el that at bottom our hopes
would be travestied by any conception we, with our little intellect and
minute knowledge, could at present frame. It was once said to me by a
far-seeing friend[74] that the modern dislike of church-going, the
modern incapacity to write a long coherent poem, the modern passion for
music and for realism, even for sordid realism, all sprang from the same
roots, from the thirst for an infinite harmony, the belief that
everything was somehow involved in that harmony, and the conviction that
all systems, as yet made or makeable, were entirely inadequate.

And to the list we may add, I think, the modern passion for history and
for science. We study history not merely to be warned by failures or
inspired by shining examples: at bottom we have a belief that somehow
the lives and struggles of those men in the distant past are still quite
as important as our own. We follow the discoveries of science not only
for their commercial value or because we share the excitement of the
chase, but because, deeper than all, we suspect that the universe is a
glorious thing.

And there is another matter, perhaps the most important of all, on which
I would dwell as I draw to a close, where Meredith leads directly to the
dominant thought of the present day. I mean his feeling that, if the
universe is to be proved acceptable to man's conscience, it will be
through the effort of man himself struggling towards his own ideal. It
is as though the world itself had to be redeemed by man. This hope is
the real hope of our time. So far as the modern world believes the
doctrine of the Incarnation, it is in this sense that it believes.

And this belief we find everywhere in all hopeful writers, great or
small. It gives dignity to the latest writings of H.G. Wells, this faith
in a spirit moving in man greater than man himself, worthy to fight and
fit to overcome all that is wrong in the universe. Bernard Shaw's creed
is just the same, sometimes thinly disguised under respect for 'the
Life-Force', sometimes coming boldly forward in audacious, profound
assertions that God needs Man to accomplish His own will and is helpless
without him. 'There is something I want to do,' Shaw imagines his God as
saying, 'and I don't know what it is; I must make a brain, the human
brain, to find it out.' Rodin modelled a mighty hand, the Hand of God,
holding within it Man and Woman. Shaw, it is reported, asked the
sculptor: 'I suppose you meant you