Do you say it is _hard_? It would be if we were made of poorer stuff. But made as we are anything less would be too small for us, would leave us dissatisfied, hungry and half employed. Yes, half employed, and not the best half either. We are so made that until we "grasp the nettle of life" the best part of us has nothing to do, loitering, so to speak, at the street corners of life, like a starving labourer out of work. On that upper level, where the best that is in us confronts the highest that is demanded of us, we discover how finely the nature of man is adapted to the world in which he lives, how well the two accord, the noblest element in the one corresponding to the most challenging element in the other, so that deep answers unto deep and the two make music together. On the lower levels there is no adaptation; our selfish desires are at odds with nature; we are out for a good time and get no response; and there all is disenchantment, disappointment and misery. But the keynote of the higher level is joy--the joy of the labourer who has found his work, of the lover who has seen his object, of the hero who has received his commission and his sword. Towards the end of the war, or perhaps shortly afterwards, somebody coined a more attractive phrase which was much on the lips of exuberant reformers. They were going to make, so they said, "A world fit for heroes to live in." What kind of a world is that? Is comfort the keynote of it? Does it provide the hero with an assured income and an easy life? Does it guarantee him a pension for any heroism he displays? Does it ask of its heroes only a limited term of service, and then superannuate them at an early age, exposing them to peril for a short time and after that withdrawing dangers from their path and surrounding them with the safeguards of a protected respectability? No; what these arrangements provide for is not the life of heroism, but its death. Give the hero a world like that and what will he say? "This world," he will say, "is _not_ fit for me to live in. It spells extinction to all that makes life worth living to me. It is the flat opposite to what I desire. It lacks everything that makes the world divine. No God can dwell within it. No Christ will ever visit its melancholy shores." And yet, is it not something like this that many of us have had in mind of late when we have been talking of "A world fit for heroes to live in"? Have we not conceived it as a world where heroism is a mere incident, almost an accident, which comes in brief patches and spells, and when the rest of life is given over to the middling virtues and to prearranged satisfactions? There are people who cry out for this; there is something within us all that cries out for it; but the noblest part of us scorns it; the heroic spirit would not have it at any price.