THERE is among Christian men and women, a growing sense of the need of making the social order in which we live less inconsistent with the Spirit of Christ than it is at the present time: solving some of its most acute problems, and our own daily and hourly problems too, not in a spirit of compromise, but as Christian logic requires them to be solved. This is one of the most difficult of all tasks; for it means nothing less than the carrying through of the implicits of the spiritual world into every detail of the common life, bringing to bear on that recalcitrant common life the power and love given to us by our faith. And we must learn to look with humility, and also with intelligence—for this too is a gift of the Holy Ghost—at this supremely difficult thing, in order to learn how to set about it; for we have no doubt now that we must set about it,
(1) Address delivered at the Inter-Denominational Summer School of Social Services, held at Swanwick, to consider , A Christian Order of Society', July I922.
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if our present confusions and miseries are to be healed. We cannot walk down a street of any of our larger towns without meeting the challenge of Christ.
Christian men and women. That means to us, of course, not what Jacob Boehme used to call 'mere historical new men' but living members of the mystical fellowship of the living Christ; members as it were of the great secret society of the universe, pledged to perfectly concrete and practical obligations, to the conscious furthering of the purposes of God. Conscious members too of that supernatural fellowship, which St. John declares to be the primary fact of the Christian life. 'Truly our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son ... if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another.' Fellowship here of course does not mean merely companionship; but utmost communion, oneness. Those who have experienced something of this reality, and surrrendered themselves, at least in will and intention, to all that it demands, can hardly regard themselves in any other light than partners with Christ in the great and continual business of bringing the world of time into ever closer harmony with the eternal love and perfection of God.
The poet Donne said of Christ, in his sonnet on the Resurrection,
'He was all gold when He lay down, but rose
All tincture'—
He was using the language of the alchemists; whose final aim was to make, not merely gold, but a tincture that should transmute into gold all the baser metals
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that it touched. In this phrase he seems to have caught and expressed the Christian secret: that the living Christ is a tincture, not added to life but transmuting life wherever He enters it; and therefore that we must seek to bring under that influence, not only the souls of individuals, but the corporate soul too, and so effect its transmutation. It is this change, not the imposition of a new moral code, which we should mean by the Christianization of society; for Christian law can only be understood and practised by Christian souls. Such a Christianization of society involves, ultimately, the complete interpenetration of God and human life; the drenching of life, on all its levels, with the Divine Charity—its complete irradiation by the spirit of goodness, beauty and love. This is fellowship with God: and nothing less than this ideal is fully Christian, because nothing less than this fully works out the incarnational idea, and gives all life its opportunity of reaching life's best levels in Christ. To say that this is impossible, is to say that Spirit cannot triumph; and so to deny the very foundations of our faith.
We turn from thoughts of this kind, and look round at the intricate and many-graded life of this planet, still holding tight to the conception of that life in its wholeness, as material for the working out of the incarnational idea: material of which the dominant character is, that it can be so used—so entinctured by the Divine Reason, Christ—as to make of it a graded revelation of God. Look particularly at the bit of life for which we are plainly responsible: the order of so-called Christian civilized society. That,
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supremely, is the material for the working out of the Incarnation to its full term. It was confided to us. Here we are, or can be, the actual tools through which the Divine Wisdom works out His purpose of perfection. Real Christianity, real consecration, means becoming such a tool.
There is a celebrated chapter in the Visions and Revelations of that great mystic and spiritual teacher, Angela of Foligno, which tells how soon after her conversion, as she was walking alone through the vineyards between Spello and Assisi, she heard the Holy Spirit saying to her, wheresoever she looked,
'Behold and see! this is My Creation!'. And, gazing on that exquisite landscape, bathed as it is in the light which we see in Perugino's pictures—a light which seems to be the veil of a more spiritual loveliness—she was filled with an ineffable sweetness and joy. And then all her sins and errors came back into her mind, and she was possessed by a humility such as she had never known before. We can translate that scene for ourselves, thinking of such a spring as that which we had this year: the beauty of the untouched English country, snowy with hawthorn, the downs starred with tiny perfect flowers, the amazing emerald life of the young beechwoods, the exultant singing of the birds—and the Spirit of God saying still in our hearts 'Behold and see! this is My Creation!' We too, seeing this living and intricate beauty, were surely filled with gratitude and delight.
