“Things are in a bad way, Jack,” he said to me at the end of one of these interviews. “You don’t see everything that’s going on, of course; so you couldn’t be expected to be on the alert for it; but it’s only right to warn you that we’re coming up against the biggest trouble we’ve had yet in the Area.” “Of course things are anything but satisfactory, I know,” I replied. “The output’s going down and there seems to be no way of screwing the men up to increase it. But is it really fatal, do you think? We seem even now to have the thing well in hand.” I glanced up at the great Nitrogen Curve above the fireplace. The red and green lines upon it appeared to me to show a state of affairs which, if not all that we could wish, was at least satisfactory as compared with what might have been. Nordenholt followed my glance. “That practical trend of mind which you have, Jack, sometimes keeps you from seeing realities. What lies at the root of the trouble just now isn’t output or slackness or anything like that. These are only symptoms of the real disease. It’s not in the concrete things that I see the danger, except indirectly. The true peril comes from the intangibles; ideas, states of mind, sub-conscious reflections. I’ve told you often that the material world is only the outward show which hardly matters: the real things are the minds of the men who live in it. It’s their movements you need to look at if you want to gauge affairs.” “I stick to what I know, Nordenholt, as I’ve often told you. I’m no psychologist; and I have to look on the material side because I’m out of my depth in the other. But let’s hear what you have in your mind about the state of affairs.” “Well, you’ve been busy enough with your own work; so probably you haven’t had time to observe how things are going; but I can put the thing in a nutshell. We’ve weathered a good many difficulties; but now we’re up against the biggest of them all. I see all the signs of a revival in the near future--and it isn’t going to be a Christian revival. It spells trouble of the worst description.” Now that my attention had been drawn to the point, a score of incidents flashed across my mind in confirmation of what he said. I had noticed an increased attendance at the meetings of street-preachers; and also a growth in the number of the preachers themselves. As I went about the city in the evenings I had seen in many places knots of people assembled round some speaker who, with emotion-contorted visage, was striving to move them by his eloquence.