uad, or the prison death as to a
chariot of fire.

XXXIV

THE ELEMENT OF CALM

All are aware that we have no abiding city here, but that, says the
hymn-writer, is a truth which should not cost the saint a tear, and our
politicians appear to lament it as little as the saints. Their eyes are
dry; it does not distress their mind, it seems hardly to occur to them,
unless, perhaps, they are defeated candidates. One might suppose from
their manner that eternal truths depended on their efforts, and that the
city they seek to build would abide for ever. Could all this toil and
expenditure be lavished on a transitory show, all this eloquence upon
the baseless fabric of a vision, all this hatred and malice upon things
that wax old as doth a garment and like a vesture are rolled up? One
would think from his preoccupied zeal that every politician was laying
the foundation stone of an everlasting Jerusalem, did not reason and
experience alike forbid the possibility.

May it not rather be that the politicians, like the saints, keep the
tears of mortality out of their eyes by contemplating this passing dream
under the aspect of eternal realities? In months when the heavens at
night are filled with constellations of peculiar beauty, may we not
suppose that the politician, emerging from the Town Hall amid the cheers
and execrations of the voice that represents the voice of God, lifts up
his eyes unto the heavens, where prone Orion still grasps his sword,
and Auriga drives his chariot of fire, and the pole star hangs
immovable, by which Ulysses set his helm? And as he gazes, he recognises
with joy in his heart that the stars themselves, with all their
recurrent comets and flaming meteors and immovable constellations,
hardly cast a stain upon the white radiance of eternity, under which he
has been striving and crying and perpetrating comparatively trifling
deviations from exactness.

It is a consolation which a large proportion, probably more than half,
of mankind shares with our politicians. Like them, the greater part of
mankind is aware that there is peace somewhere beyond these voices, that
life with all its unsatisfied longings and its repetition of care is
transitory as a summer cloud, and that the only way of escape from the
pain and misery, the foulness and corruption, of this material universe
is by the destruction of all desires, except the one engrossing desire
for non-existence. That is why the majority of mankin