But now, reverse this picture; and suppose that we are condemned to go with Christ to some of the places which we, in our corporate capacity—Christian
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citizens of a Christian country—have made, or allowed through stupidity and sloth to come into existence. Imagine anyone of us walking through the East End of London, or up the staircase of a lodging-house in Notting Dale—and then through Piccadilly, and up some staircases which one could find near there—or down our prison corridors—or through a poison-gas factory—with that Companion at our side. And suppose that it is our turn to meet that glance and say, 'Behold and see! This is our creation'. We can each complete that episode; but none without shame. Even to think of the contrast is surely to be possessed in our turn by such a penitence as we have never known before.
If we dare to complete the episode, to turn from this monumental exhibition of our corporate failure in intelligence and love, our greed, apathy, stupidity, lack of energetic faith, and look at the face of Christ; then, we cannot feel any doubt about the nature of the command which is laid on us. We have to meet that vision, fair and square,—that infinite love and compassion which ought to be our love and compasssion too—with the knowledge in our minds that there are places in all our great cities where it is not possible for a child to grow up in unsullied purity. This is our creation. We know what Jesus thinks about children; and He brings to us the mind of God. Again, complete classes of the population are kept in a state of economic insecurity, which thwarts for them all chance of spiritual development: and we must hold such spiritual development—by which I do not mean piety—to be God's will for all men. There is a level of
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deprivation and anxiety, just as there is a level of luxury, at which the soul's life cannot prosper; where animal interests and anxieties alone can survive. This poverty is not holy and simple, but sordid and degrading; and this is our creation too. It makes stunted, diseased, imperfect, wasted lives; ugliness, bitterness and tension. The soul's inherent beauty and possiibility are taken and twisted out of shape, by our worse than animal acquisitiveness, our steady self-occupation and indifference to the common good.
Christ demands the surrender of acquisitiveness: and ultimately a social order in which we can say to all men and women without irony, in respect of their bodily necessities, 'Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things: but seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you'. That alone—the corporate security which comes from the practical application of neighbourly love—is Christian citizenship. I do not say that this means the triumph of any particular ism: but it does mean, plainly, a triumph of the love and generosity of God in the heart and mind and strength of every individual of which that social order is built. Energy and intelligence, as well as mere feeling, dedicated to the purposes of Christ; and then brought to bear on the desperate problems of our corporate life. We have got that corporate life into such a mess now by our persistent acquiescence in a policy of clutch, that its problems seem to present insuperable difficulties; but there are no insuperable difficulties to Divine Love. It is strange that any Christian should look upon such a
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notion as fantastic, since it is merely the corollary of our faith in the power and present work of the Holy Spirit within life. Because of this faith we do not look upon it as fantastic, and do look upon the social order which neglect of Christian realism has brought into being, as grotesque. Therefore we are bound to consider, in a spirit of prayer and with an entire willingness to pay the necessary price, how best to tackle some of the problems which have been brought into being by this triumph of acquisitiveness over love.
This involves a preliminary problem, to be faced by each of us: how to acquire, and to hold, that attitude of mind and heart which shall make us the most efficient tools of the Spirit of Christ, keep us in a measure—as He was supremely—at one and the same time hidden in God, yet wholly dedicated to His unstinted service, the furthering of His aim in our fellow-men. We shall only be useful in this work in so far as we achieve this; speaking and acting as men and women of prayer, whose souls are opened wide towards the world of spirit, and have received its penetrating gift of energy and peace. We must have the habit of recourse to Eternity and its values; must respond directly to God quite as often, and in as real, devoted, and intimate a spirit of love and service, as we respond to our fellow-men. He is the one Reality, the one Touchstone: His revelation in Christ the Pattern from which we must never depart, bringing to it every practical question and difficulty. Professor Lethaby, in a recent book on town planning, appealed for the fostering in men and women—and specially in children—of the sense of the sacredness
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of their town: of its comeliness, dignity, beauty, as the outward expressions of the corporate soul, something which all could love and seek to further and preserve. Did we have this, we should come to feel that hideous buildings, vulgar advertisements, and still more bad and degraded housing conditions, were actual insults offered to the Spirit of God; and we should try perhaps instead to do honour to His holy power in our constructive work, considering all its problems in that Universal Spirit, to which George Fox was always inviting us to have recourse. But this means a firm grasp of the fact of God's Presence, a perpetual keeping of the Pattern in focus; and this is not to be had unless we pay attention to it.
