tutions
which form the working mechanism of life, even suggesting possible
substitutes. In ending I would say as in beginning; this is not because
salvation may be found through any device, however perfect, but because
this itself, by reason of its excellence on the one hand or its
depravity on the other, is, under the law of life, contributory to the
operation of the divine spirit (which is the sole effective energy) or a
deterrent. I have tried at long last to gather up this diffuse argument
for the supremacy of spiritual force as it works through the individual,
and to place it before you in this concluding lecture. Perhaps I can
best emphasize my point thus.

The evil of the institutions which now hold back the progress that must
be made towards social recovery and the Great Peace, is far less the
quality of wrongness in themselves and the ill influence they put in
operation, than it is the revelation they make of personal character. It
is not so much that newspapers are what they are as that there should be
men who are pleased and content to make them this, in apparently honest
ignorance of what they are doing, and that there should be others in
sufficient number to make them profitable business propositions by
giving them their appreciation and support. It is not so much that
government should be what it is as that character should have so far
degenerated in the working majority of citizens that these qualities
should show themselves as a fixed condition, and that there should be no
body of men of numerical distinction, who regard the situation with
sentiments much more active than those of indifference and amused
toleration. It is not so much that the industrial situation should be
what it is, as that there should be on both sides moral wrong, and that
this condition could not have come about, nor could it still be
maintained, except through character degeneration in the individual. It
is not so much that many forms of religion are what they are, as it is
that they should progressively have become this through their exponents
and adherents, and that there should be so many who are still willing to
defend them in this case.

Every ill thing reveals through its very quality the defects of the
individual man, and as upon him must rest the responsibilities for the
fault, so on him must be placed the responsibility for the recovery. The
failures we have recorded, the false gods we have raised up in idolatry,
even th