vasion, greed, waste,
falsehood, and sinister preparation. Your lives open out in the midst
of the breakdown for which that age prepared. To you negligence is no
longer possible. There is cold and darkness, there is the heat of the
furnace before you; you will live amidst extremes such as our youth
never knew; whatever betide, you of your generation will have small
chance of living untempered lives. Our country is at war and half
mankind is at war; death and destruction trample through the world;
men rot and die by the million, food diminishes and fails, there is
a wasting away of all the hoarded resources, of all the accumulated
well-being of mankind; and there is no clear prospect yet of any end to
this enormous and frightful conflict. Why did it ever arise? What made
it possible? It arose because men had forgotten God. It was possible
because they worshipped simulacra, were loyal to phantoms of race and
empire, permitted themselves to be ruled and misled by idiot princes and
usurper kings. Their minds were turned from God, who alone can rule and
unite mankind, and so they have passed from the glare and follies of
those former years into the darkness and anguish of the present day. And
in darkness and anguish they will remain until they turn to that King
who comes to rule them, until the sword and indignation of God have
overthrown their misleaders and oppressors, and the Justice of God, the
Kingdom of God set high over the republics of mankind, has brought peace
for ever to the world. It is to this militant and imminent God, to this
immortal Captain, this undying Law-giver, that you devote yourselves
to-day.

"For he is imminent now. He comes. I have seen in the east and in the
west, the hearts and the minds and the wills of men turning to him as
surely as when a needle is magnetized it turns towards the north. Even
now as I preach to you here, God stands over us all, ready to receive
us...."

And as he said these words, the long nave of the cathedral, the shadows
of its fretted roof, the brown choir with its golden screen, the rows
of seated figures, became like some picture cast upon a flimsy and
translucent curtain. Once more it seemed to the bishop that he saw
God plain. Once more the glorious effulgence poured about him, and the
beautiful and wonderful conquest of men's hearts and lives was manifest
to him.

He lifted up his hands and cried to God, and with an emotion so
profound, an earnestness so commandin