the most heady days of the War,
that is to say, days when people made least use of their heads, I
encountered him at the country-house of a well-known statesman. One
morning, while we were being lined up for a photograph, the boar-hound
of our host came and forced himself between the Archbishop and myself.
"What would the newspapers say," exclaimed the Archbishop in my ear, "if
they knew that his name is--_Kaiser_!"

In this manner he regards all sensational excitement of every kind. When
people are tearing their hair, and the welkin rings with such
affrighting cries as Downfall and Crisis, the Archbishop's rather solemn
and alarmed countenance breaks up into a genial smile. It is when people
are immovable in otiose self-satisfaction, when the air is still and
when lethargy creeps over the whole body of humanity, that the face of
Dr. Davidson hardens. There is nothing he dreads more than apathy,
nothing that so stimulates his policy of constant pressure as inertia.
Ndengei, the supreme deity of the Fiji Islands, the laziest of all the
gods, has the serpent for his effigy. "The Devil tempts the busy man,"
says a Turkish proverb, "but the idle man tempts the Devil."

One of those who has worked with the Archbishop for many years, although
his views are of a rather extreme order and his temperament altogether
of the excessive kind, said to me the other day, "When Randall Davidson
went to Canterbury, I told those who asked me what would be the result
of his reign. He will leave the Church as he found it. I was wrong. He
has done much more than that." He went on to say that there was now a
far greater charity between the different schools than existed at the
beginning of the century, and that if unity had not been attained, at
least disruption had been avoided.

One of the most eloquent and far-sighted of the Evangelicals puts the
matter to me in this fashion: "It is possible that fifty years hence men
may ask whether he ought not to have been constructive; but for the
present we, his contemporaries, must confess that it is wonderful how he
keeps things together."

"Pull yourself together!" was the admonition addressed to a somewhat
hilarious undergraduate. "But I haven't got a together," he made answer.

If it be true that a house divided against itself cannot stand, then we
must admit that Dr. Randall Davidson is not merely one of the Church's
greatest statesmen, but a worker of miracles, a man whom we might expect
to take up serpents and drink any deadly thing.

But it will be safe to keep the Archbishop's reputation in the region of
statesmanship.

The reader, I hope, will not think me either pedantic or supercilious if
I insist that no word is more misused by the newspapers, indeed by the
whole modern world, than this word statesmanship. It is a word of which
the antonym is drifting. It signifies steersmanship, and implies
control, guidance, direction, and, obviously, foresight. Now, let us see
how this word is used by those who are supposed to instruct public
opinion.

The settlement of the Irish Question was hailed as a triumph of British
statesmanship. One of the Sunday newspapers of the higher order
acclaimed Mr. Lloyd George as the greatest statesman in the history of
England and perhaps the greatest man in the world. But it needs only a
little thought, only a moment's reflection, to realise that this welcome
settlement was a triumph, not of statesmanship, but of murderous
brutality. There would have been no pæns if there had been no volleys,
no triumph if there had been no violence.

Statesmanship was defeated in the eighties, and those who defeated it,
those who exalted prejudice and racialism and intolerance above
rationality and foresight, are now among those whom the world salutes as
immortal statesmen. In truth, they have bowed the knee to violence.

By the same power, and not by reason, the Government extended the
franchise to women. Statesmanship held firmly on the contrary course
till the winds of violence rose and the rain of anarchy threatened to
descend in a flood of moral devastation.

Look closely into the great achievements of the Washington Conference
and you will find that the nations are not voluntarily seeking the
rational ideal of peace, but are being driven by urgent necessity into
the course of reason. Statesmanship would have disarmed the world before
1914. It was only after 1918 that the spectre of Universal Bankruptcy
drove the poor trembling immortals who pass for statesmen to embrace
each other as heroes in search of an ideal. Humanity has achieved
nothing noble or glorious in the last thirty years; it has been driven
by the winds of God into every haven which has saved it from shipwreck.

With a clear understanding of the meaning of the word statesmanship, one
may ask with some hope of arriving at an intelligent answer whether
Randall Davidson is a great statesman.

Under his rule a divided and distracted Church has held together; but
religion has gone out of favour. During his reign at Lambeth there has
been a sensible movement towards reunion; but the nation is
uninterested. If the Romanists have been less rebellious, the
Evangelicals have lost almost all their zeal. If the Church still
witnesses to the truth of Christianity, it is with all her ancient
inequalities thick upon her, turning her idealism to ridicule, and in
the midst of a nation which has become steadily more and more
indifferent to the Church, more and more cynical towards religion.

