I have tried in “The Sins of the Fathers,” to prove that the marks of degeneracy and constructive evil in the modernism that went to its ruin during the Great War, and is now accomplishing its destiny in the even more tragical epoch of after-the-war, are its imperialism, its materialism and its quantitative standard--that is to say, its acceptance of the gross aggregate in place of the unit of human scale, its standard of values which rejected the passion for perfection in favour of the numerical equivalent, and its denial of spirit as a reality rather than a mere mode of material action--while the only salvation for society is to be found in the restoration, in all things, of small human units, the testing of all things by value not bulk, and the acceptance once more of the philosophy of sacramentalism. It would be possible, I suppose, to develop a detailed scheme for the reconstruction of the world along certain definite lines that would be in accordance with these principles, but the question would at once arise, How could it be made to work? Frankly, the question is unanswerable except by a categorical negative. The nineteenth-century superstition that life proceeds after an inevitable system of progressive evolution, so defiant of history, so responsible in great degree for the many delusions that made the war not only possible but inevitable, finds few now to do it honour. The soul is not forever engaged in the graceful industry of building for itself ever more stately mansions; it is quite as frequently employed in defiling and destroying those already built, and in substituting the hovel for the palace. It is not even, except at infrequent intervals, desirous of improving its condition. As a whole, man is not an animal that is eager for enlightenment that it may follow after the right. At certain crescent periods in the long process of history, when great prophets and leaders are raised up, it is forced, even against its will, to follow after the leaders when once the prophets have been conscientiously stoned, and great and wonderful things result--Athens, Rome, Byzantium, Venice, Sicily, the cities of the Middle Ages, Flanders, Elizabethan England--but the untoward exertion is its own executioner, and always society sinks back into some form of barbarism from whence all is to be begun again.