In the Yearly Meeting Epistle of the Society of Friends for 1920, the question was asked: How can we gain a new spirit? How can we break loose from our fears and suspicions and from the grip of complacent materialism, and face the issues with new faith in God and man? And the answer is: Only by a fresh sense of the presence and character of God. I am convinced that this is the right answer, and the key to success in the work which we want to do. In the long run 'we behold that which we are' say the mystics 'and are that which we behold.' Our outward lives inevitably come to harmonize with our real ideals; our vision of truth depends upon truth within. As our hearts are, so do our aim and our treasure come to be. This is true of society as well as of individual souls; the corporate life of a people that beholds the Eternal Beauty will tend to be beautiful in its turn. Psychology is insisting more and
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more on the importance of that which it calls the Imagined End; the need of placing before our inner vision a clear picture of that which we want to achieve. This imagined end acts as a magnet, drawing and unifying our will, energy and desire. Whether our aim be health, success, or holiness, the same principle applies; we tend towards that which we clearly envisage as possible, and really desire. In this enterprise then it is above all things necessary that we should give ourselves a chance of looking at the end —the Kingdom, the realization of the Love of God that we should constantly look, watch, listen, for the intimations of eternity: and judge by this majestic standard the sins and omissions, the cheap expedients and selfish negligences, which enter into our dealings with the temporal environment within which our wills operate. Be still, and know; in order that you may be. Realize the superb possibilities of your material, the august power of creation that has been put into your hands; and do not conceive life in terms of jerry-built villas with garage attached. Look at your pattern, instead of working by rule of thumb. Seek spiritual food, and give yourselves time to assimilate it so that you may be strong. Before we can mend our unreal confusions, we must have a clear vision of the Real: and the gaining and holding of such a vision in personal life is one of the main functions of prayer, as in corporate life its holding up is the chief business of institutional religion. Efforts to Christianize our social conduct are foredoomed; unless those who undertake them give themselves time to look steadily at Christ .
Beyond this vision of the pattern, perpetually
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blurred, perpetually to be renewed if we would be true to it, there is also the question of power. Christianity is a religion of power; and if it were not so, our undertaking would be hopeless. Recourse in prayer to the Unchanging and Eternal is recourse to the very sources of our life. The saying in the Fourth Gospel, 'I am come that they might have life, and have it more abundantly', is a practical, not merely a devotional, statement. Zoe, the 'more abundant life' offered to every real Christian, is not anything vague or metaphysical. It means, in modern jargon, a real enhancement of our life-force; that mysterious vital energy of which the Spirit of God is declared to be Lord and Giver, and which conditions our body and mind, showing itself in our power of dealing with circumstances. This is an absolutely practical promise; making a sharp division between the person who only believes in Christianity, and the person who experiences it. Christian regeneration is not only a supernatural but also a psychological fact, which enhances efficiency, feeds power, gives life; and it does this by the sublimation of our vigorous instinctive nature, its unification and total dedication to one end. It does really initiate a series of changes in us—often slow and painful—which can bring us in the end, if we do not shirk them, into perfect and lifegiving harmony with the Will of God.
Therefore we bring to our study of the Christian social order and how we can work for it, this principle: that only by constantly looking at the Pattern can we keep ourselves trued up for this job, and only by recourse to supernatural sources of power can we get
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the strength to put it through. History proves this to us. It shows us, again and again, that men and women of prayer tap a source of energy, possess a tranquil courage, an initiative, a faith, entirely unknown to those who have not set up and deliberately maintained through thick and thin these willed and loving contacts with the Eternal Life in which we 'live and move and have our being'. And it warns us most solemnly that, entering—as I believe we are entering,—on one of man's recurrent efforts to actualize the Spirit of Christ, we defeat our own purpose, cut ourselves off from the true fountain of that more abundant life which we shall need for it, unless we so order our existence that the life towards God keeps pace with the life lived for our fellow-men.
