Again, still speaking as one Westerner to another, our entrance into the war found us dangerously close to the point of losing something that was finely spiritual in our forebears. I am aware that an impatient shrug greets this suggestion. The spires and towers of innumerable churches decorate the Western sky-line, and I accept them for what they represent, without discussing the efficiency of the modern church or its failure or success in meeting the problems of modern life. There was apparent in the first settlers of the Mississippi valley a rugged spirituality that accounted for much in their achievements. The West was a lonesome place and religion--Catholic and Protestant--filled a need and assisted greatly in making wilderness and plain tolerable. The imagination of the pioneer was quickened and brightened by the promise of things that he believed to be eternal; the vast sweep of prairie and woodland deepened his sense of reliance upon the Infinite. This sense so happily interpreted and fittingly expressed by Lincoln is no longer discernible--at least it is not obtrusively manifest--and this seems to me a lamentable loss. Here, again, it may be said that this is not peculiar to the West; that we have only been affected by the eternal movement of the time spirit. And yet this elementary confidence in things of the spirit played an important part in the planting of the democratic ideal in the heart of America, and we can but deplore the passing of what to our immediate ancestors was so satisfying and stimulating. And here, as with other problems that I have passed with only the most superficial note, I have no solution, if indeed any be possible. I am fully conscious that I fumble for something intangible and elusive; and it may be that I am only crying vainly for the restoration of something that has gone forever. Perhaps this war came opportunely to break our precipitate rush toward materialism, and the thing we were apparently losing, the old enthusiasm for higher things, the greater leisure for self-examination and self-communion, may come again in the day of peace. “There is always,” says Woodberry, “an ideality of the human spirit” visible in all the works of democracy, and we need to be reminded of this frequently, for here in the heart of America it is of grave importance that we remain open-minded and open-hearted to that continuing idealism which must be the strength and stay of the nation.