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deem the most promising for the future, not of our race only, but of
the world at large. We are not living in a perfect world, and we may
not expect to deal with imperfect conditions by methods ideally
perfect. Time and staying power must be secured for ourselves by that
rude and imperfect, but not ignoble, arbiter, force,--force potential
and force organized,--which so far has won, and still secures, the
greatest triumphs of good in the checkered history of mankind. Our
material advantages, once noted, will be recognized readily and
appropriated with avidity; while the spiritual ideas which dominate
our thoughts, and are weighty in their influence over action, even
with those among us who do not accept historic Christianity or the
ordinary creeds of Christendom, will be rejected for long. The eternal
law, first that which is natural, afterwards that which is spiritual,
will obtain here, as in the individual, and in the long history of our
own civilization. Between the two there is an interval, in which force
must be ready to redress any threatened disturbance of an equal
balance between those who stand on divergent planes of thought,
without common standards.

And yet more is this true if, as is commonly said, faith is failing
among ourselves, if the progress of our own civilization is towards
the loss of those spiritual convictions upon which it was founded, and
which in early days were mighty indeed towards the overthrowing of
strongholds of evil. What, in such a case, shall play the tremendous
part which the Church of the Middle Ages, with all its defects and
with all the shortcomings of its ministers, played amid the ruin of
the Roman Empire and the flood of the barbarians? If our own
civilization is becoming material only, a thing limited in hope and
love to this world, I know not what we have to offer to save ourselves
or others; but in either event, whether to go down finally under a
flood of outside invasion, or whether to succeed, by our own living
faith, in converting to our ideal civilization those who shall thus
press upon us,--in either event we need time, and time can be gained
only by organized material force.

Nor is this view advanced in any spirit of unfriendliness to the other
ancient civilizations, whose genius admittedly has been and is foreign
to our own. One who believes that God has made of one blood all
nations of men who dwell on the face of the whole earth cannot but
check and repress, i