at least by the session's end. And
there is much, undoubtedly, that Parliament can and ought to do for us.
Nevertheless, was not Christ right? Instead of the old prayer, "Create
in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me," some of
us, as one writer says, would rather pray, "Create a better social
order, O God; and renew a right relation between various classes of
men." We are ready to begin anywhere rather than with ourselves, at any
point in the big circumference rather than at the centre. "I don't deny,
my friends," wrote Charles Kingsley to the Chartists, "it is much
cheaper and pleasanter to be reformed by the devil than by God; for God
will only reform society on the condition of our reforming every man his
own self, while the devil is quite ready to help us to mend the laws and
the Parliament, earth and heaven, without ever starting such an
impertinent and 'personal' request as that a man should mend himself."
Yet without self-reform nothing is possible. "The character of the
aggregate," says Herbert Spencer, "is determined by the characters of
the units." And he illustrates thus: Suppose a man building with good,
square, well-burnt bricks; without the use of mortar he may build a wall
of a certain height and stability. But if his bricks are warped and
cracked or broken, the wall cannot be of the same height and stability.
If again, instead of bricks he use cannon-balls then he cannot build a
wall at all; at most, something in the form of a pyramid with a square
or rectangular base. And if, once more, for cannon-balls we substitute
rough, unhewn boulders, no definite stable form is possible. "The
character of the aggregate is, determined by the characters of the
units." Every attempt to reconstruct society which leaves out of account
the character of the men and women who constitute society is foredoomed
to failure. Behind every social problem stands the greater problem of
the individual, the redemption of character. We may get, as assuredly we
ought to get, better houses for the working-classes; but unless we also
get better working-classes for the houses, we shall not have greatly
mended matters. And no turn of the Parliamentary machine will produce
these for us. We can pass new laws; only the grace of God can make new
men. "For my part," says Kingsley once more, speaking through the lips
of his tailor-poet, "I seem to have learnt that the only thing to
regenerate the world is not more of any s