Chapter III: Appendix: B (2)

The first fruit of the new intellectualism was the philosophy of Dr. John Calvin--if we can call it such,--Augustinian philosophy, misread, distorted and made noxious by its reliance on the intellectual process cut off from spiritual energy as the sufficient corrective of philosophical thought. It is this false philosophy, allied with an equally false theology, that misled for so many centuries those who accepted the new versions of Christianity that issued out of the Reformation. The second was the mechanistic system, or systems, the protagonist of which was Descartes. If, as I believe, Calvinism was un-Christian, the materialistic philosophies that have gone on from the year 1637, were anti-Christian. As the power of Christianity declined through the centuries that have followed the Reformation, Calvinism played a less and less important part, while the new philosophies of mechanism and rationalism correspondingly increased. During the nineteenth century their control was absolute, and what we are today we have become through this dominance, coupled with the general devitalizing or abandonment of religion.

And yet are we not left comfortless. Even in the evolutionary philosophy engendered by Darwin and formulated by Herbert Spencer and the Germans, with all its mistaken assumptions and dubious methods, already there is visible a tendency to get away from the old Pagan static system reborn with the Renaissance. We can never forget that Bergson has avowed that "the mind of man, by its very nature, is incapable of apprehending reality." After this the return towards the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages is not so difficult, nor even its recovery. If we associate with this process on the part of formal philosophy the very evident, if sometimes abnormal and exaggerated, progress towards a new mysticism, we are far from finding ourselves abandoned to despair as to the whole future of philosophy.

Now this return and this recovery are, I believe, necessary as one of the first steps towards establishing a sound basis for the building up of a new and a better civilization, and one that is in fact as well as in name a Christian civilization. I do not mean that, with this restoration of Christian philosophy, there we should rest. Both revelation and enlightenment are progressive, and once the nexus of our broken life were restored, philosophical development would be continuous, and we should go on beyond the scholastics even as they proceeded beyond Patristic theology and philosophy. I think a break of continuity was effected in the sixteenth century, with disastrous effects, and until this break is healed we are cut off from what is in a sense the Apostolical succession of philosophical verity.

Before going further I would guard against two possible misconceptions; of one of them I have already spoken, that is, the error so frequent in the past as well as today, that would make of philosophy, however sound, however consonant with the finalities of revealed religion, a substitute in any degree for religion itself. Philosophy is the reaction of the intellect, of man to the stimuli of life, but religion _is_ life and is therefore in many ways a flat contradiction of the concepts of the intellect, which is only a small portion of life, therefore limited, partial, and (because of this) sometimes entirely wrong in its conclusions independently arrived at along these necessarily circumscribed lines.

The second possible error is that philosophy is the affair of a small group of students and specialists, quite outside the purview of the great mass of men, and that it owes its existence to this same class of delving scholars, few in number, impractical in their aims, and sharply differentiated from their fellows. On the contrary it is a vital consideration for all those who desire to "see life and see it whole" in order that they may establish a true scale of comparative values and a right relationship between those things that come from the outside and, meeting those that come from within, establish that plexus of interacting force we call life. As for the source of philosophic truth, Friar Bacon put it well when he said "All the wisdom of philosophy is created by God and given to the philosophers, and it is Himself that illumines the minds of men in all wisdom." It is a whimsical juxtaposition, but the first pastor of the Puritans in America, the Rev. John Robinson, testifies to the same effect. "All truth," he says, "is of God ... Wherefore it followeth that nothing true in right reason and sound philosophy can be false in divinity.... I add, though the truth be uttered by the devil himself, yet it is originally of God." There are not two sources of truth, that of Divine Revelation on the one hand, that of science and philosophy and all the intellectual works of man on the other. Truth is one, and the Source is one; the channels of communication alone are different. But truth in its finality, the Absolute, the _noumenon_ that is the substance of phenomena, is in itself not a thing that can be directly apprehended by man; it lies within the "ultra-violet" rays of his intellectual spectrum. "The trammels of the body prevent man from knowing God in Himself" says Philo, "He is known only in the Divine forces in which He manifests Himself." And St. Thomas: "In the present state of life in which the soul is united to a passable body, it is impossible for the intellect to understand anything actually except by turning to the phantasm." Religion confesses this, philosophy constantly tends to forget it, therefore true religion speaks always through the symbol, rejecting, because it transcends, the intellectual criterion, while philosophy is on safe ground only when it unites itself with religion, testing its own conclusions by a higher reality, and existing not as a rival but as a coadjutor.