If there is peace in the Church, there is little of that moral
earnestness in the life of the nation which in past times laid the
foundations both of English character and of English greatness. We are
becoming swiftly, I think, a light and flippant people, the only
seriousness in our midst the economic seriousness of our depressed
classes. It is not to any other class in the community that the zealot
can address himself with an evangel of any kind. Only where a sense of
bitterness exists, a sense of anger and rebellion, can the idealist in
these dangerous times hope for attention.

The Bishop of Manchester preached some few weeks ago a sermon to the
unemployed of that city. He was asked at the end of his sermon if the
workers could get justice without the use of force. He replied, "It all
depends what you mean by force." And at that the congregation shouted,
"Murder." They were to have concluded the service with the hymn, "When
wilt Thou save Thy people?" Instead, it concluded with the singing of
"The Red Flag."

Now let us ask ourselves what might have been the course of religious
history during the last twenty years if Dr. Randall Davidson, instead of
contenting himself with composing clerical quarrels, had used his high
office to control the Church and to steer it in the direction of greater
spiritual realism.

Suppose, for example, that after presiding over a conference of warring
Churchmen, he had turned to one of the champions of a party, and had
said to him, in the manner of a true spiritual father, "I have
something to ask of you. What was the first command of our Risen Lord to
the apostle Simon Peter?" He would have been obliged to answer, "Feed My
lambs." "And the second command?" And he would have been obliged to say,
"Feed My sheep." "And the third command?" And again he would have been
obliged to say, "Feed My sheep." Then, what had they all said if the
Primate had turned to both sides and admonished them in these words, "My
brothers in Christ, I think there would now be no disputation among you
if instead of concerning yourselves with the traditions of men you had
rather given yourselves entirely to obeying the commandment of our Risen
Lord"?

But the question would remain, With what food is the flock to be fed?

Is it possible to give an answer to this question which will not open
again the floodgates of controversy? If that is so, then those of us who
acknowledge the moral law had better abandon Christianity altogether,
and set ourselves to construct a new and unifying gospel of ethics from
the works of the moralists. For the world is torn asunder by strife, and
contention is the opportunity of the wolves. Humanity has begun to
apprehend this truth. It has begun to find out that disarmament is
practical wisdom; and now it is beginning to wonder whether counsels of
perfection may not serve its domestic interests with a higher efficiency
than the compromises effected by unprincipled politicians. It is in the
mood to listen to a teacher who speaks with authority; but in no mood
to listen to a war of words.

If religion cannot speak with one voice in the world, it had better
adjourn, like the plenipotentiaries of Sinn Fein and the representatives
of the British Government, to a secret session. It must come to an
understanding with itself, an agreement as to what it means, before
mankind will recover interest in its existence.

CHAPTER XIII

CONCLUSION

     _The fashion of this world passes away, and it is with what is
     abiding that I would fain concern myself._--GOETHE.

     _The breadth of my life is not measured by the multitude of my
     pursuits, nor the space I take up amongst other men; but by the
     fulness of the whole life which I know as mine._--F.H. BRADLEY.

     _We are but at the very beginning of the knowledge and control of
     our minds; but with that beginning an immense hope is dawning on
     the world._--"THE TIMES."

     _The Ideal is only Truth at a distance._--LAMARTINE.

It is curious, if Christianity is from heaven, that it exercises so
little power in the affairs of the human race.

Far from exercising power of any noticeable degree, it now ceases to be
even attractive. The successors of St. Paul are not shaping world policy
at Washington; they are organising whist-drives and opening bazaars. The
average clergyman, I am afraid, is regarded in these days as something
of a bore, a wet-blanket even at tea-parties.

Something is wrong with the Church. It is impious to think that heaven
interposed in the affairs of humanity to produce that ridiculous mouse,
the modern curate. No teacher in the history of the world ever occupied
a lower place in the respect of men. So deep is the pit into which the
modern minister has fallen that no one attempts to get him out. He is
abandoned by the world. He figures with the starving children of Russia
in appeals to the charitable an object of pity. The hungry sheep look up
and are not fed, but the shepherd also looks up from his pit of poverty
and neglect, as hungry as the sheep, hungry for the bare necessities of
animal life.

This is surely a tragic position for a preacher of good news, and a
teacher sent from God.

If the Christian would know how far his Church has fallen from power,
let him reflect that, even after the sorrow and desolation of a world
conflict, there is no atmosphere in Europe rendering the savagery of
submarine warfare unthinkable--utterly unthinkable to the conscience of
mankind.

Mr. Balfour and Lord Lee make a proposal to end this devilish warfare;
the French oppose; newspapers open a crusade, here against France, there
against Great Britain; the vital interests of humanity are at stake; the
door will either be opened to disarmament or closed against peace for
another fifty years; and Christ is silent--the Church does not lift even
three fingers to bless the cause of peace.

