their presence; but at the same time reveals us to
ourselves as beings who are capable of overcoming them. If on the one
hand it uncovers the pain of life and makes us feel it with a new
intensity, on the other it liberates the love that conquers pain, a
power mightier than death and sharper than agony.

One might almost define religion in these terms. That in each of us,
and in all of us which faces the crisis, which rises to meet it, which
feels, when confronted by it, that its hour is come and for this cause
it came into the world.

Do you say it is _hard_? It would be if we were made of poorer stuff.
But made as we are anything less would be too small for us, would leave
us dissatisfied, hungry and half employed. Yes, half employed, and not
the best half either. We are so made that until we "grasp the nettle
of life" the best part of us has nothing to do, loitering, so to speak,
at the street corners of life, like a starving labourer out of work.
On that upper level, where the best that is in us confronts the highest
that is demanded of us, we discover how finely the nature of man is
adapted to the world in which he lives, how well the two accord, the
noblest element in the one corresponding to the most challenging
element in the other, so that deep answers unto deep and the two make
music together. On the lower levels there is no adaptation; our
selfish desires are at odds with nature; we are out for a good time and
get no response; and there all is disenchantment, disappointment and
misery. But the keynote of the higher level is joy--the joy of the
labourer who has found his work, of the lover who has seen his object,
of the hero who has received his commission and his sword.

Towards the end of the war, or perhaps shortly afterwards, somebody
coined a more attractive phrase which was much on the lips of exuberant
reformers. They were going to make, so they said, "A world fit for
heroes to live in."

What kind of a world is that? Is comfort the keynote of it? Does it
provide the hero with an assured income and an easy life? Does it
guarantee him a pension for any heroism he displays? Does it ask of
its heroes only a limited term of service, and then superannuate them
at an early age, exposing them to peril for a short time and after that
withdrawing dangers from their path and surrounding them with the
safeguards of a protected respectability?

No; what these arrangements provide for is not the l