There is in William Blake's 'Jerusalem' a marvellous drawing of the pitiful and energizing Spirit of Christ brooding over Albion; stretching His wounded hands to those two limits —which Blake calls Adam and Satan —all the possibilities of our humanity (for Christ is, after all, the Son of man) and all the worst we have become. It seems to me we too are bound to strive for such a spiritual gesture; the stretching out as it were of one hand towards His perfection, the limit where Divine and human meet, and of the other, in complete friendliness and generosity, towards the sins and imperrfections of men. Neither action is particularly easy in a practical way; but unless we try to manage this, we need not regard ourselves as genuine friends of Christ. It is the double, simultaneous outstretching that matters; this only can open the heart wide enough to let in God, and so make of each man who achieves it a mediator
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of His reality to other men. The non-religious socialist seems to stretch out one hand, and the non-social pietist the other. But one without the other is useless. Both at once: that is where the difficulty comes in. It sometimes seems a demand which we can hardly meet.
Mediators of God's reality to other men: this is to be in our small way workers with Christ. It means the constant interpretation to us of God's thought and will by the living Spirit, known to us in the life of prayer, and its constant handing on by ourselves, in the active life of human intercourse and service. It means the translation of unchanging Perfection—the pure reality of Eternal Life—into human terms: such concrete human terms as national, civic, industrial, family relationships. It means thjs actualization of God; given to us spiritually, in all that we mean by the contemplative side of life, and laying on us the obligation of expressing it on the practical side of life. Never one without the other. Not the life of devotion divorced from the effort to bring in, here-and-now, the Kingdom of God; not, most certainly, the hopeless effort to actualize the Kingdom without the life of prayer. We want to bring the creative spirit of Love—perpetually offered to us but never forced on us—to bear on the actual stuff of human life; and for this, we must make strong and close contacts with both orders, the spiritual and the human worlds.
St. Teresa said that to give our Lord a perfect service, Martha and Mary must combine. The modern tendency is to turn from the attitude and the work of Mary; and even call it—as I have heard it called by busy social Christians,—a form of spiritual selfish-
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ness. Thousands of devoted men and women today believe that the really good part is to keep busy, and give themselves no time to take what is offered to those who abide quietly with Christ; because there seem such a lot of urgent jobs for Martha to do. The result of this can only be a maiming of their human nature, exhaustion, loss of depth and of vision; and it is seen in the vagueness and ineffectuality of a great deal of the work that is done for God. It means a total surrender to the busy click-click of the life of succession; nowhere, in the end, more deadly than in the religious sphere. I insist on this because I feel, more and more, the danger in which we stand of developing a lop-sided Christianity; so concentrated on service, and on this-world obligations, as to forget the need of constant willed and quiet contact with that other world, wherefrom the sanctions of service and the power in which to do it proceed. For those who are seeking to solve the problems of citizenship in a Christian light, that willed contact is of primary importance; so too is the inward discipline, the exacting, personal, secret effort and response, to which we shall find it impels us. Do you suppose that we can, so to speak, hop into our uniforms, let enthusiasm avail for efficiency, and win the battle thus? Most certainly not. We all believe now in education for citizenship; training for social service. Far more should we believe in training for spiritual service, for participation in the building of the City of God; and this has not much in common with what commonly passes for religious education. It means in practice the effort to live some sort of inner
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life harmonious with the great principles of Christian spirituality; penitence, renunciation, self-surrender, and daily recourse to the peace and power of God.
Here, then, those who desire to work most fruitfully for the Kingdom have a most delicate discrimination to make. Because plainly it is not Christian to concentrate too much attention upon one's own soul; yet on the other hand, our own inward growth does condition both our communion with God and our power of helping other men. We see this double strain in all great religious teachers, and in all the best helpers of humanity. It is exhibited on a grand scale in St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Francis, St. Teresa, Fox, Wesley; in all of whom an unremitting, intense inner effort, an exacting life of self-discipline and prayer, an alert sensitiveness to the Presence of God, kept pace with outward deeds. Remember Elizabeth Fry, balancing her marvellous regenerative work by silent worship. Remember General Booth travailing in spirit, and creating the Salvation Army. The breezy modern doctrine which we so often hear recommended—go straight ahead, fill your life to the brim with service, and your soul will take care of itself—this notion receives no support whatever from the real heroes of practical Christianity. They were keenly aware of their own disharmonies and inward conflicts; and felt these to be a source of weakness, as they are. They knew they must resolve these conflicts, if the Holy Spirit was to work through them without impediment, if they were to grow, and achieve the stature in which they could best do the work of Christ. So in them, penitence kept pace with love,
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and prayer with work. Conscious loving dependence on greater sources of power—fellowship with God—was the cause of their success: and the fact that our Lord's own teaching and works of power and mercy appear closely dependent on the nights which He spent on the mountain in prayer, might make us hesitate about abandoning this, the classic norm of Christian life. The effort towards Christian citizenship, in fact, must begin by the effort to be, ourselves, each one of us, citizens of the City of God.
