--the death of the soul.

How far the world is gone from sanity, and how clearly science endorses
Christ's teaching, may be seen in the modern craze for unhealthy
excitement, and in the medical condemnation of that morbid passion. A
well-known doctor in London, Sir Bruce Bruce-Porter, has lately
condemned Grand Guignol as intensifying the emotion of fear or
anxiety--"Take no heed"--and has declared anger, or any violence of
feeling, to be a danger--"Love your enemies"--pointing out that "the
experiment of inoculating a guinea-pig with the perspiration taken from
the forehead of a man in a violent temper has resulted in the death of
the guinea-pig with all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning."

Science is the one voice that condemns in these days the self-destroying
madness of a world set on seeking to live habitually in the lower life.
Sometimes journalism may light a candle of reason in our darkness, as
when _The Times_ recently pointed out in a leading article that the
half-humorous interest of the world in the murderer Landru had its rise
in a profound instinct of the human spirit, namely, that horror must be
laughed at if it is not to be feared--to fear it is to be overwhelmed by
it. This instinct is "an unconscious refusal to believe in the ultimate
reality of evil; it is the predecessor of the scientific spirit which
says that evil is something to be overcome by understanding it."

Out of such a lethargy as that which now holds her captive, I do not
think the Church can be roused except by the trumpets of war. Let her,
then, consider whether there is not here, in this world of false values,
of low ambitions, of mean pleasures, of dark materialism, and of
perilous superstitions, a world to be fought, as the doctors fight it,
and the best kind of newspapers, if only for the sake of posterity, a
world against which it is good to oppose oneself--the Children of Light
against the Children of Darkness.

What is the good news of Christianity if it is not the news that "the
spiritual alone is the real," that there is freedom for human life and
mastery for the human soul, that faith in the spiritual is power over
the material? Even in the tentative form which M. Bergson uses to reveal
the reality of the spiritual world there is such joy that one of his
interpreters can exclaim:

Here we are in these regions of twilight and dream, where our ego
takes shape, where the spring within us gushes up, in the warm