It is St. Paul who declares that "God has never left Himself without a witness" and the "witness" was explicit, however clouded, in the philosophies of paganism. Plato and Aristotle knew the limitations of man's mind, and the corrective of over-weaning intellectuality in religion, but thereafter the wisdom faded and pride ousted humility, with the result that philosophy became not light but darkness. Let me quote from the great twelfth century philosopher, Hugh of St. Victor, who deserves a better fate than sepulture in the ponderous tomes of Migne:

"There was a certain wisdom that seemed such to them that knew not the true wisdom. The world found it and began to be puffed up, thinking itself great in this. Confiding in its wisdom it became presumptuous and boasted it would attain the highest wisdom. And it made itself a ladder of the face of creation.... Then those things which were seen were known and there were other things which were not known; and through those which were manifest they expected to reach those that were hidden. And they stumbled and fell into the falsehoods of their own imagining.... So God made foolish the wisdom of this world; and He pointed out another wisdom, which seemed foolishness and was not. For it preached Christ crucified, in order that truth might be sought in humility. But the world despised it, wishing to contemplate the works of God, which He had made a source of wonder, and it did not wish to venerate what He had set for imitation, neither did it look to its own disease, seeking medicine in piety; but presuming on a false health, it gave itself over with vain curiosity to the study of alien things."

Precisely: and this is the destiny that has overtaken not only the pagan philosophy of which Hugh of St. Victor was speaking, but also that which followed after St. Thomas Aquinas, from Descartes to Hobbes and Kant and Comte and Herbert Spencer and William James. The jealously intellectual philosophies of the nineteenth century, the materialistic and mechanistic substitutes that were offered and accepted with such enthusiasm after the great cleavage between religion and life, are but "the falsehoods of their own imaginings" of which Hugh of St. Victor speaks, for they were cut off from the stream of spiritual verity, and are losing themselves in the desert they have made.

Meanwhile they have played their part in shaping the destinies of the world, and it was an ill part, if we may judge from the results that showed themselves in the events that have been recorded between the year 1800 and the present moment. Just what this influence was in determining the nature of society, of industrial civilization and of the political organism I shall try to indicate in some of the following lectures, but apart from these concrete happenings, this influence was, I am persuaded, most disastrous in its bearing on human character. Neither wealth nor power, neither education nor environment, not even the inherent tendencies of race--the most powerful of all--can avail against the degenerative force of a life without religion, or, what is worse, that maintains only a desiccated formula; and the post-Renaissance philosophies are one and all definitely anti-religious and self-proclaimed substitutes for religion. As such they were offered and accepted, and as such they must take their share of the responsibility for what has happened.

I believe we must and can retrace our steps to that point in time when a right philosophy was abandoned, and begin again. There is no impossibility or even difficulty here. History is not a dead thing, a thing of the past; it is eternally present to man, and this is one of the sharp differentiations between man and beast. The material monuments of man crumble and disappear, but the spirit that built the Parthenon or Reims Cathedral, that inspired St. Paul on Mars' hill or forged Magna Charta or the Constitution of the United States is, _because of our quality as men,_ just as present and operative with us today, if we will, as that which sent the youth of ten nations into a righteous war five years ago, or spoke yesterday through some noble action that you or I may have witnessed. It is as easy for us to accept and practice the philosophy of St. Thomas or the divine humanism of St. Francis as it is to accept the philosophy of Mr. Wells or the theories of Sir Oliver Lodge. No spiritual thing dies, or even grows old, nor does it drift backward in the dwindling perspective of ancient history, and the foolishest saying of man is that "you cannot turn back the hands of the clock."

It is simply a question of will, and will is simply a question of desire and of faith.

