esire of happiness. To-day it
hesitates, lightheartedly enough, but every serious thinker knows how
momentous the decision may be. It is, apparently, deserting the path
of religion and entering upon the path of secularism. Will it lose
itself in quagmires of sensuality down this new path, and pant and toil
through years of civic and industrial anarchy, only to learn it had
lost the road, and must return to religion? Or will it find that at
last it is leaving the mists and the quagmires behind it; that it is
ascending the slope of the hill so long dimly discerned ahead, and
making straight for the long-sought Utopia? This is the drama of our
time, and every man and every woman should understand it.

"Mr. Chesterton understands it. Further, he gives us credit for
understanding it. He has nothing of that paltry meanness or strange
density of so many of his colleagues, who put us down as aimless
iconoclasts or moral anarchists. He admits that we are waging a
thankless war for what we take to be Truth and Progress. He is doing
the same. But why, in the name of all that is reasonable, should we,
when we are agreed on the momentousness of the issue either way,
forthwith desert serious methods of conducting the controversy? Why,
when the vital need of our time is to induce men and women to collect
their thoughts occasionally, and be men and women--nay, to remember
that they are really gods that hold the destinies of humanity on their
knees--why should we think that this kaleidoscopic play of phrases is
inopportune? The ballets of the Alhambra, and the fireworks of the
Crystal Palace, and Mr. Chesterton's Daily News articles, have their
place in life. But how a serious social student can think of curing the
thoughtlessness of our generation by strained paradoxes; of giving
people a sane grasp of social problems by literary sleight-of-hand; of
settling important questions by a reckless shower of rocket-metaphors
and inaccurate 'facts,' and the substitution of imagination for
judgment, I cannot see."

I quote this passage with a particular pleasure, because Mr. McCabe
certainly cannot put too strongly the degree to which I give him and
his school credit for their complete sincerity and responsibility of
philosophical attitude. I am quite certain that they mean every word
they say. I also mean every word I say. But why is it that Mr. McCabe
has some sort of mysterious hesitation about admitting that I mean
every word I say