The Crusades, the Renaissance, the Revolution, no doubt exercised, in the long run, so potent a secularizing influence, because men's minds had become too largely other-worldly--had lost a sufficient interest in this wonderful world; and hence all those new, apparently boundless outlooks and problems were taken up largely as a revolt and escape from what looked like a prison-house--religion. Yet through all these violent oscillations there persisted, in human life, the supernatural need and call. In this God is the great central interest, love and care of the soul. We must look to it that both these interests and Ethics are kept awake, strong and distinct within a costingly rich totality of life: the Ethic of the honourable citizen, merchant, lawyer--of Confucius and Socrates; and the Ethic of the Jewish Prophets at their deepest, of the Suffering Servant, of our Lord's Beatitudes, of St. Paul's great eulogy of love, of Augustine and Monica at the window in Ostia, of Father Damian's voluntarily dying a leper amidst the lepers. The Church is the born incorporation of this pole, as the State is of the other. The Church indeed should, at its lower limit, also encourage the This-world Stage; the State, at its higher limit, can, more or less consciously, prepare us for the Other-World Stage. Both spring from the same God, at two levels of His action; both concern the same men, at two stages of their response and need. Yet the primary duty of the State is turned to this life; the primary care of the Church, to that life--to life in its deepest depths. Will men, after this great war, more largely again apprehend, love, and practise this double polarity of their lives? Only thus will the truest progress be possible in the understanding, the application, and the fruitfulness of Religion, with its great central origin and object, God, the beginning and end of all our true progress, precisely because He Himself already possesses immeasurably more than all He helps us to become,--He Who, even now already, is our Peace in Action, our Joy even in the Cross. BOOKS FOR REFERENCE I. 1. Oswold Kuelpe, _The Philosophy of the Present in Germany_, English translation. London: George Allen, 1913, _3s. 6d._ net. 2. J. McKeller Stewart, _A Critical Exposition of Bergon's Philosophy_. London: Macmillan, 1913, _6s._ net. II. 1. R. H. Charles, _A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life_. London: A. & C. Black, 1899, _10s. 6d._ net. 2. Ernest T. Scott, _The Fourth Gospel_. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1906, _6s._ net. III. 1. Aliotta, _The Idealistic Reaction against Science_. English translation. Macmillan, 1914, _12s._ net. 2. F. C. Schiller, _Humanism_, Macmillan, 1903, _7s. 6d._ net. 3. C. C. J. Webb, _Group Theories of Religion and the Individual_, Allen and Unwin, 1916, _5s._ net. FOOTNOTES: [32] _The Idealistic Reaction against Science_, Engl. tr. 1914, pp. 6, 7.