Manifestly I cannot be expected to recreate in a few words this philosophy to which I believe we must have recourse in our hour of need. I have no ability to do this in any case. It begins with St. Paul, is continued through St. Augustine, and finds its culmination in the great Mediaeval group of Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus, Hugh of St. Victor and St. Thomas Aquinas. I do not know of any single book that epitomizes it all in vital form, though Cardinal Mercier and Dr. De Wulf have written much that is stimulating and helpful. I cannot help thinking that the great demand today is for a compact volume that synthesizes the whole magnificent system in terms not of history and scientific exegesis, but in terms of life. Plato and Aristotle are so preserved to man, and the philosophers of modernism also; it is only the magisterial and dynamic philosophy of Christianity that is diffused through many works, some of them still untranslated and all quite without coordination, save St. Thomas Aquinas alone, the magnitude of whose product staggers the human mind and in its profuseness defeats its own ends. We need no more histories of philosophy, but we need an epitome of Christian philosophy, not for students but for men.

Such an epitome I am not fitted to offer, but there are certain rather fundamental conceptions and postulates that run counter both to pagan and to modern philosophy, the loss of which out of life has, I maintain, much to do with our present estate, and that must be regained before we can go forward with any reasonable hope of betterment. These I will try to indicate as well as I can.

Christian philosophy teaches, in so far as it deals with the relationship between man and these divine forces that are forever building, unbuilding and rebuilding the fabric of life, somewhat as follows:

The world as we know it, man, life itself as it works through all creation, is the union of matter and spirit; and matter is not spirit, nor spirit matter, nor is one a mode of the other, but they are two different creatures. Apart from this union of matter and spirit there is no life, in the sense in which we know it, and severance is death. "The body" says St. Thomas, "is not of the essence of the soul; but the soul, by the nature of its essence, can be united to the body, so that, properly speaking, the soul alone is not the species, but the composite", and Duns Scotus makes clear the nature and origin of this common "essence" when he says there is "on the one hand God as Infinite Actuality, on the other spiritual and corporeal substances possessing an homogeneous common element." That is to say; matter and spirit are both the result of the divine creative act, and though separate, and in a sense opposed, find their point of origin in the Divine Actuality.

The created world is the concrete manifestation of matter, through which, for its transformation and redemption, spirit is active in a constant process of interpenetration whereby matter itself is being eternally redeemed. What then is matter and what is spirit? The question is of sufficient magnitude to absorb all the time assigned to these lectures, with the strong possibility that even then we should be scarcely wiser than before. For my own purposes, however, I am content to accept the definition of matter formulated by Duns Scotus, which takes over the earlier definition of Plotinus, purges it of its elements of pagan error, and redeems it by Christian insight.

"Materia Primo Prima" says the great Franciscan, "is the indeterminate element of contingent things. This does not exist in Nature, but it has reality in so far as it constitutes the term of God's creative activity. By its union with a substantial form it becomes endowed with the attributes of quantity, and becomes Secundo Prima. Subject to the substantial changes of Nature, it becomes matter as we see it."

It is this "Materia Primo Prima," the term of God's creative activity, that is eternally subjected to the regenerative process of spiritual interpenetration, and the result is organic life.

What is spirit? The creative power of the Logos, in the sense in which St. John interprets and corrects the early, partial, and therefore erroneous theories of the Stoics and of Philo. God the Son, the Eternal Word of the Father, "the brightness of His glory and the figure of His Substance." "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father: by Whom all things were made." Pure wisdom, pure will, pure energy, unconditioned by matter, but creating life out of the operation of the Holy Spirit on and through matter, and in the fullness of time becoming Incarnate for the purpose of the final redemption of man.

Now since man is so compact of matter and spirit, it must follow that he cannot lay hold of pure spirit, the Absolute that lies beyond and above all material conditioning, except through the medium of matter, through its figures, its symbols, its "phantasms." Says St. Thomas: "From material things we can rise to some kind of knowledge of immaterial things, but not to the perfect knowledge thereof." The way of life therefore, is the incessant endeavour of man sacramentally to approach the Absolute through the leading of the Holy Spirit, so running parallel to the slow perfecting of matter which is being effected by the same operation. So matter itself takes on a certain sanctity, not only as something susceptible, and in process, of perfection, but as the vehicle of spirit and its tabernacle, since in matter spirit is actually incarnate.

From this process follows of necessity the whole sacramental system, in theology, philosophy and operation, of Christianity. It is of its _esse;_ its great original, revolutionary and final contribution to the wisdom that man may have for his own, and it follows inevitably from the basic facts of the Incarnation and Redemption, which are also its perfect showing forth.

