arnate, their life
changes but with its life, and together they recede into the divine
whence they came. The effort to extract the inmost truth, tearing away
the form which by an obscure yet inviolate process has crystallized
around it, is like breaking a statue to discover the loveliness of its
loveliness. Akbar would have as quickly reached the creative thought,
the _idea_ enshrined in the Athene of Phidias, the immortal cause of
its power, by destroying the form, as have severed the divine thought
immanent in the Magian or Hindoo faiths from their integral embodiments.

But a greater task awaits Britain. Among the races of the earth whose
fate is already dependent, or within a brief period will be dependent
upon Europe, what empire is to aid them, moving with nature, to attain
that harmony which Dante discerned? What empire, disregarding the
mediaeval ideal, the effort to impose upon them systems, rites,
institutions, creeds, to which they are by nature, by their history, by
inherited pride in the traditions of the past, hostile or invincibly
opposed, will adventure the new, the loftier enterprise of developing
all that is permanent and divine within their own civilizations,
institutions, rites, and creeds? Nature and the dead shall lend their
unseen but mighty alliance to such purposes! Thus will Britain turn to
the uses of humanity the valour or the fortune which has brought the
religions of India and the power of Islam beneath her sway.

The continents of the world no longer contain isolated races severed
from each other by the barriers of nature, mutual ignorance, or the
artifices of man, but vast masses, moving into ever-deepening
intimacies, imitations, mutually influenced and influencing. Man grows
conscious to himself as one, and to represent this consciousness on the
round earth, as Rome did once represent it on this half the world, to
be amongst the races of all the earth what Hildebrand dreamed the
Normans might be amongst the nations of Europe, is not this a task
exalted enough to quicken the most sluggish zeal, the most retrograde
"patriotism"? For without such mediation, misunderstanding, envy,
hate, mistrust still erect barriers between the races of mankind more
impassable than continents or seas or the great wall of Ch'in Chi.
This is a part not for the future merely, it is one to which Britain is
already by her past committed. The task is great, for between
civilization and barbarism, the v