ous and
disposed to make terms for itself rather than come into any large
schemes of reconstruction that will abolish profit as a primary aim in
economic life, there is still a very considerable movement towards such
a reconstruction. Nothing is so misleading as a careless analogy. In the
dead years that followed the Napoleonic wars, which are often quoted as
a precedent for expectation now, the spirit of collective service
was near its minimum; it was never so strong and never so manifestly
spreading and increasing as it is to-day.

But service to what?

I have my own very strong preconceptions here, and since my temperament
is sanguine they necessarily colour my view. I believe that this impulse
to collective service can satisfy itself only under the formula that
mankind is one state of which God is the undying king, and that the
service of men's collective needs is the true worship of God. But
eagerly as I would grasp at any evidence that this idea is being
developed and taken up by the general consciousness, I am quite unable
to persuade myself that anything of the sort is going on. I do perceive
a search for large forms into which the prevalent impulse to devotion
can be thrown. But the organised religious bodies, with their creeds
and badges and their instinct for self-preservation at any cost,
stand between men and their spiritual growth in just the same way the
forestallers stand between men and food. Their activities at present are
an almost intolerable nuisance. One cannot say "God" but some tout is
instantly seeking to pluck one into his particular cave of flummery and
orthodoxy. What a rational man means by God is just God. The more you
define and argue about God the more he remains the same simple thing.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, modern Hindu religious thought, all agree
in declaring that there is one God, master and leader of all mankind, in
unending conflict with cruelty, disorder, folly and waste. To my mind,
it follows immediately that there can be no king, no government of any
sort, which is not either a subordinate or a rebel government, a local
usurpation, in the kingdom of God. But no organised religious body has
ever had the courage and honesty to insist upon this. They all pander to
nationalism and to powers and princes. They exists so to pander. Every
organised religion in the world exists only to exploit and divert and
waste the religious impulse in man.

This conviction that the world ki