Philosophically this is the great contribution of Christianity and for fifteen centuries it was held implicitly by Christendom, yet it was rejected, either wholly or in part, by the Protestant organizations that came out of the Reformation, and it fell into such oblivion that outside the Catholic Church it was not so much ignored or rejected as totally forgotten. Recently a series of lectures were delivered at King's College, London, by various carefully chosen authorities, all specialists in their own fields, under the general title "Mediaeval Contributions to Modern Civilization," and neither the pious author of the address on "The Religious Contribution of the Middle Ages," nor the learned author of that on "Mediaeval Philosophy," gave evidence of ever having heard of sacramental philosophy. It may be that I do them an injustice, and that they would offer as excuse the incontestible fact that Mediaevalism contributed nothing to "modern civilization," either in religion or philosophy, that it was willing to accept.

The peril of all philosophies, outside that of Christianity as it was developed under the Catholic dispensation, is dualism, and many have fallen into this grave error. Now dualism is not only the reversal of truth, it is also the destroyer of righteousness.

Sacramentalism is the anthithesis of dualism. The sanctity of matter as the potential of spirit and its dwelling-place on earth; the humanizing of spirit through its condescension to man through the making of his body and all created things its earthly tabernacle, give, when carried out into logical development, a meaning to life, a glory to the world, an elucidation of otherwise unsolvable mysteries, and an impulse toward noble living no other system can afford. It is a real philosophy of life, a standard of values, a criterion of all possible postulates, and as its loss meant the world's peril, so its recovery may mean its salvation.

Now as the philosophy of Christianity is purely and essentially sacramental, so must be the operation of God through the Church. This "Body of Christ" on earth is indeed a fellowship, a veritable communion of the faithful, whether living or dead, but it is also a divine organism which lives, and in which each member lives, not by the preaching of the Word, not even by and through the fellowship in living and worship, but through the ordained channels of grace known as the Sacraments. In accordance with the sacramental system, every material thing is proclaimed as possessing in varying degree sacramental potentiality, while seven great Sacraments were instituted to be, each after its own fashion, a special channel for the inflowing of the power of the Divine Actuality. Each is a symbol, just as so many other created things are, or may become, symbols, but they are also _realities,_ veritable media for the veritable communications of veritable divine grace. Here is the best definition I know, that of Hugh of St. Victor. "A sacrament is the corporeal or material element set out sensibly, representing from its similitude, signifying from its institution, and containing from its sanctification, some invisible and spiritual grace." This is the unvarying and invariable doctrine of historic Christianity, and the reason for the existence of the Church as a living and functioning organism. The whole sacramental system is in a sense an extension, in time, of the Redemption, just as one particular Sacrament, the Holy Eucharist, is also in a sense an extension of the Incarnation, as it is also an extension, in time, of the Atonement, the Sacrifice of Calvary.

The Incarnation and the Redemption are not accomplished facts, completed nineteen centuries ago; they are processes that still continue, and their term is fixed only by the total regeneration and perfecting of matter, while the Seven Sacraments are the chiefest amongst an infinity of sacramental processes which are the agencies of this eternal transfiguration.

God the Son became Incarnate, not only to accomplish the redemption of men as yet unborn, for endless ages, through the Sacrifice of Calvary, but also to initiate and forever maintain a new method whereby this result was to be more perfectly attained; that is to say, the Church, working through the specific sacramental agencies He had ordained, or was from time to time to ordain, through His everlasting presence in the Church He had brought into being at Pentecost. He did not come to establish in material form a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, or to provide for its ultimate coming. He indeed established a Spiritual Kingdom, His Church, "in the world, not of it," which is a very different matter indeed, as the centuries have proved. His Kingdom is not of this world, nor will it be established here. There has been no _absolute_ advance in human development since the Incarnation. Nations rise and fall, epochs wax and wane, civilizations grow out of savagery, crest and sink back into savagery and oblivion. Redemption is for the individual, not for the race, nor yet for society as a whole. Then, and only then, and under that form, it is sure, however long may be the period of its accomplishment. "Time is the ratio of the resistance of matter to the interpenetration of spirit," and by this resistance is the duration of time determined. When it shall have been wholly overcome then "time shall be no more."

