on every hand. Whether in religion, art, education,
or public affairs, we do not stop to find our ideals for the problems
that confront us. We do not even look at them. Our modern problems are
all Jerichos to us--most of them paper ones. We arrange symposiums and
processions around them and shout at them and march up and down before
them. Modern prophecy is the blare of the trumpet. Modern thought is a
crowd hurrying to and fro. Civilisation is the dust we scuffle in each
other's eyes.

When the peace and strength of spirit with which the walls of temples
are builded no longer dwell in them, the stones crumble. Temples are
built of eon-gathered and eon-rested stones. Infinite nights and days
are wrought in them, and leisure and splendour wait upon them, and
visits of suns and stars, and when leisure and splendour are no more in
human beings' lives, and visits of suns and stars are as though they
were not, in our civilisation, the walls of it shall crumble upon us. If
fulness and leisure and power of living are no more with us, nothing
shall save us. Walls of encyclopaedias--not even walls of Bibles shall
save us, nor miles of Carnegie-library. Empty and hasty and cowardly
living does not get itself protected from the laws of nature by tons of
paper and ink. The only way out for civilisation is through the
practical men in it--men who grapple daily with ideals, who keep office
hours with their souls, who keep hold of life with books, who take
enough time out of hurrahing civilisation along--to live.

Civilisation has been long in building and its splendour still hangs
over us, but Parthenons do not stand when Parthenons are no longer being
lived in Greek men's souls. Only those who have Coliseums in them can
keep Coliseums around them. The Ideal has its own way. It has it with
the very stones. It was an Ideal, a vanished Ideal, that made a
moonlight scene for tourists out of the Coliseum--out of the Dead Soul
of Rome.

IV

Ashes

There seem to be but two fundamental characteristic sensibilities left
alive in the typical, callously-civilised man. One of these
sensibilities is the sense of motion and the other is the sense of mass.
If he cannot be appealed to through one of these senses, it is of little
use to appeal to him at all. In proportion as he is civilised, the
civilised man can be depended on for two things. He can always be
touched by a hurry of any kind, and he never fails to be moved by a
crowd. If he