che went farther. He reacted
violently against the onslaughts of pity in his own soul, and in
philosophical self-defence inverted the promptings of compassion. The
war has shown the human need of self-defence against excessive sympathy.
We are surfeited with horrors on land and sea; the ghastly truth of a
carnage which exceeds anything known in history, of maimed and broken
lives, of starving and homeless people, is shunned lest we lose our
reason in impotent and disruptive pity. The man of bayonet and bomb, who
a short time ago spent mildly exciting days over his desk in the City,
and who was anxiously concerned over the indisposition of his
neighbour's cat, has made himself a heart of steel for the purposes of
the war. If sympathy interfered with the issue of every bullet and the
thrust of every bayonet, there would be an end to military efficiency.
The civilian has not seldom gone far beyond the needs of emotional
self-defence and equipped himself with a heart of stone. The perfect Man
of Sympathy--controlling His sympathy, yet radiating it to all the world
and its sins--was Jesus Christ. His compassion had none of the corrosive
qualities which drove Nietzsche to distraction. He could retain the
consciousness of all the suffering which men inflict on fellow-creatures
and yet keep ever abundant the measure of His pity and the regenerating
power of His love. He saw the root of our evil, the one cause and the
one remedy. He is the catholic and consistent reformer, whilst we--we
of the smaller measure--flounder in the web of a hundred causes.

Each cause can be endowed with an importance which outdoes all the
others. Education--can any one deny the overwhelming need of proper
concentration on its possibilities? "Here we have a generation of
ignorant, selfish, immoral creatures, devoid of a sense of social
responsibility," says our first reformer; "why, the remedy is obvious:
let us begin with the children in the schools. Is any one so dense as
not to perceive the all-pervading importance of the guidance we give to
the young?"

"It is no use beginning with the children whilst those who teach them
are so hopelessly sunk in materialism and stupidity," says our second
reformer. "Look at the education laws; they are all ill-conceived and
ill-administered. Education is not only a failure; it is a dead-weight
of falsehood and class tyranny which hampers progress. Let us go
straight for socialism and equal human rights and oppo