See therefore how perfect is the correspondence between the Sacraments and the method of life where they are the agents, and which they symbolically set forth. There is in each case the material form and the spiritual substance, or energy. Water, chrism, oil, the spoken word, the touch of hands, the sign of the cross, and finally and supremely the bread and wine of the Holy Eucharist. Each a material thing, but each representing, signifying and containing some gift of the Holy Spirit, real, absolute and potent. So matter and spirit are linked together in every operation of the Church, from the cradle to the grave, and man has ever before him the eternal revelation of this linked union of matter and spirit in his life, the eternal teaching of the honour of the material thing through its agency and through its existence as the subject for redemption. So also, through the material association, and the divine condescension to his earthly and fallible estate (limited by association with matter only to inadequate presentation) he makes the Spirit of God his own, to dwell therewith after the fashion of man.

And how much this explains and justifies: Man approaches, and must always approach, spiritual things not only through material forms but by means of material agencies. The highest and most beautiful things, those where the spirit seems to achieve its loftiest reaches, are frequently associated with the grossest and most unspiritual forms, yet the very splendour of the spiritual verity redeems and glorifies the material agency, while on the other hand the homeliness, and even animal quality, of the material thing, brings to man, with a poignancy and an appeal that are incalculable, the spiritual thing that, in its absolute essence, would be so far beyond his ken and his experience and his powers of assimilation that it would be inoperative.

This is the true Humanism; not the fictitious and hollow thing that was the offspring of neo-paganism and took to itself a title to which it had no claim. Held tacitly or consciously by the men of the Middle Ages, from the immortal philosopher to the immortal but nameless craftsman, it was the force that built up the noble social structure of the time and poised man himself in a sure equilibrium. Already it had of necessity developed the whole scheme of religious ceremonial and given art a new content and direction through its new service. By analogy and association all material things that could be so used were employed as figures and symbols, as well as agencies, through the Sacraments, and after a fashion that struck home to the soul through the organs of sense. Music, vestments, incense, flowers, poetry, dramatic action, were linked with the major arts of architecture, painting and sculpture, and all became not only ministers to the emotional faculties but direct appeals to the intellect through their function as poignant symbols. So art received its soul, and was almost a living creature until matter and spirit were again divorced in the death that severed them during the Reformation. Thereafter religion had entered upon a period of slow desiccation and sterilization wherever the symbol was cast away with the Sacraments and the faith and the philosophy that had made it live. The bitter hostility to the art and the liturgies and the ceremonial of the Catholic faith is due far less to ignorance of the meaning and function of art and to an inherited jealousy of its quality and its power, than it is to the conscious and determined rejection of the essential philosophy of Christianity, which is sacramentalism.

The whole system was of an almost sublime perfection and simplicity, and the formal Sacraments were both its goal and its type. If they had been of the same value and identical in nature they would have failed of perfect exposition, in the sense in which they were types and symbols. They were not this, for while six of the explicit seven were substantially of one mode, there was one where the conditions that held elsewhere were transcended, and where, in addition to the two functions it was instituted to perform it gave, through its similitude, the clear revelation of the most significant and poignant fact in the vast mystery of life. I mean, of course, the Holy Eucharist, commonly called the Mass.

If matter is _per se_ forever inert, unchangeable, indestructible, then we fall into the dilemma of a materialistic monism on the one hand, Manichaean dualism on the other. Even under the most spiritual interpretation we could offer--that, shall we say, of those today who try to run with the hare of religion and hunt with the hounds of rationalistic materialism--matter and spirit unite in man as body and soul, and in the Sacraments as the vehicle and the essence, but temporally and temporarily; doomed always to ultimate severance by death in the one case, by the completion of the sacramental process in the other. If, on the other hand, the object of the universe and of time is the constant redemption and transformation of matter through its interpenetration by spirit in the power of God the Holy Ghost, then we escape the falsities of dualism, while in the miracle of the Mass we find the type and the showing forth of the constant process of life whereby every instant, matter itself is being changed and glorified and transferred from the plane of matter to the plane of spirit.

If this is so: if the Incarnation and the Redemption are not only fundamental facts but also types and symbols of the divine process forever going on here on earth, then, while the other Sacraments are in themselves not only instruments of grace but manifestations of that process whereby in all things matter is used as the vehicle of spirit, the Mass, transcending them all, is not only Communion, not only a Sacrifice acceptable before God, it is also the unique symbol of the redemption and transformation of matter; since, of all the Sacraments, it is the only one where the very physical qualities of the material vehicle are transformed, and while the accidents alone remain, the substance, finite and perishable, becomes, in an instant of time and by the operation of God, infinite and immortal.

