uncreative idealisms, and the Catholic church will protect itself from the advancing spiritual disintegration of Western society by immuring the sacramental life more and more in places of worship and in the esthetic appeal of symbolism. In both Protestantism and Catholicism, mystical experiences will have the character of a flight from life instead of being “the practice of the presence of God” not only in our kitchens but also in our factories, our department stores, and our offices of finance. Such a mystical flight has begun, in fact, not guessing its actual route, innocent of the possibility that it may even be another instrument whereby Mammon conceals the fact that it is--just Mammon. PART II THIS DISILLUSIONMENT IS ITSELF ILLUSORY IX THE PRECISE NATURE OF THE ISSUE The disillusionment that creeps over twentieth-century man concerns, not the ability of the universe to supply what he desires, but his own capacity for really desiring anything greatly significant. Are our springs of action, then, all necessarily narrow, selfish, or sensual, and do we merely delude ourselves when we fancy that our souls have wings? It is conceivable that we have wings, but that the surrounding atmosphere is not of sufficient density to sustain us in flight. In this case an old form of pessimism would be justifiable. We should be able to respect ourselves, but we should complain against the nature that brought us forth and now envelops us. The situation would have all the elements of the deepest tragedy--two irreconcilables meeting, and producing unrelievable woe thereby. The general trend of our day is not towards pessimism of this kind. Modern man assumes, on the whole, that the world is large enough for our nature, and that his job is to get out of it what’s there. No slackening of enterprise confronts us, little world-weariness; rather unprecedented eagerness to explore, master, and appropriate. Nature does not scare and oppress us as she used to do, and she is immensely more responsive to our desires since the sciences taught us how to predict. Accordingly, not disappointed bitterness, not renunciation nor resignation, but exploitation is the characteristic attitude. “The world is my oyster.” What directly affects our idealism, then, is not any general lack of exuberance in nature, but the conviction that there is a special lack at one point. What we want is there, it is believed, but our wants, our springs of action, are scant. It is assumed that we cannot want the common welfare as much as we want profits; that we cannot desire world-fellowship as much as we desire the perquisites of our present war-making system of economy; that sex-appetite never can be made to play a harmonious part in a symphony of life; and that aspiration for communion with the divine is a refined and self-deceived form of the very forces that religion fancies that it is bringing under control.