possibilities, and our assurance of its reality is ever more and more
confirmed, while on the other hand its actual or past results at the
lower level of nature have grown and are growing more familiar. We see
that Progress is the essential and therefore eternal form of life and
spiritual being, which endows it everywhere with worth and substance.
With this comes the conviction that the source of all this lies inward,
in that inwardness where our true selves lie and springs from the very
nature of that. The spirit which is within us is not other than the
spirit which upholds and maintains the whole Universe and works after
the same fashion. And with regard to this its manner of working, we have
learned that it proceeds by taking account of its own past achievements,
imagining or conceiving for itself tasks relevant to these but not
limited by them, and finds in that the conditions and stimulus to their
actualization. It is our business to imitate this procedure and so to
contribute to the advance of the whole. No work so done is or can be
lost. We are justified in supposing that in so doing we are leagued
together in effective co-operation with one another and with all other
forces at work in the whole. In and through us, though not in and
through us only, Progress goes on, drawing us along with it. Inner and
outer Progress, free allegiance and loyal subjection concur and do not
clash, and the world in which we live and act appears to us as it is--a
city of God which is also a self-governed and self-administered city of
free men.

But above all, what it prescribes to us is the duty--another name for
'the ideal of action'--to seek first light as to the true nature of our
world and ourselves, dismissing and disregarding all appearance, however
charming or seductive. Unless we learn to see Progress as universal and
omnipresent and omnipotent, we shall set before ourselves ideals of
action which are false and treacherous. We must exert ourselves not
merely to apprehend, but to dwell in the apprehension and vision of it.

And if there were no other reason, we should know it for the right
ideal--this command first to seek light--because it is the hardest thing
that can be asked of us or that we can ask of ourselves. But what is
thus asked is not mere Faith and Hope, but a loyal adherence to the
knowledge which is within us.

Is this not the hardest? To-day, when over there in France and Flanders,
and indeed almost all over