It is to sacramentalism then that we must return, not only in religion and its practice, but in philosophy, if we are to establish a firm foundation for that newer society and civilization that are to help us to achieve the "Great Peace." Antecedent systems failed, and subsequent systems have failed; in this alone, the philosophy of Christianity, is there safety, for it alone is consonant with the revealed will of God.

III

THE SOCIAL ORGANISM

Society, that is to say, the association in life of men, women and children, is the fundamental fact of life, and this is so whether the association is of the family, the school, the community, industry or government. Everything else is simply a series of forms, arrangements and devices by which society works, either for good or ill. Man makes or mars himself in and through society. He is responsible for his own soul, but if he sees only this and works directly for his soul's salvation, disregarding the society of which he is a part, he may lose it, whereas, if he is faithful to society and honourably plays his part as a social animal with a soul, he will very probably save it, even though he may for the time have quite ignored its existence. Man is a member of a family, a pupil under education, a worker and a citizen. In all these relationships he is a part of a social group; he is also a component part of the human race and linked in some measure to every other member thereof whether living or dead. Into every organization or institution in which he is involved during his lifetime--family, school, art or craft, trade union, state, church--enters the social equation. If society is ill organized either in theory or in practice, in any or all of its manifestations, then the engines or devices by which it operates will be impotent for good. Defective society cannot produce either a good fundamental law, a good philosophy, a good art, or any other thing. Conversely, these, when brought forth under an wholesome society, will decay and perish when society degenerates.

In its large estate, that is, comprehending all the minor groups, as a nation, a people or an era, society is always in a state of unstable equilibrium, tending either toward better or worse. It may indeed be of the very essence of human life, but it is a plant of tender growth and needs delicate nurture and jealous care; a small thing may work it irreparable injury. It may reach very great heights of perfection and spread over a continent, as during the European Middle Ages; it may sink to low depths with an equal dominion, as in the second dark ages of the nineteenth century. Sometimes little enclaves of high value hide themselves in the midst of degradation, as Venice and Ireland in the Dark Ages. Always, by the grace of God, the primary social unit, the family may, and frequently does, achieve and maintain both purity and beauty when the world without riots in ruin and profligacy.

I have taken the problem of the organization of society as the first to be considered, for it is fundamental. If society is of the wrong shape it does not matter in the least how intelligent and admirable may be the devices we construct for the operation of government or industry or education; they may be masterly products of human intelligence but they will not work, whereas on the other hand a sane, wholesome and decent society can so interpret and administer clumsy and defective instruments that they will function to admiration. A perfect society would need no such engines at all, but a perfect society implies perfect individuals, and I think we are now persuaded that a society of this nature is a purely academic proposition both now and in the calculable future. What we have to do is to take mankind as it is; made up of infinitely varied personalities ranging from the idiot to the "super-man"; cruel and compassionate, covetous and self-sacrificing, silly and erudite, cynical and emotional, vulgar and cultured, brutal and fastidious, shameful in their degradation and splendid in their honour and chivalry, and by the franchise of liberty and the binding of law, facilitate in every way the process whereby they themselves work out their own salvation. You cannot impose morality by statute or guarantee either character or intelligence by the perfection of the machine. Every institution, good or bad, is the result of growth from many human impulses, not the creation of autocratic fiat. But growth may be impeded, hastened, or suspended, and the most that can be done is to offer incentives to action, remove the obstacles to development, and establish conditions and influences that make more easy the finding of the right way.

Now it seems to me that the two greatest obstacles to the development of a right society have been first, the enormous scale in which everything of late has been cast, and second, that element in modern democracy which denies essential differences in human character, capacity and potential, and so logically prohibits social distinctions, and refuses them formal sanction or their recognition through conferred honours. In questioning the validity and the value of these two factors, imperialism and social democracy, and in suggesting substitutes, I am, I suppose, attacking precisely the two institutions which are today--or at all events have been until very recently--held in most conspicuous honour by the majority of people, but the question is at least debateable, and for my own part I have no alternative but to assert their mistaken nature, and to offer the best I can in the way of substitutes.

