changing anything, not even ourselves very much; we bark at the heels of progress, and leave statesmen, and scientists, and labour leaders, sociologists, poets, novelists, and psychologists, to convert the world and lead it in the ways of peace and goodwill. A Church, half paralysed in the higher centres, is not in a position to look down upon the talents of the great enthusiasts; nor have the leaden hands of German theologians, or the timid fingers of our own, as yet brought that old garden of the soul into growth and productivity again.
We have not lived dangerously, but academically: almost apart from real science, and blind to the revelations of art, we have trifled with old books, and have focussed our religion to the furbishing of old formulas. At best, we have been purely intellectual; and for a large part we have not been so much as that, but scholastic, sentimental, and sordid. We complained of nineteenth-century materialism, but it may be we were materialized ourselves, and fought materialism with the weapons of materialism. And now that the world is emerging from this nightmare, it is not because of any achievements of the official Church, but simply because the Spirit will not be bound by the wrappings we have made.
The 'miraculous' gifts have disappeared? May it not be that many years of concentration upon material things, and upon the material aspects of