Why is the Church so powerless? Why is it she has so fatally lost the
attention of mankind?

Is it not because she has nothing to give, nothing to teach? Morals are
older than Christianity, and sacramental religions as well. Men feel
that they cannot understand the immense paraphernalia of religion and
its unnatural atmosphere of high mystery; it is so tremendous a fuss
about so very small a result. If God is in the Church, why doesn't He do
more for it, and so more for the world? The revenues of religion are
still enormous. What do they accomplish?

Men who think in this way are not enemies of religion, any more than the
Jews who came to Jesus were enemies of Judaism. They deserve the respect
of the Church. Indeed, it is in finding an answer to their challenge
that the Church is most likely to find a solution to her own problem.
But that answer will never be found if the Church seeks for it only in
her documents. There is another place in which she must look for the
truth of Christ, a truth as completely overlooked by the modernist as by
the traditionalist: it is in the movements of the soul, in the world of
living men.

I believe that there are more evidences for the existence of Christ in
the modern world than in the whole lexicon of theology. I believe it is
more possible to discern His features and to feel the breath of His lips
by confronting the discoveries of modern science than by turning back
the leaves of religious history to the first blurred pages of the
Christian tradition. I believe, indeed, that it is now wholly impossible
for any man to comprehend the Light which shone upon human darkness
nearly two thousand years ago without bringing the documents of the
Church to the light which is shining across the world at this present
hour from the torch of science.

"Why seek ye the living among the dead?"

For twenty years I have followed this clue to the meaning of Christ and
the nature of His message. I have seen Darwinism, the very foundation of
modern materialism, break up like thin ice and melt away from the view
of philosophy. I have seen evolution betray one of its greatest secrets
to the soul of man--an immanent teleology, an invisible _direction_
towards deeper consciousness, an intelligent _movement_ towards greater
understanding. And I have seen the demonstration by science that this
visible and tangible world in its final analysis is both invisible and
intangible--a phantasm of the senses.

I may be allowed perhaps to recall the incident which first set me to
follow this clue.

One day, when he was deep in his studies of Radiant Matter, Sir William
Crookes touched a little table which stood between our two chairs, and
said to me, "We shall announce to the world in a year or two, perhaps
sooner, that the atoms of which this table is composed are made up of
tiny charges of electricity, and we shall prove that each one of those
tiny electrons, relative to its size, is farther away from its nearest
neighbour than our earth from the nearest star."

I have lived to see this prophecy fulfilled, though its implications are
not yet understood.

The Church does not yet realise that physical science, hitherto regarded
as the enemy of religion and the mocker of philosophy, presents us now
with the world of the transcendentalists, the world of the
metaphysicians, the world of religious seers--a world which is real and
visible only to our limited senses, but a world which disappears from
all vision and definition directly we bring to its investigation those
ingenious instruments of science which act as extensions of our senses.

Every schoolboy is now aware that a door is solid only to his eyes and
touch; that with the aid of X-rays it becomes transparent, the light
passing through it as water passes through network, revealing what is on
the other side. Every schoolboy also knows that his own body can be so
photographed as to reveal its skeleton.

But the Church has yet to learn from M. Bergson the alphabet of this new
knowledge, namely, that our senses and our reason are what they are
because of a long evolution in _action_--not in pure thought. We have
got our sight by looking for prey or for enemies, and our hearing by
listening for the movement of prey or of enemies. Our reason, too, is
fashioned out of a long heredity of action, that is to say an immemorial
discipline in an existence purely animal. So powerful is the influence
of this heredity, so real seems to us a physical world which is not
real, so infallible seem to us the senses by which we fail to live
successfully even as animals, that, as Christ said, a man must be born
again before he can enter the Kingdom of God--that is to say, before he
can behold and inhabit Reality.

At the head of this chapter I have set a quotation from a leading
article in _The Times_ on the recent lectures of M. Coué. It is now
eighteen years ago, treading in the footsteps of Frederic Myers, that I
discussed with some of the chief medical hypnotists in London and Paris
the phenomena of mental suggestion. It was known then that
auto-suggestion is a force of tremendous power. It was stated then that
"an immense hope is dawning on the world," but not then, not even now,
is it realised that this awkward term of "auto-suggestion" is merely a
synonym for the more beautiful and ancient words, meditation and prayer.

We know now that a man can radically change his character, can uproot
the toughest habits of a lifetime, by telling himself that his will is
master in his house of life[9]. And we think that we have made this
discovery, forgetting that Shakespeare said "The love of heaven makes us
heavenly," and that Christ said, "Blessed are they which do hunger and
thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled," and "All things,
whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive," or, as
Mark has it, "What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that
ye receive them, and ye shall have them," and "According to your faith
be it unto you."