The question of imperialism, of a gross and unhuman and therefore absolutely wrong scale, is one that will enter into almost all of the matters with which I propose to deal, certainly with industrialism, with politics, with education, with religion, as well as with the immediate problem of the social organism, for not only has it destroyed the human scale in human life, and therefore brought it into the danger of immediate destruction, but it has also been a factor in establishing the quantitative standard in all things, in place of the qualitative standard, and this, in itself, is simply the antecedent of well-merited catastrophe. In considering the social organism, therefore, we must have in mind that this is intimately affected by every organic institution which man has developed and into which he enters in common with others of his kind.

The situation as it confronts us today is one in which man by his very energy and the stimulus of those cosmic energies he has so astonishingly mastered, has got far beyond his depth. I say man has mastered these energies; yes, but this was true only of a brief period in the immediate past. They now have mastered him. It is the old story of the Frankenstein monster over again. Man is not omnipotent, he is not God. There are limits beyond which he cannot go without coming in peril of death. An isolated individual here and there may become super-man, perhaps, though at grievous peril to his own soul, and it is conceivable that to such an one it might be possible to live beyond the human scale, though hardly. If one could envisage so awful a thing as a community made up entirely of super-men, one might concede that here also the human scale might be exceeded without danger of catastrophe. With society as it is, and always will be, a welter of defectives and geniuses in small numbers and a vast majority of just plain men, with all that that implies, the breaking through into the imperial scale is simply a letting in the jungle; walls and palings and stockades, the delicate fabrics of architecture, the clever institutions of law, the thin red line of the army, all melt, crumble, are overcome by the onrush of primordial things, and where once was the white man's city is now the eternal jungle, and the vines and thrusting roots and rank herbage blot out the very memory of a futile civilization, while the monkey and the jackal and the python come again into their heritage.

Alexander and Caesar, Charles V and Louis XIV and Napoleon and Disraeli and William III could function for a few brief years beyond the limits of the human scale, though even they had an end, but you cannot link imperialism and democracy without the certainty of an earlier and a more ignominious fall.

I have already spoken of the malignant and pathological quality of the quantitative standard. It is indeed not only the nemesis of culture but even of civilization itself. Out of this same gross scale of things come many other evils; great states subsisting on the subjugation and exploitation of small and alien peoples; great cities which when they exceed more than 100,000 in population are a menace, when they exceed 1,000,000 are a crime; division of labour and specialization which degrade men to the level of machines; concentration and segregation of industries, the factory system, high finance and international finance, capitalism, trades-unionism and the International, standardized education, "metropolitan" newspapers, pragmatic philosophy, and churches "run on business methods" and recruited by advertising and "publicity agents."

Greater than all, however, is the social poison that effects society with pernicious anaemia through cutting man off from his natural social group and making of him an undistinguishable particle in a sliding stream of grain. Man belongs to his family, his neighbourhood, his local trade or craft guild and to his parish church: the essence of wholesome association is that a man should work with, through and by those whom he knows personally--and preferably so well that he calls them all by their first names.

As a matter of fact, today he works with, through and by the individuals whom he probably has never seen, and frequently would, as a matter of personal taste, hesitate to recognize if he did see them. He belongs to the "local" of a union which is a part of a labour organization which covers the entire United States and is controlled in all essential matters from a point from one hundred to two thousand miles away. He votes for mayor with a group of men, less than one per cent of whom he knows personally (unless he is a professional politician), with another group for state officers, and with the whole voting population of the United States, for President. If he goes to church in a city he finds himself amongst people drawn from every ward and outlying district, if he mixes in "society" he associates with those from everywhere, perhaps, except his own neighbourhood. Only when he is in college, in his club or in his secret society lodge or the quarters of his ward boss does he find himself in intimate social relations with human beings of like mind and a similar social status. He is a cog in a wheel, a thing, a point of potential, a lonely and numerical unit, instead of a gregarious human animal rejoicing in his friends and companions, and working, playing and quarreling with them, as God made him and meant him to be and to do.

