And this was precisely what men were aiming at. The military framework of society was broken; to replace it by a financial framework would have been considered almost criminal; and that was where the great danger lay. To employ a comparison approved by Francis I., two cars are running the world’s course side by side; a choice must be made between them. One is the car of Plutus, filled with gold, lechery, vice; the other is the car of Honour and Love, thronged about by all the virtues.[138] The choice is clear: for its own happiness, for its own glory, the world must reject the worship of money, trample on the power of money, and proclaim the power of virtuous love. Thus, little by little, the formula sought for emerges into view. A wonderful light is thrown on the problem when it is admitted that to be happy it is necessary to rise above material things, and establish society upon a philosophy of love. Life and beauty, they are the true riches! The feeblest of men, the most hopeless invalids, the vilest outcasts, woman with her feeble body and ardent soul, are richer than a nugget of gold, more eternal than the Alps, greater than the sea and the vast realm of nature, for this very reason that they have in them life, the true life, that is, consciousness of life, confidence in life, and love of life. And the same idea that happiness must be sought through true life, led men to recognise the necessity of considering the ‘hygiene’ of this life. Medicine, care and pity had been up to that time only for the ills of the body, for the gaping, gory wounds that came under the eye; the wounds of heart and spirit had been forgotten. To render life sumptuous and brilliant, to fritter it away in a sort of giddy excitement or intoxication, was the utmost of men’s achievement. The heart cannot be bought; there is no specific for healing its wounds; they must heal themselves. The art will consist then, in realising as far as may be the plenitude of life; in other words, in extracting from Christianity, which is Hope and Charity, an aesthetic philosophy. “I am the God of the living,” said the Master. If we combine the sayings on life scattered through the gospels we obtain a true code of aestheticism, while the sayings on love form the warp and woof of the doctrine. On the morrow of the Resurrection, when the rude fishers chosen to disseminate the sacred tidings are in utter ignorance of the event, the Master shows Himself first of all to Love; He appears at the gates of a mysterious garden by which Mary Magdalene is about to pass—Mary, a woman pardoned, glorified, because she loved much, because she sinned through superabundant kindliness.