We are accustomed to think of the external world around us as a nasty tiresome old thing of which all we can say for certain is that it works by a "law of cussedness"--so that, whichever way we want to go, that way seems always barred, and we only bump against blind walls without making any progress. But that uncomfortable state of affairs arises from ourselves. Once we have passed a certain barrier, which at present looks so frowning and impossible, but which fades into nothing immediately we have passed it--once we have found the open secret of identity--then the way is indeed open in every direction. The world in which we live--the world into which we are tumbled as children at the first onset of self-consciousness--denies this great fact of unity. It is a world in which the principle of separation rules. Instead of a common life and union with each other, the contrary principle (especially in the later civilizations) has been the one recognized--and to such an extent that always there prevails the obsession of separation, and the conviction that each person is an isolated unit. The whole of our modern society has been founded on this delusive idea, WHICH IS FALSE. You go into the markets, and every man's hand is against the others--that is the ruling principle. You go into the Law Courts where justice is, or should be, administered, and you find that the principle which denies unity is the one that prevails. The criminal (whose actions have really been determined by the society around him) is cast out, disacknowledged, and condemned to further isolation in a prison cell. 'Property' again is the principle which rules and determines our modern civilization--namely that which is proper to, or can be appropriated by, each person, as AGAINST the others. In the moral world the doom of separation comes to us in the shape of the sense of sin. For sin is separation. Sin is actually (and that is its only real meaning) the separation from others, and the non-acknowledgment of unity. And so it has come about that during all this civilization-period the sense of sin has ruled and ranged to such an extraordinary degree. Society has been built on a false base, not true to fact or life--and has had a dim uneasy consciousness of its falseness. Meanwhile at the heart of it all--and within all the frantic external strife and warfare--there is all the time this real great life brooding. The kingdom of Heaven, as we said before, is still within. The word Democracy indicates something of the kind--the rule of the Demos, that is of the common life. The coming of that will transform, not only our Markets and our Law Courts and our sense of Property, and other institutions, into something really great and glorious instead of the dismal masses of rubbish which they at present are; but it will transform our sense of Morality.