hensible,
opening out with all that inexplicable quality of design that, for
example, some great piece of music, some symphony of Beethoven's,
conveys. We see future beyond future and past behind past. It has been
like the coming of dawn, at first a colourless dawn, clear and spacious,
before which the mists whirl and fade, and there opens to our eyes not
the narrow passage, the definite end we had imagined, but the rocky,
ill-defined path we follow high amidst this limitless prospect of space
and time. At first the dawn is cold--there is, at times, a quality of
terror almost in the cold clearness of the morning twilight; but
insensibly its coldness passes, the sky is touched with fire, and
presently, up out of the dayspring in the east, the sunlight will be
pouring.... And these men of the New Republic will be going about in the
daylight of things assured.

And men's concern under this ampler view will no longer be to work out
a system of penalties for the sins of dead men, but to understand and
participate in this great development that now dawns on the human
understanding. The insoluble problems of pain and death, gaunt,
incomprehensible facts as they were, fall into place in the gigantic
order that evolution unfolds. All things are integral in the mighty
scheme, the slain builds up the slayer, the wolf grooms the horse into
swiftness, and the tiger calls for wisdom and courage out of man. All
things are integral, but it has been left for men to be consciously
integral, to take, at last, a share in the process, to have wills that
have caught a harmony with the universal will, as sand grains flash into
splendour under the blaze of the sun. There will be many who will never
be called to this religious conviction, who will lead their little lives
like fools, playing foolishly with religion and all the great issues of
life, or like the beasts that perish, having sense alone; but those who,
by character and intelligence, are predestinate to participate in the
reality of life, will fearlessly shape all their ethical determinations
and public policy anew, from a fearless study of themselves and the
apparent purpose that opens out before them.

Very much of the cry for faith that sounds in contemporary life so
loudly, and often with so distressing a note of sincerity, comes from
the unsatisfied egotisms of unemployed, and, therefore, unhappy and
craving people; but much is also due to the distress in the minds of
active an