There is no way in which life can be brought back to a sane and wholesome and noble basis except through the recovery of a right religion and a right philosophy, the establishing of a new industrial and commercial system as radically opposed to the insanities of Bolshevism as it is to the sinister efficiency of the capitalist-proletarian _régime_, and by the elimination of the useless and crushing impedimenta that have been heaped upon us by “labour-saving” machines, the craft and ingenuity of misguided inventors, and the monumental ability of the system of advertising. Within the deadly coil of life as it is now irrevocably fixed by the society of today, there is no possibility of escape (barring the threatened success of Marxian socialism as this has taken shape in internationalism and Bolshevism), for the individual is helpless, bound hand and foot by the forces of custom, public opinion, lethargy and luxury, and by what Dr. Jacks so well calls “the tyranny of mere things.” So the real men felt in the time of St. Benedict, and of St. Odo of Cluny and St. Robert of Molesmes, of St. Norbert and St. Francis and St. Dominic and St. Bruno. They left the world in order that they might regain it, even though their eyes were fixed on a heavenly country. For themselves and their followers they gained a better type of life than the world could then offer, and their deeds lived after them in centuries of a regenerated life. It is our habit of mind to think of the period of decline and catastrophe that intervenes between one era and the next as something awful and ominous, when the whole world realizes the horror of change and is sunk in black despair. In this we are undoubtedly as wrong as we are in the case of our interpretation of history. St. Augustine and St. Jerome saw the significance of the fall of the Roman Empire, but such other documentary evidence as exists would indicate that the Romans as a whole took it much as a matter of course, with little sense of the vastness of the catastrophe and the plenitude of the humiliation. In the ninth century men were so steeped in the universal sin and corruption they ceased to retain any perspective whatever. Very likely while Marozia and her clan were turning Rome and the Church into a monstrous offence against decency, the general public, as well as the world-wide corrupting influences themselves, thought that their “civilization” was really not so bad after all. The same is true of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the beginnings of the Renaissance dazzled man’s eyes to the tragedy of the ending of Mediævalism and the fast growing profligacy in act and thought. We ourselves are in similar case. We are so near the events that are bringing modernism to an end that we can estimate them not at all in their true nature. Read any newspaper of today, talk with any “practical business man,” or indeed almost any clergyman, educator or