ved there could not be any more profiteering, or ca' canny,
or any injustice. For love never says 'Give,' only 'Let me give.' ...
But, alas! we make room for every spirit but that. For forty years we
have taught the children by statute, but they have not been taught
that. They have been taught figures and the records that are mainly
the records of crime, and the explanations that are no explanations.
We must begin again and teach our children what duty is, what the love
of God and man is, what reverence is, and how there is a moral purpose
working out life and death--life if men conform to it and death if they
defy it. We teach everything by statute except that--the one thing
needful. We teach that man is to be saved by the brain; we have
forgotten that salvation is of the soul. There is but one power known
among men that can turn the self-willed and self-centred life into the
self-sacrificing and the God-centred life, and that power is the spirit
of the Carpenter of Nazareth. If we but sought it, then it would fuse
the poor fissiparous sand of our national life into the unity and
potency of steel. It is our only hope.

CHAPTER II

THE SUPREME NEED

'To me through these thin cobwebs Death and Eternity sat
gazing.'--THOMAS CARLYLE.

Many eager hearts looked for the redemption of mankind to come out of
Armageddon. Aceldama has been cleansed, but redemption seems to tarry.
And nobody need be surprised. Out of filth and mud and horror the
cleansed soul does not emerge. There was a king long ago who saw ten
horrible plagues succeed each other until at last the first-born lay
dead--but he was the same until the sea overwhelmed him. And man is
the same in all ages. Cataclysms do not work renewal. Miracles do not
regenerate. Not even the millions dead will mean a new earth or a new
Britain. That new Britain of the heart's desire will only come if men
and women whose souls are quickened will arise and make their world
anew. The world's supreme need is not reorganisation, but a new spirit.

I

The pathos of humanity is that men are ever the victims of illusion.
After Waterloo, when a conflict that waged for a quarter of a century
ended, our fathers hailed the millennial dawn. But, alas! Peterloo
succeeded Waterloo. The nation was seized with the passion for riches.
To get rich quick the nation had to be reorganised on an industrial
basis, and the people were swept out of the green of England