This literature will have to come slowly, and I have come to believe that the first book, when it comes, will be perhaps a book that does not prove anything, a book that is a mere cry, a prayer, or challenge; the story of what one man with these streetfuls of the faces of men and the faces of women pouring their dullness and pouring their weariness over him, has desired, and of what, God helping him, he will have. There is a certain sense in which merely praying to God has gone by. In the present desperate crisis of a world plunging on in the dark to a catastrophe or a glory that we cannot guess, it is a time for men to pray a prayer, a standing-up prayer, to one another. I believe that it is going to be this huge gathering-in of public desire, this imperious challenge of what men want, this standing-up prayer of men to one another, which alone shall make men go forth with faith and singing once more into the battle of life. Sometimes it has seemed to me I have already heard it--this song of men's desires about me--faintly. But I have seen that the time is at hand when it shall come as a vast chorus of cities, of fields, of men's voices, filling the dome of the world--a chorus in the glory and the shame of which no millionaire who merely wants to make money, no artist who is not expressing the souls and freeing the bodies of men, no statesman who is not gathering up the desires of crowds, and going daily through the world hewing out the will of the people, shall dare to live. * * * * * But while this is the vision of my belief, I would not have any one suppose that I am the bearer of easy and gracious tidings. It is rather of a great daily adventure one has with the world. There have been times when it seemed as if it had to begin all over again every morning. Day by day I walk down Fleet Street toward Ludgate Hill. I look once more every morning at that great picture of any religion; I look at the quiet, soaring, hopeful dome--that little touch of singing or praying that men have lifted up against heaven. "Will the Dome bring the Man to me?" I look up at the machines, strange and eager, hurrying across the bridge. "Will the Machines bring the Man to me?" I look in the faces of the crowd hurrying past. "Will the Crowd bring the Man to me?" With the picture of my religion--or perhaps three religions or three stories of religion--I walk on and on through the crowd, past the railway, past the Cathedral, past the Mansion House, and over the Tower Bridge. I walk fast and eagerly and blindly, as though a man would walk away from the world.