peaceful revolution brings about happier results for
a country, as we have good reason to know, than a revolution of force.
Even now the narrower religious systems prevail more in virtue of the
gentleness and goodwill and persuasion of their ministers than through
the spiritual terrors that they wield--the thunders are divorced from
the lightning.

Thus may the victories of faith be won, not by noise and strife, but by
the silent motion of a resistless tide. Even now it creeps softly
over the sand and brims the stagnant pools with the freshening and
invigorating brine.

But in the worship of the symbol there is one deep danger; and that
is that if one rests upon it, if one makes one's home in the palace of
beauty or philosophy or religion, one has failed in the quest. It is the
pursuit not of the unattained but of the unattainable to which we are
vowed. Nothing but the unattainable can draw us onward. It is rest that
is forbidden. We are pilgrims yet; and if, intoxicated and bemused by
beauty or emotion or religion, we make our dwelling there, it is as
though we slept in the enchanted ground. Enough is given us, and no
more, to keep us moving forwards. To be satisfied is to slumber. The
melancholy that follows hard in the footsteps of art, the sadness
haunting the bravest music, the aching, troubled longing that creeps
into the mind at the sight of the fairest scene, is but the warning
presence of the guide that travels with us and fears that we may linger.
Who has not seen across a rising ground the gables of the old house,
the church tower, dark among the bare boughs of the rookery in a smiling
sunset, and half lost himself at the thought of the impossibly beautiful
life that might be lived there? To-day, just when the western sun began
to tinge the floating clouds with purple and gold, I saw by the roadside
an old labourer, fork on back, plodding heavily across a ploughland all
stippled with lines of growing wheat. Hard by a windmill whirled its
clattering arms. How I longed for something that would render permanent
the scene, sight, and sound alike. It told me somehow that the end
was not yet. What did it stand for? I hardly know; for life, slow and
haggard with toil, hard-won sustenance, all overhung with the crimson
glories of waning light, the wet road itself catching the golden hues of
heaven. A little later, passing by the great pauper asylum that stands
up so naked among the bare fields, I looked over a hedg