g mist which now
surrounds us, it looks as if the State were about as competent
to control trade as to control the weather. Bureaucracy is having
its fling, and when the mist clears off it will stand revealed
as a well-meant (and well-paid) imposture.

Closely related to all these problems is the problem of the women's
vote. Here the mist is very thick indeed. Those who have always
favoured it are naturally sanguine of good results. Women will
vote for peace; women will vote for temperance; women will vote
for everything that guards the sanctity of the home. Those who
have opposed the change see very different consequences. Women
will vote for war; women will vote as the clergyman bids them;
women will vote for Socialism. All this is sheer guess-work, and
very misty guess-work too.

And yet once more. There are (though this may to some seem strange)
people who consider the Church at least as important as the State,
and even more so, inasmuch as its concernments relate to an eternal
instead of a transitory order. What are the prospects of the Church?
Here the mists are thicker than ever. Is the ideal of the Free
Church in the Free State any nearer realization than it was three
years ago? All sorts of discordant voices reach me through the
layers of cloud. Some cry, "Our one hope for national religion
is to rivet tighter than ever the chains which bind the Church
to the chariot-wheels of the State." Others reply, "Break those
chains, and let us go free--even without a roof over our heads or
a pound in our pockets." And there is a third section--the party
which, as Newman said, attempts to steer between the Scylla of
Aye and the Charybdis of No through the channel of no meaning,
and this section cries for some reform which shall abolish the
cynical mockery of the Conge d'Elire, and secure to the Church,
while still established and endowed, the self-governing rights
of a Free Church. In ecclesiastical quarters the mist is always
particularly thick.

Certainly at this moment, if ever in our national life, we must
be content to "walk by faith and not by sight." This chapter began
with imagery, and with imagery it shall end. "I have often stood
on some mountain peak, some Cumbrian or Alpine hill, over which
the dim mists rolled; and suddenly, through one mighty rent in
that cloudy curtain, I have seen the blue heaven in all its beauty,
and, far below my feet, the rivers and cities and cornfields of
the plain sparkled in