The English mystic, Walter Hilton, has a beautiful and celebrated passage in which he describes pilgrim man travelling in desire towards that City: how he sees it on a hill, small and far away, yet real, as a pilgrim first sees Jerusalem. It seems to him at that distance very tiny, hardly more than a rood in length; nevertheless he knows it to be no mere vision, but the true home of his soul. When he reaches it, he finds it is within, 'both long and large, that without was so little to his sight' a very roomy place, full of every kind of dwelling, a home for all manner of men: and he discovers that this city he has been journeying towards so long is nothing else but that concrete Love of God to which the soul attains when it ascends the Mount of Contemplation. And Hilton ends his parable thus: 'This city betokeneth the perfect love of God, set in the hill of contemplation; the which, to the sight of a soul that without the feeling of it travelleth towards it in desire, seemeth somewhat, but it seemeth but a little thing, no more than a rood, that is six cubits and a palm of length. By six cubits are understood the perfection of a man's work;
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and by the palm, a little touch of contemplation . . . nevertheless, if he may come within the city of contemplation, then seeth he much more than he saw first.'
Consider this well; for here we have a formula by which to true up our own conceptions of citizenship in the kingdom of God. It demands two things: 'the perfection of a man's work, and a little touch of contemplation'. That means the union of skill and vision, both consecrated. One without the other is no good; we shall not get the measurement of the city right. Accept then this conception of the Kingdom of God on earth, as built up by man's very best work, directed by man's very best prayer; and see what it must mean in efficiency and beauty, industry and joy. Take that measurement into slums, factories: schools, committee rooms, labour exchanges and building-estates—the perfection of man's work and a little touch of contemplation—and then measure against this scale ourselves and our average performances. The first result will probably be profound humilation. We shall perceive ourselves, face to face with the social muddle, incapable of that perfection of work which its rebuilding requires: and of the sharp vision of the Pattern on the hill, which will give us faith in the possibility of actualizing it on earth, in a Christian order of society. It is a long way off, hardly in focus yet; nevertheless, let us at least travel towards it, as Hilton asks us, in thought and desire.
With this thought in our minds, of the perfect union of work and of prayer demanded of us by Christ, if His purpose is to be fulfilled by His friends, look at the programme for this week. It points out to us
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three great forms of social wrongness, which inhibit the free action of God's will for men: our acquiescence first in materialism, next in the principle of conflict, and last in social and racial injustice. Where the love of God declared in Christ alone should rule, if we mean anything by Christianity, these three things rule instead. If we look more closely, we see what they represent. Not so much man's wilful wrongness though each offers opportunity and encouragement to all his lowest and most unloving impulses—but rather a failure to push forward; a relapse into those lower levels of life from which God, as we believe, is drawing out the human soul into His own light. They represent the natural tendency of man to camp in the marshes, instead of undertaking the climb upwards to Jerusalem: his failure, as psychology would say, to sublimate and adapt to new levels the crude forms of that instinct of self-preservation which once under other conditions served him well. They show that our impulsive minds, which really control our actions, are still the impulsive minds of primitive men; ruled by fear and anger, pride and possessiveness, unredeemed by the Perfect Man revealed in Jesus.
Our materialism is the survival and accentuation of primitive man's necessary preoccupation with the material world; the immense importance for him,—if he were to survive at all—of food, shelter, possesssions; the sense that they are valuable for their own sakes, and being won with difficulty, must be clutched tight as the very substance of his life. Our spirit of conflict, whether shown in industrial competition or international struggles, represents the survival of that
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pugnative instinct which impelled the primitive, in a world full of inimical forces, to fight for his own hand, his own family, his own tribe. Our class and racial antagonisms represent the wrong development of that herd-instinct which was perhaps one of the very first instruments of man's social education; teaching him his first lessons in brotherhood, obedience, self-subordination to the common good, but also tending to assemble him in exclusive groups which are smaller than his capacity for love.
