Some new deed or thought or book was certain to take the place of that which had for a time been considered sacred. And, if that did not come, then woe to the race! Progress must stop and darkness must close in on their purblind leaders, who, in order to retain their dominance, must elevate the past, immediate or distant, into a divinity, and its best book into an oracle. After a time so obscured do the pages of this book become with cobwebs of interpretation that at last they must spin new cobwebs out of their intestines. The dread of light from without becomes a horror. If a new teacher or prophet should come, down with him into the dust; his teachings are false, for they agree not with the devotion-cobwebbed book. If a reformer sees light above and ahead, he is banned as a messenger of hell; and what he sees is nothing but a diabolic marshlight. All through the race spread the awful diseases of spiritual inbreeding, inability to distinguish the true from the false, love of delusion, unwholesome and insane pursuits and ends, and the madness of cruelty and intolerance. Nothing but fierce revolution could save a race from such a plight. And the germs of revolution must come from without themselves and without the world. CHAPTER VII PIONEERING IMAGINATION, corrected by racial instinct in the assemblies of all, was the seeker for foregleams of what was to be. And a people that had organised its civilisation into a disciplined advance was not likely to leave its scouts and vanguard unorganised. Its destiny was largely in the hands of those who went before it into the night, or who ascended the heights above it, and told of the region to be traversed next, and the best routes through it. There was no service that needed so much the best powers of the race and its best organisation.