This world (as all will admit) is one of the innumerable expressions of an Unknowable Creative Purpose, which colloquially we call God; that which not every one will admit is that this Creative Purpose works in its fashioning not only of matter but of what we call spirit, through friction, through the rubbing together of the noses, the thoughts, and the hearts of men. While the material condition of our planet—the heat or friction within it—remains favourable to human life, there will, there must needs be, a continual crescendo in the stature of Humanity, through the ever-increasing friction of human spirits one with the other; friction supplied by life itself, and, next after life, by those transcripts of life, those expressions of human longing, which we know as art. Art for art’s sake—if it meant what it said, which is doubtful—was always a vain and silly cry. As well contend that an artist is not a man. Art was ever the servant as well as the mistress of men, and ever will be. Civilization, which after all is but the gradual conversion of animal man into human man, has come about through art even more than through religion, law, and science. For the achieved “expression of man’s intuitive longing towards the Unknowable, in more or less perfect forms of art” has ever—after life itself—been the chief influence in broadening men’s hearts. The aim of human life no doubt is happiness. But, after all, what is happiness? Efficiency, wealth, material comfort? Many by their lives do so affirm; few are cynical enough to say so; and on their death-beds none will feel that they are. Not even freedom in itself brings happiness. Happiness lies in breadth of heart. And breadth of heart is that inward freedom, which has the power to understand, feel with, and, if need be, help others. In breadth of heart are founded justice, love, sacrifice; without it there would seem no special meaning to any of our efforts, and the tale of all human life would still be no more than that of very gifted animals, many of whom, indeed, are highly efficient, and have unity partly instinctive, partly founded on experiences of the utility thereof; but none of whom have that conscious altruism which is without perception of benefit to self, and works from sheer recognition of its own beauty. In sum, human civilization is the growth of conscious altruism; and the directive moral purpose in the world nothing but our dim perception, ever growing through spiritual friction, that we are all bound more and more towards the understanding of ourselves and each other, and all that this carries with it. To imagine, then, that a conflagration like this war, however vast and hellish, will do aught but momentarily retard the crescendo of that understanding, is to miss perception of the whole slow process by which man has become less and less an animal throughout the ages; and to fear that the war will scorch and wither art, that chief agent of understanding, is either to identify