, for it is only
when taken as a whole, one paper reacting upon and modifying another,
that whatever merit the course possesses can be made apparent.

II

A WORKING PHILOSOPHY[*]

[*This lecture has been very considerably re-written
since it was delivered, and much of the matter it then contained
has been cut out, and is now printed in the Appendix. These
excisions were purely speculative, and while they have a certain
bearing on the arguments and conclusions in the other lectures,
might very well be prejudicial to them, and for this reason it
has seemed better to remove them from the general sequence and
give them a supplementary place by themselves.]

The first reaction of the World War was a great interrogation, and the
technical "Peace" that has followed brings only reiteration. Why did
these things come, and how? The answers are as manifold as the
clamourous tongues that ask, but none carries conviction and the problem
is still unsolved. According to all rational probabilities we had no
right to expect the war that befell; according to all the human
indications as we saw them revealed amongst the Allies we had a right to
expect a better peace; according to our abiding and abounding faith we
had a right to expect a great bettering of life after the war, and even
in spite of the peace. It is all a _non sequitur,_ and still we ask the
reason and the meaning of it all.

It may be very long before the full answer is given, yet if we are
searching the way towards "The Great Peace" we must establish some
working theory, if only that we may redeem our grave errors and avoid
like perils in the future. The explanation I assume for myself, and on
which I must work, is that, in spite of our intentions (which were of
the best) we were led into the development, acceptance and application
of a false philosophy of life which was not only untenable in itself but
was vitiated and made noxious through its severance from vital religion.
In close alliance with this declension of philosophy upon a basis that
had been abandoned by the Christian world for a thousand years, perhaps
as the ultimate reason for its occurrence, was the tendency to void
religion of its vital power, to cut it out of intimate contact with
life, and, in the end, to abandon it altogether as an energizing force
interpenetrating all existence and controlling it in certain definite
directions and after certain definite met