man spirit will be upon their work, and this alone makes the task
of any man or woman singular and precious and of the elect.

I hear again, "But you will make them solitaries...." The solitary way
is first--all the great companions have taken that way at first.
Solitude--that is the atmosphere for the conception of every heroism.
The aspirations of the solitary turn to God. Having heard the voice of
God--then comes the turning back to men.... To be powerful in two
worlds--that is the ideal. There is a time for nestlings--and a time for
great migratory flights.

25

THE CHOICE OF THE MANY

A teacher said upon hearing the title of this book, that she supposed it
had to do with the child in relation to the state or nation--a patriotic
meaning. I was wrong in getting a sting from this, for one should not be
ambiguous. The sting came because of a peculiar distaste for national
integrations and boundaries of any kind between men. The new
civilisation which the world is preparing for, and which the war seems
divinely ordained to hasten to us, will have little to do with tightly
bound and self-contained peoples. In fact, such nations furnish in
themselves an explosive force for disruption. Little more than material
vision is now required to perceive most of the nations of lower Europe
gathered like crones about a fire hugging the heat to their knees, their
spines touched with death.

The work in the Chapel is very far from partisanship, nationalism and
the like. It has been a true joy to watch the young minds grasp the
larger conception. It is as if they were prepared for it--as if they had
been waiting. Encouraged to look to their own origins for opinion and
understanding; taught that what they find there is the right opinion and
conception _for them_, they find it mainly out of accord with things as
they are. They express the thing as they see it, and in this way build
forms of thought for the actions of the future to pass through.

This is sheer realism. We have always called those who walked before us,
the mystics, because the paths they tread are dim to our eyes and their
distance far ahead. That which is the mystic pathway of one generation
is the open highway of the next. No man ever felt the awakening of his
spirit and bowed to its manifestation, who was not a mystic to the many
or few about him, and always the children of his fellows come to
understand him better than their fathers.

I say to them here