[Footnote 9: At Nancy even a lesion has been cured by suggestion.]

With our present knowledge of the universe and of the human mind, it is
at last possible for us to perceive in the confused records of the New
Testament the nature of Christ's teaching. He loved the world for its
beauty, but He penetrated its delusions and breathed the air of its only
reality. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon the earth . . . but lay
up for yourselves treasures in heaven . . . for where your treasure is,
there will your heart be also." "What is a man profited, if he shall
gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in
exchange for his soul?" "If thou canst believe, all things are possible
to him that believeth." "He that hath ears to hear let him hear."

His world was always the world of thought. The actual deed of sin was
merely a physical consequence; the cause was spiritual: it was an evil
thought; to harbour an evil thought is to commit the sin. He looked into
the hearts of men, into their thoughts, and there only He found their
reality. All else was transitory. All else would see corruption and die.
The flesh profiteth nothing. But the thought of a man--that is to say
the region now being explored by the psycho-analyst, the
psycho-therapeutist, and the psycho I know not what else--this was the
one region in which Jesus moved, the region in which He proclaimed his
transvaluation of values, a region of which He was so complete a master
that He could heal delusion at a word and disorder by a touch.

One does not perhaps wholly realise, until one has read the muddied
works of modern psychology, how sublime was the soul of Jesus. It might
be possible to infer His divinity from the simplicity of the language
and the white purity of the thought with which He expressed truths of
the profoundest significance even in regions where so many fall into
unhealthiness. "No man can serve two masters"--is not that the teaching
of the modern hypnotist in dealing with "a divided self"? "Set your
affections on things above"--is not that the counsel of the sane
psycho-analyst in treating a diseased mind? "Ask, and it shall be given
you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto
you"--is not this the message of M. Coué, the teaching of
auto-suggestion?--that teaching which makes us say at last that "an
immense hope is dawning on the world."

And, in sober truth, we may indeed believe that this immense hope is
dawning on the world; the hope that mankind may recognise in Jesus, Who
called Himself the Light of the World, the world's great Teacher of
Reality.

Here we approach that unifying principle which was the object of our
quest in setting out to explore the chaos of opinion in the modern
Church.

Is it not possible that the Church might see the trivial unimportance of
all those matters which at present dismember her, if she saw the supreme
importance of Christ as a Teacher? Might she not come to behold a glory
in that Teaching greater even than that which she has so heroically but
so unavailingly endeavoured to make the world behold in the crucified
Sacrifice and Propitiation for its sins?

Is there not here the opportunity of an evangel, the dawning of an
immense hope on the world?

But let the Church ask herself, before she abandons her labour of
expounding doctrines concerning the Person of Christ, whether she is
quite clear as to the teaching of Jesus. "Not every one that saith unto
Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he that
doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven."

Read St. Mark, the earliest, the least corrupted, of the narratives. It
is a declaration of a new power in human life, and a record of its
achievements. It is this, and nothing else. The one great word of that
gospel is Faith--not faith in a formula or an institution, but faith in
the absolute supremacy of spirit. Faith in spirit means power--power
over circumstance, power over matter, power over the heredity of our
animal origin. Jesus not only sets men free from the prison-house of
material delusion, as Plato and others sought to do; He teaches them the
way in which alone they can exercise spiritual dominion.

There were two things to which He set no limits: one, the love of God,
and the other, the power of Faith.

Let all the schools in the Church revise their definition of the word
_faith_, and unity will come of itself. Faith, as Jesus employed that
term, meant _making use of belief_--belief that the spiritual alone is
the real. Faith is the action of the soul. It is the working of a
power. It is mastery of life.

Let the Church realise that Jesus taught this power of the soul. Let her
begin to exercise her own spiritual powers. And then let her understand
that she is in the world to teach men, to lead the advance of evolution,
to educate humanity in the use of its highest powers.

A knowledge of the sense in which Jesus employed the word Faith is the
clue to the recovery of Christian influence.

This is the suggestion which I venture to submit to the Church, at a
moment in history when the harsh and brutal spirit of materialism is
crushing all faith out of the soul and leaving the body no tenant but
its appetites.

I do not think any observant man can deny that the whole "suggestion" of
the modern world is of an evil nature, that is to say, of a nature which
fastens upon the mind the delusions of the senses, making it believe
that what it sees is reality, persuading it that the gratification of
those senses is the end and object of existence. The wages of this
suggestion is death--the death of the soul.

