oet of our time gave utterance to
the dark pessimism which flooded his soul:

"Gone the cry of 'Forward, Forward,' lost within a growing gloom;
Lost, or only heard in silence from the silence of a tomb.

Half the marvels of my morning, triumphs over time and space,
Staled by frequence, shrunk by usage, into commonest commonplace!

Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good,
And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud.

Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the Time,
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime?"

Am I unduly pessimistic? I fear that this is the case with most men who,
like Dante, have crossed their fiftieth year and find themselves in a
"dark and sombre wood."

My reader will probably subject me to the additional reproach that I
suggest no remedy.

There are many palliatives for the evils which I have discussed. To
rekindle in men the love of work for work's sake and the spirit of
discipline, which the lost sense of human solidarity once inspired,
would do much to solve the problem, for work is the greatest moral force
in the world. But I must frankly add that I have neither the time nor
the qualifications to discuss the solution of this grave problem.

If we of this generation can only recognize that the evil exists, then
the situation is not past remedy; for man has never yet found himself in
a blind alley of negation. He is still "master of his soul and captain
of his fate," and, to me, the most encouraging sign of the times is the
persistent evidence of contemporary literature that thoughtful men now
recognize that much of our boasted progress was as unreal as a rainbow.
While the temper of the times seems for the moment pessimistic, it
merely marks the recognition of man of an abyss whose existence he
barely suspected but over which his indomitable courage will yet carry
him.

I have faith in the inextinguishable spark of the Divine, which is in
the human soul and which our complex mechanical civilization has not
extinguished. Of this, the world war was in itself a proof. All the
horrible resources of mechanics and chemistry were utilized to coerce
the human soul, and all proved ineffectual. Never did men rise to
greater heights of self-sacrifice or show a greater fidelity "even unto
death." Millions went to their graves, as to their beds, for an ideal;
and when that is possible, this Pandora's box of modern civilization,
which co