, a spiritual
thing, an eternal thing; but it is positive only in its opposition to
creation, in its corruption of the soul, and in its subtle undermining
of the divine moments of the soul by the power of eternal
dreariness and disillusion.

What we need above everything is a symbolic image which shall
represent the creative energy of life, the creative power of love,
and those eternal ideas of truth and beauty and nobility which
seem in some mysterious way derogated from, rendered less
formidable and unfathomable, by being named "the good."

The desire for a symbol of this kind, which shall gather together
all the tribes and nations of men and all conflicting ideals of
humanity, is a desire so deep and universal as to be perhaps the
supreme desire of the human race. No symbol arbitrarily invented
by any one man, even though he were the greatest genius that ever
lived, could supply this want or satisfy this desire. And it could not
do so because it would lack the organic weathering and bleaching,
so to speak, of the long panorama of time. An individual
genius might hit upon a better symbolic image, an image more
comprehensive, more inclusive, more appealing to the entire
nature of the complex vision; but without having been subjected to
the sun and rain of actual human experience, without having
endured the passion of the passing of the generations, such an
image would remain, for all its appropriateness, remote,
intellectual and barren of magical suggestiveness.

I do not mean to indicate that there is necessarily any determined
or fatalistic process of natural selection in these things by which
one symbol rather than another gathers about it the hopes and fears
of the generations. Chance no doubt plays a strange part in all this.
But the concrete necessities of living human souls play a greater
part than chance; and without believing in any steady evolutionary
process or even in any law of natural selection among the
evocations of human desire, it must still remain that the symbol
which survives will be the symbol adapted to the deepest instincts
of complicated souls and at the same time palpable and tangible to
the touch of the crudest and most simple.

It cannot be denied that there are serious difficulties in the way of
the acceptance of any historic symbol, the anonymous evocation
of the generations of men. Just because it has a definite place in
history such a symbol will necessarily have gathered to itself