children of ever knowing what the sacraments of nature mean. The majority of Londoners have never seen the sun rise, save over smoking chimneys; they have never been able to watch the full moon sailing across the clear blue of a cloudless night; never known a morning filled with the joyous exhilaration of sunlight only dimmed by the mist of the vanishing dew. Still less do such town-dwellers understand of the lonely silence of the night in the [p.90] open country, in which men may feel themselves back again amid the childhood of the race. True, the amber haze of day in London and the flicker of the gas lamps in the streets at night have a beauty of their own; but it is dearly bought if the price must be, at least for the greater part of our poorer men and women, and for almost all the children, so heavy a one as this. The civilization which shuts out from its gaze the vision of the stars may well grow blind to greater mysteries; if men will not listen to the music of the spheres, how should they hear the angel's song? CHAPTER VI: INSTITUTIONS AND INSPIRATION ONE of the strangest and sometimes perhaps one of the saddest things that the student of history comes to realize must surely be that law which seems to doom every great ideal and every great movement to give birth to organizations which, while created to promote it, end by destroying it or diverting it to different channels. The cynics laugh at the contrast between present-day Christianity, as manifested in the dignity of the great historic churches and the rude simplicity of the Galilean fishers; in a narrower field the most sympathetic of French historians has traced for us the tragic way in which the great spiritual forces that made the early Franciscan movement what it was, were trammelled, if not extinguished, by the growth of the very society which they had called into being. The mystic laments the fall from the unrealized ideal; the statesman makes rejoinder that the change is a needful one, and a necessary means of progress. So across the centuries contend with one another the men of method and of discipline [p.92] and the men of vision. Iscariot still follows in the steps of Christ, bearing his money bags, planning his arrangements of finance, ignoring his ideal.