I beseech audience from the churches for these thoughts on our Irish polity, and would recall to them their early history, how when the fiery spirit of their Lord first manifested on earth, life, near to It, reflected It as in a glowing glass, and impulses of true living arose. Material possessions were held in common. There was no fierce talk of Thine and Mine. His ancient law counseled poverty to the spirit, lest the gates of Paradise should grow narrow before it like the eye of a needle. I believe the fading hold the heavens have over the world is due to the neglect of the economic basis of spiritual life. What profound spiritual life can there be when the social order almost forces men to battle with each other for the means of existence? I know well that no political mechanics, nothing which is an economic device only, will of themselves be able to affect the transfiguration of society and bring it under the dominion of the spirit. For that, a far higher quality of thought and action than is here indicated is necessary. The economist can provide the daily bread, but that bread of the coming day which Christ wished his followers to aspire to must come otherwise. That should be the labor of the poets, artists, musicians, and of the heroic and aristocratic characters who provide by their life an image to which life can be modeled. Therefore I beseech audience not only of the churches, but of the poets, writers, and thinkers of Ireland for their aid in this labor. They alone can create in wide commonalty the ideals which can dominate society. It is the work of the artist to create for us images of desirable life, to manifest to us the ideal humanity, and to prefigure that vaster entity which I have called the national being. I said in an earlier page that part of the failure of Ireland must be laid to the poets who had dropped out of the divine procession and sang a solitary song; to the writers who had turned from contemplating the great to the portrayal of the little in human nature. I know how difficult it is to constrain the spirit, and how futile it is to ask artists or poets to create what they are not inspired to create. But we can ask all men--artists, poets, litterateurs, and scientists--to be citizens, and if they realize imaginatively the spiritual conception of the State, we may assume that this imaginative realization of the State will influence the labors of the mind, and what is done will, consciously or unconsciously, have reference to that collective being which must dominate society more and more, which will dominate it as a tyranny if we fail in our labors, or liberate and make more majestical the spirit of man if we imagine rightly. All greatness is brought about by a conspiracy of the imagination and the will. Our literature certainly manifests beauty, but not greatness or majesty, for majesty only arises where there is an orchestration of humanity by some mighty