and Lust, reigned over and enslaved the world. The soul of England was dead in trespasses and in sins, and there was no compelling voice calling aloud, "Awake, thou that sleepest, and Christ shall give thee light." Society had drifted towards practices and ideals wholly unworthy of a reflective people gifted with sense and reason. We had gone astray from the true path of individual and social life, lost spiritual enthusiasm, and depth and simplicity of living. Materialism and the mechanical complications of life had mastered us. "Comfort," as Disraeli said, "is mistaken for civilization," owning to our false estimate of, and over-confidence in, material values and sensuous satisfactions. We were not happy, we could not be, seeking our own will and not God's, as though each man were his own highest good, and torturing ourselves in the foolish idea that in a feverish attachment to "things" the insatiable spirit of men can reach its true summit, and by brute energy in sport, or keen intellect, or emotional excitement, discover the goal of human existence, i.e. by egotism, vanity, and self-interest in its myriad forms. We see now that it was a deplorable condition, and could scarcely be surprised if in this hour of manifestation, the prophet were to say to us, "Ah, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evil-doers, children that deal corruptly; they have forsaken the Lord, they have despised the Holy One of Israel, they are estranged, and gone backward. Why will ye be still stricken, that ye revolt more and more? The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds and bruises and festering sores; they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with oil. Your country is desolate; your cities are burned with fire; your land—strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers."
If, then, this war has already revealed to us the way in which we have succumbed to the temptations of a long period of exceptional prosperity, may we not believe that in other ways, accursed as all war is, and must be, this very war is now taking its place amongst the ministers of progress, and in the language of Professor L. T. Hobhouse, "functioning development"?
For human progress depends upon self-consciousness, and self-consciousness depends upon nations and groups of people, seeing themselves as they really are, and then proceeding from
