And in a thousand lesser ways in various efforts through industrious novelists and essayists, in the newspaper and the pulpit, there is made manifest this bewilderment, doubt, and uncertainty of the future. “Neither hast Thou saved Thy people at all,” is the summary of many who hoped so much from the discoveries and progresses of the last century, and now find their hopes unexpectedly baffled. The majority of writers are in revolt against the organisation of present-day society. Some call themselves Socialists. But by “Socialist” they mean little but an impeachment of the present. With some that impeachment is definitely of certain specific and economic evils. Poverty in the midst of plenty, extravagance of wealth helpless before extravagance of penury, a growing absorption in pleasure, lack of simplicity, of patriotism, or of impersonal ideals, are the subjects which fill their pages with lamentation. There are others, however, in whom the criticism goes deeper, with whom complaint against life’s ironies and injustices has passed into complaint against life itself. They can see present wrongs, but if all these wrongs were righted, they can see no rational or satisfying ideal. Level the poor to the rich, convert Poplar or Wapping into Belgravia or Mayfair, make every labourer’s cottage, as by the waving of a fairy wand, into the security and splendour of the country house. What after all, they declare, have you accomplished but the conversion of a society scourged with hunger and cold into a society afflicted with a great weariness. Humanity, at last self-conscious, has understood the meaning of the World Process and will be no longer fooled by its futile, irrational demands. What can be discovered, in this evidence of wasting and decay, of another character: of a literature which accepts the present with rejoicing, or looks through the present to a transfigured future, or sees the present itself transfigured by a perpetual benediction? Can there still be descried, under grey skies and in an age of comfort rather than of inspiration, those who still assert the reality of the Vision Splendid, and essay adventure down all the great ways of the world. Still two voyages are being accepted: a voyage without, in the actual encounter with primitive and hostile forces, and in a universe of salt and bracing challenges; and a voyage within, across distant horizons and to stranger countries than any visible to the actual senses. In the latter there is revealed a continuous tradition through the older mystics, of those who are secure in whatever wild whirlpools or stretches of sullen marsh the river of time may flow, because their goods are gathered “Where change is not, nor parting any more, Nor revolution of the moon and sun.”