How far the world is gone from sanity, and how clearly science endorses
Christ's teaching, may be seen in the modern craze for unhealthy
excitement, and in the medical condemnation of that morbid passion. A
well-known doctor in London, Sir Bruce Bruce-Porter, has lately
condemned Grand Guignol as intensifying the emotion of fear or
anxiety--"Take no heed"--and has declared anger, or any violence of
feeling, to be a danger--"Love your enemies"--pointing out that "the
experiment of inoculating a guinea-pig with the perspiration taken from
the forehead of a man in a violent temper has resulted in the death of
the guinea-pig with all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning."

Science is the one voice that condemns in these days the self-destroying
madness of a world set on seeking to live habitually in the lower life.
Sometimes journalism may light a candle of reason in our darkness, as
when _The Times_ recently pointed out in a leading article that the
half-humorous interest of the world in the murderer Landru had its rise
in a profound instinct of the human spirit, namely, that horror must be
laughed at if it is not to be feared--to fear it is to be overwhelmed by
it. This instinct is "an unconscious refusal to believe in the ultimate
reality of evil; it is the predecessor of the scientific spirit which
says that evil is something to be overcome by understanding it."

Out of such a lethargy as that which now holds her captive, I do not
think the Church can be roused except by the trumpets of war. Let her,
then, consider whether there is not here, in this world of false values,
of low ambitions, of mean pleasures, of dark materialism, and of
perilous superstitions, a world to be fought, as the doctors fight it,
and the best kind of newspapers, if only for the sake of posterity, a
world against which it is good to oppose oneself--the Children of Light
against the Children of Darkness.

What is the good news of Christianity if it is not the news that "the
spiritual alone is the real," that there is freedom for human life and
mastery for the human soul, that faith in the spiritual is power over
the material? Even in the tentative form which M. Bergson uses to reveal
the reality of the spiritual world there is such joy that one of his
interpreters can exclaim:

     Here we are in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego
     takes shape, where the spring within us gushes up, in the warm
     secrecy of the darkness which ushers our trembling being into
     birth. Distinctions fail us. Words are useless now. We hear the
     wells of consciousness at their mysterious task like an invisible
     shiver of running water through the mossy shades of the caves. I
     dissolve in the joy of becoming. I abandon myself to the delight of
     being a pulsing reality. I no longer know whether I see scents,
     breathe sounds, or smell colours. Do I love? Do I think? The
     question has no longer a meaning for me. I am, in my complete self,
     each of my attitudes, each of my changes. It is not my sight which
     is indistinct or my attention which is idle. It is I who have
     resumed contact with pure reality, whose essential movement admits
     no form of number.

How much greater the joy of him who knows that Reality is God, and that
God is Father.

     The open secret flashes on the brain,
     As if one almost guessed it, almost knew
     Whence we have sailed and voyage whereunto.

Let us suppose that the whole Church of Christ was engaged in teaching
men this high mystery, this open secret, that all such great
associations as the Christian Students' Movement, the Adult Sunday
School Movement, the World Association for Adult Education, and all the
numerous Missionary Societies throughout the whole earth--let us suppose
that the entire Church of Christ was at work in the world teaching
Christ's teaching, _educating_ men, bringing it home to the heart and
mind of humanity that "life is mental travel," that it is in our
thoughts we live and by our thoughts we are shaped, that flesh and blood
cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, that all terrestrial values are
radically false, that to hunger and thirst after anything is to get it,
that the power of "the dominant wish" is our fate, that in love alone
can we live to the full stature of our destiny, that the Kingdom of God
is within us, that the engine of faith has not yet been exerted by the
whole human race in concert, that conquests await us in the spiritual
world before which all the conquests of the material world will pale
into insignificance, that we are spirits finding our way out of the
darkness of an animal ancestry into the Light of an immortal inheritance
as children of God; let us suppose that this, and not dogma was the
Voice of the Church; must we not say that by such teaching the whole
world would eventually be rescued from our present chaos and in the
fulness of time be born again into the knowledge of spiritual reality?

I believe it is only when a man realises that in its final analysis the
whole universe is invisible, and ceases to think of himself as an animal
and becomes profoundly sensible of himself as a spirit, and a spirit in
communion with a spiritual reality closer than hands and feet, that it
is possible for him to fulfil the two great commandments on which hang
all the Law and the Prophets. And without that fulfilment there must
always be chaos.

If the Church will not teach the world, modern science will inspire
philosophy to take up anew the teaching of Plato, and the world will go
forward into the light, but with no creative love in its soul to save it
from itself. "If therefore," said Christ, "the light that is in thee be
darkness, how great is that darkness."