only be saved by submitting to law
and by ceasing to wield the bludgeon of force.... When one thinks of
the poor suffering, quarrelling, dying slaves of custom; when one sees
the world in one blinding flash convulsed in the death throes--Oh, God!
if only there came a gale from Heaven--a sudden, rushing wind. Only
that could save a world blinded like this.

III

You may imagine that I am exaggerating the power of this tyrant of
whose despotism you are unconscious. But you have only to think and
you will at once recognise that my words are but the words of
soberness. Use your eyes as if for the first time--and what a world
this is that surrounds us! I read the other day a paragraph in the
morning paper that made my blood cold. A discharged soldier got his
gratuity and spent his day in jollity. He came home at night and, in
the presence of his children, trampled his wife to death, and not his
wife only, but the unborn child--and in the presence of his children.
That, in the most cultured city in Bible-loving and Christian Scotland.
And every day the tale is much the same. Little children are
perishing, mothers are broken-hearted, and the streets are strewn with
human wreckage. The casualties of war pale in significance before the
casualties of peace! But this does not move us: we are accustomed to
it. These crowded, reeking public-houses, thirty to the half-mile,
battening on the misery of the poor--we have seen them from our youth
and they move us not. How many in our Circuses and Terraces and Places
will even trouble themselves to so much as vote for the deliverance of
their fellow-citizens? Very few in these particular places, if I
mistake not. For they cannot shake themselves loose from the yoke of
custom.

IV

And this same tyrant blinds us to the goal to which we are hastening.
The last great proof of the power of custom is that when nations and
empires were perishing they never knew they were perishing. Men were
so accustomed to the riches and greatness and security of the Roman
empire, that even when it was tottering to its fall they never realised
that it was doomed. All nations have gone the one road. They have
abolished God or the gods! They have cast duty to the winds; they have
given themselves to Mammon and to pleasure; and they perished--but they
never knew that the world that seemed to them so secure was passing
away. And unless there comes a change--a mighty gale from Heaven--th