Such are indications of a possible escape from a literature that appears in the bulk in active warfare against “progress,” as the word is understood in twentieth-century England. The critics and the novelists, no less than the poets, would seem to have deserved Plato’s rigorous sentence of expulsion from a civilisation against which they are openly at war. They cry pitifully or passionately over the huge ant-heap of modern industry, “What shall it profit?” Those who listen to their crying will probably drop under in the struggle, from mere inability--when the choice is offered--to fashion any intelligible goal of attainment. They exhibit progress making inevitable more men, but by no means better men. They demonstrate, as with the physical accuracy of the dissector’s scalpel, the same selfishnesses and superstitions and weaknesses and impulses of lust and cowardice and greed, multiplying to-day as yesterday. They reveal in the few, as conspicuously as in the many, life directed by prejudice rather than by reason, arrogance and avarice and blindness exercising their ancient empire. They ask sometimes with impatience, sometimes with deliberation, if this be the final word in the matter: if the desirable things which are possible to human experience are always to be sacrificed to Accumulation or Acceleration, or a joyless extravagance, or (at the bottom) a mere animal struggle for food and shelter. And Civilisation, in reply to these “Anarchists,” speaks with voice less certain than in former days; being itself perplexed why, after the long journey has been attempted and all the miracle achieved, it cannot at last see clearly on the horizon the walls and towers of the Golden City of men’s dreams. CHAPTER IX RELIGION AND PROGRESS