that . . . I knew that the world was perishable and
would end, but I did not think it would end with a whimper, but, if
anything, with a trump of doom . . . I will even be so indecently
frivolous as to burst into song, and say to the young pessimists:

Some sneer; some snigger; some simper;
In the youth where we laughed, and sang.
And they may end with a whimper
But we will end with a bang.

His last message for this generation was the sound of a trumpet
calling us to resurrection. A dead world must find life again, must
go back to the meaning of the book of Genesis at which it had learnt
to sneer: must realise a week once more with--"the grandeur of that
conception, by which a week has become a wonderful and mystical thing
in which Man imitates God in his labour and in his rest."

Through his call sounds a note of most solemn warning.

Unless we can bring men back to enjoying the daily life which
moderns call a dull life, our whole civilisation will be in ruins in
about fifteen years. Whenever anybody proposes anything really
practical, to solve the economic evil today, the answer always is
that the solution would not work, because the modern town populations
would think life dull. That is because they are entirely unacquainted
with life. They know nothing but distractions from life; dreams which
may be found in the cinema; that is, brief oblivions of life. . . .
Unless we can make daybreak and Daily bread and the creative secrets
of labour interesting in themselves, there will fall on all our
civilisation a fatigue which is the one disease from which
civilisations do not recover. So died the great Pagan civilisation;
of bread and circuses and forgetfulness of the household gods.*

[* _The Listener_, January 31, 1934.]

This splendid world that God has given us, and the furniture of it as
the writer of Genesis saw it in his vision, has in it the material of
happiness in labour and in the true end of labour. "For the true end
of all creation is completion; and the true end of all completion is
contemplation."

CHAPTER XXXII

Last Days

DOROTHY TOLD ME one day in 1935 that Gilbert had written the
beginning of an autobiography some years before but had laid it
aside. She had, she said, a superstitious feeling about urging him to
get on with it--as though the survey of his life and the end of his
life would somehow be tied together. I urged he