Christian. That was of course the secret of his
power. Because he wasn't, the leisured and the cultured sat in serried
ranks at his feet. Perhaps he would give them what they had
lost--peace! And there came the memory of another civilisation sinking
into decay when the mysteries of the Nile and the Orontes established
themselves on the banks of the Tiber, and the weary citizens of Rome,
sated by a world's luxury, deemed no charlatan emerging from the East
too gross for acceptance or his mystery too incredible for belief. In
the dawn of its decay Rome bestowed 'the freedom of the city on all the
gods of mankind.' In {170} our day London and Edinburgh have followed
along the same road. The God all-holy and loving, the All-Father--we
have cast Him off. But no superstition is too mean for us to kneel at
its shrine. History is truly a monotonous record. Nations and empires
have all gone the same road to perdition. And they never knew they
were treading it.

V

Such was the condition of the nation when the trumpet of judgment
sounded and civilisation went reeling into the furnace. The
slum-dwellers and the slum-infected were alike shaking back into
paganism and the beast. For the time we have emerged from the greater
horror of sin into the horror of war. But what is to happen after?
Saved as by fire, are we to hug our slums again?

Surely it cannot be for the perpetuation on earth of life after this
order, that five millions of men have arisen {171} and faced death. If
we are to be worthy of the price that has been paid for our
deliverance, by a resurrection from the dead we must cleanse our souls
and transform our slums. It is not for us as we are, or for our cities
as they now are built, or for a State that denies to its children the
decencies of life, or for the continued reign of that plutocracy that
has darkened the windows of the soul--not for the continuance of these
have our brothers died right joyfully in the glory of their youth. It
was for another England, another Scotland--the kingdom of the heart's
desire wherein shall be found no more either the slum-dweller or the
slum-lover--that they fought and died. When we think of them we know
what the early Christians felt when they said one to the other, 'We are
bought with a price; we are no longer our own to do as we like; we are
His.' And we--we are _theirs_. We must be worthy of them. We dare
not any longer leave their children in noisome sl