ome established form, without any qualms about the
capacity of their freed instincts to generate the new forms that may
be needed. So the Reformation, in destroying the traditional order,
intended to secure truth, spontaneity, and profuseness of religious
forms; the danger of course being that each form might become meagre
and the sum of them chaotic. If the accent, however, could only be
laid on the second phase of the transformation, reform might mean the
creation of order where it did not sufficiently appear, so that
diffuse life should be concentrated into a congenial form that should
render it strong and self-conscious. In this sense, if we may trust
Mr. Gilbert Murray, it was a great wave of reform that created Greece,
or at least all that was characteristic and admirable in it--an effort
to organise, train, simplify, purify, and make beautiful the chaos of
barbaric customs and passions that had preceded. The clanger here, a
danger to which Greece actually succumbed, is that so refined an
organism may be too fragile, not inclusive enough within, and not
buttressed strongly enough without against the flux of the uncivilised
world. Christianity also, in the first formative centuries of its
existence, was an integrating reform of the same sort, on a different
scale and in a different sphere; but here too an enslaved rabble
within the soul claiming the suffrage, and better equipped
intellectual empires rising round about, seem to prove that the
harmony which the Christian system made for a moment out of nature and
life was partial and insecure. It is a terrible dilemma in the life of
reason whether it will sacrifice natural abundance to moral order, or
moral order to natural abundance. Whatever compromise we choose proves
unstable, and forces us to a new experiment.

Perhaps in the century that has elapsed since the French Revolution
the pendulum has had time to swing as far as it will in the direction
of negative reform, and may now begin to move towards that sort of
reform which is integrating and creative. The veering of the advanced
political parties from liberalism to socialism would seem to be a
clear indication of this new tendency. It is manifest also in the love
of nature, in athletics, in the new woman, and in a friendly medical
attitude towards all the passions.

In the fine arts, however, and in religion and philosophy, we are
still in full career towards disintegration. It might have been
thought that a