These antique tendencies, immensely strong, are now so cunningly disguised and rationalized that very few of us realize the half-savage and half-childish nature of the impelling instinct which causes us to love a bargain, to collect things for collecting's sake, to judge rich and poor by different standards, to resent a trespass, blindly to support our own class or country, to enjoy combative games and destructive sports, to feel uplifted by a patriotic song. None of these impelling instincts are wrong in themselves; but they are now occasions of wrong, because we have failed to sublimate them. We let them go on, in altered conditions, giving us suggestions appropriate to the Stone Age; instead of harnessing these vigorous springs of psychic energy to the chariot of Christ. To do this (i) We must replace material by spiritual values—the respect for wealth by the respect for beauty, the desire for goods by the desire for good, the desire for luxury by the desire for justice; quantity by quality; must dissolve acquisitiveness in that spirit of poverty which enjoys everything because it desires nothing. (ii) We must replace the belief in
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achievement through conflict and the defeat of our adversary—whether in the international, the economic or the political field—by belief in achievement through love, united effort, and the winning of our adversary: 'Loving the unlovely into loveableness.' (iii) We must replace tyranny between class and race by love between class and race; fraternity, the true fulfilment of the herd instinct, overflowing its first narrow boundaries till it embraces the world.
But these are mental and spiritual imperatives; they spring up from within, they are not imposed from without. They remind us again that the Christian order of society can only come into being as the expresssion of a corporate Christian soul. If we want to produce it, we must first produce a corporate change of heart; bit by bit Christianizing the social body from within, so that it may become more and more incapable of acts that conflict with the principle of love, and of tolerating for others conditions which we would never allow to affect those individuals for whom we really care. Corporate regeneration must follow the same course as personal regeneration. Accepting, like the individual Christian, the Incarnation as the clue to life, the community must grow into conformity with this belief. It can only do this along the same lines as the individual; namely, by a balanced process of analysis and synthesis. It must first track down and realize the true springs of its conduct; press back into the racial past, and discover the humiliating facts about those impulses which really condition our behaviour in such matters as nationalism, property, employment, servitude, sex. It must acknowledge
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how many notions necessary to a primitive state of society have become imbedded in our view of life; and, thanks to the conservative nature of the social mind, still govern our corporate view of existence. It must further realize that these relics of the past, however imposing the disguises they now wear in financial and political circles, represent something less than man's best here and now possibility: and that therefore our wholesale capitulation to them, our quiet assumption that you cannot go against 'human nature' in its most acquisitive, self-regarding, and combative mood, has the character of sin. Having reached this level of self-knowledge, it may perhaps be brought to something equivalent to social penitence: may feel as a direct reproach every life damaged by bad housing, every child maimed by economic conditions, every soul stifled by luxury or obsessed by unreal values, every man or woman embittered and made hopeless by unemployment and friendlessness. And then, turning in one way or another to God, to Reality, to the true values declared in Christ, the work of whose creative Spirit its mingled stupidity and selfishness retards, society may set in hand the complementary movement of synthesis: the real building-up of Jerusalem, by perfect work and steady prayer.
Let us take, as a last thought, a picture from current philosophy: that great vision of the so-called new realists, of a universe which has, as they say, a tendency to deity, is moving perpetually towards the actualization of God. That picture, for Christians, indeed for all truly religious minds, must be incomplete. Yet does it not represent, as far as it goes, a real view of
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the Holy Spirit dwelling within our world of change and ever seeking more perfect incarnation in life? And is it not man's supreme vocation to co-operate in this? Consciously to forward the creative aim of Divine Love; take his share in the business of the spiritual world, which is lifting all things up into the order of Divine Reality. These may seem very metaphysical, possibly even unreal, considerations, to put side by side with our pressing problems of internationalism, economics, family life. But philosophy reminds us again, that unless we can set the particular details of our actual life within some such universal background, we shall never understand their significance; and that a first duty of thought is to get this universal background right. At present the universals within which we see our particular social order are wrong, because not Christian; hence the wrong interpretation is put upon particular facts, and a wrong scale of values obtains. Our need, then, is the re-birth of our vast potential energies into a world of fresh values, in which each particular action would be given the meaning that it has for the Mind of Christ. It is an exacting standard, but we dare not aim at less: for we cannot forget that for Christians human nature, human love, and human life, find their controlling law and their perfect fulfilment on Calvary, and not on any lower level than that. But to remember this, to keep our eye fixed on it, means living in the spirit of prayer: and to live up to it means an unremitting effort, both social and individual, to Christianize our every action through and through, and so fulfil the destiny of our souls.
