gress, but mostly slowly, intermittently, with short violent
paroxysms of excess and long sleepy reactions of defect, with
one-sidedness, travesties, and--worst of all--with worldly indifference
and self-seeking. The grace and aid of the Simultaneous Richness are
here also always necessary; nor can these things ever really progress
except through a deep religious sense--all mere scepticism and all
levelling down are simply so much waste. Still, we can speak of progress
in the Science of Religion more appropriately than we can of progress in
the Knowledge of Religion.

The Crusades, the Renaissance, the Revolution, no doubt exercised, in
the long run, so potent a secularizing influence, because men's minds
had become too largely other-worldly--had lost a sufficient interest in
this wonderful world; and hence all those new, apparently boundless
outlooks and problems were taken up largely as a revolt and escape from
what looked like a prison-house--religion. Yet through all these violent
oscillations there persisted, in human life, the supernatural need and
call. In this God is the great central interest, love and care of the
soul. We must look to it that both these interests and Ethics are kept
awake, strong and distinct within a costingly rich totality of life: the
Ethic of the honourable citizen, merchant, lawyer--of Confucius and
Socrates; and the Ethic of the Jewish Prophets at their deepest, of the
Suffering Servant, of our Lord's Beatitudes, of St. Paul's great eulogy
of love, of Augustine and Monica at the window in Ostia, of Father
Damian's voluntarily dying a leper amidst the lepers. The Church is the
born incorporation of this pole, as the State is of the other. The
Church indeed should, at its lower limit, also encourage the This-world
Stage; the State, at its higher limit, can, more or less consciously,
prepare us for the Other-World Stage. Both spring from the same God, at
two levels of His action; both concern the same men, at two stages of
their response and need. Yet the primary duty of the State is turned to
this life; the primary care of the Church, to that life--to life in its
deepest depths.

Will men, after this great war, more largely again apprehend, love, and
practise this double polarity of their lives? Only thus will the truest
progress be possible in the understanding, the application, and the
fruitfulness of Religion, with its great central origin and object, God,
the beginning and end of all