The plain man, so far as I know him, is neither aghast nor gleeful at this revelation. For the most part he looks somewhat listlessly on, as at a probable dog-fight in which there is no dog of his. A sense of moral horror does not come easily when you have supped full of horrors on most of the days of three or four years; sacrilege has to go far, indeed, to shock men who have seen their old gods looking extremely human and blowing out, one by one, the candles before their own shrines. Some new god, or devil, of course, may enter at any time into this disfurnished soul. Genius in some leader might either possess it with an anarchic passion to smash and delete all the old institutions that disappointed in the day of trial or fire it with a new craving to lift itself clear of the wrack and possess itself on the heights. For either a Lenin or a St. Francis there is a wide field to till, cleared, but of pretty stiff clay. Persistently sane in his disenchantment as he had been in his rapture, the common man, whose affection and trust the old order wore out in the war, is still slow to enlist out-and-out in any Satanist unit. There's reason, he still feels, in everything. So he remains, for the time, like one of the angels whom the Renaissance poet represented as reincarnate in man; the ones who in the insurrection of Lucifer were not for Jehovah nor yet for his enemy. CHAPTER XV ANY CURE? I How shall it all be set right? For it must be, of course. A people that did not wait to be pushed off its seat by the Kaiser is not likely now to turn its face to the wall and die inertly of shortage of faith and general moral debility. Some day soon we shall have to cease squatting among the potsherds and crabbing each other, and give all the strength we have left to the job of regaining the old control of ourselves and our fate which, in the days of our health, could only be kept by putting forth constantly the whole force of the will. "Not to be done," you may say. And, of course, it will be a miracle. But only the everyday miracle done in somebody's body, or else in his soul. When the skin shines white and tight over the joints, and the face is only a skull with some varieties of expression, and the very flame flickers and jumps in the lamp, the body will bend itself up to expel a disease that it could not, in all its first splendour of health, keep from the door. In all the breeds of cowardly livers--drunkards, thieves, liars, sorners, drug-takers, all the kinds that have run from the enemy, throwing away as they ran every weapon that better men use to repel him--you will find some that turn in the end and rend with their bare hands the fiend that they could not face with their bow and their spear.