Of course the result of this is that men are forced into unnatural associations, many of which are purely artificial and all of which are unsound. It is true that the trade union, the professional society, the club are natural and wholesome expressions of common and intimate interests, but they acquire a false value when they are not balanced and regulated by a prior and more compelling association which cuts, not vertically but horizontally through society, that is to say, the neighbourhood or community group. The harsh and perilous division into classes and castes which is now universal, with its development of "class consciousness," is the direct and inevitable result of this imperial scale in life which has annihilated the social unit of human scale and brought in the gigantic aggregations of peoples, money, manufacture and labourers, where man can no longer function either as a human unit or an essential factor in a workable society.

It is hard to see just how we are to re-fashion this impossible society in terms even nearly approaching the normal and the human. It is universal, and it is accepted by everyone as very splendid and quite the greatest achievement of man. It is practically impossible for any one today to conceive of a world where great empires, populous cities, mills and factories and iron-works in their thousands, and employing their millions through their billions of capitalization, where the stock exchange and the great banking houses and the insurance companies and the department stores, the nation-wide trade unions and professional associations and educational foundations and religious corporations, do not play their predominant part. Nevertheless they are an aggregation of false values, their influence is anti-social, and their inherent weakness was so obviously revealed through the War and the Peace that it has generally escaped notice.

There seem but two ways in which the true scale of life can be restored; either these institutions will continue, growing greater and more unwieldy with increasing speed until they burst in anarchy and chaos, and after ruin and long rest we begin all over again (as once before after the bursting of Roman imperialism), or we shall repeat history (as we always do) only after another fashion and, learning as we always can from the annals of monasticism, build our small communities of the right shape and scale in the very midst of the imperial states themselves, so becoming perhaps the leavening of the lump. This of course is what the monasteries of St. Benedict did in the sixth century and those of the Cluniacs and the Cistercians in the eleventh, and it is what the Franciscans and Dominicans tried to do in the fourteenth century, and failed because the fall of the cultural and historic wave had already begun.

The trouble today with nearly all schemes of reform and regeneration is that they are infected with the very imperialism in scale that has produced the conditions they would redeem. Socialism is now as completely materialistic as the old capitalism, and as international in its scope and methods. Anarchy is becoming imperial and magnificent in its operations. Secular reformers must organize vast committees with intricate ramifications and elaborate systems supported by "drives" for money which must run into at least seven figures, and by vast and efficient bureaus for propaganda, before they can begin operations, and then the chief reliance for success is frequently placed on legislation enacted by the highest lawmaking bodies in the land. Even religion has now surrendered to the same obsession of magnitude and efficiency, and nothing goes (or tries to, it doesn't always succeed) unless it is conceived in gigantic "nation-wide" terms and is "put across" by efficiency experts, highly paid organizers, elaborate "teams" of propagandists and solicitors, and plenty of impressive advertising. A good deal can be bought this way, but it will not "stay bought," for no reform of any sort can be established after any such fashion, since reform begins in and with the individual, and if it succeeds at all it will be by the cumulative process.

I shall speak of this element of scale in every succeeding lecture, for it vitiates every institution we have. Here, where I am dealing with society in itself, I can only say that I believe the sane and wholesome society of the future will eliminate great cities and great corporations of every sort. It will reverse the whole system of specialization and the segregation and unification of industries and the division of labour. It will build upward from the primary unit of the family, through the neighbourhood, to the small, and closely knit, and self-supporting community, and so to the state and the final unifying force which links together a federation of states. In general it will be a return in principle, though not in form, to the social organization of a Mediaeval Europe before the extinction of feudalism on the Continent, and the suppression of the monasteries and the enclosure of the common lands in England.

The grave perils of this false scale in human society have been recognized by many individuals ever since the thing itself became operative, and every Utopia conceived by man during the last two centuries, whether it was theoretical or actually put into ephemeral practice, has been couched in terms of revolt away from imperialism and towards the unit of human scale. In every case however, the introduction of some form of communism has been the ruin of those projects actually materialized, for this in itself is imperialistic in its nature. Communism implies the standard of the gross aggregate, the denial of human differentiation and the quantitative standard, as well as the elimination of private property and the negation of sacred individuality. Its institution implies an almost immediate descent into anarchy with a sequent dictatorship and autocracy, for it is the reversal of the foundation laws of life. Such reversals cannot last, nothing can last that is inimical to flourishing life; it may triumph for a day but life itself sloughs it off as a sound body rids itself of some foreign substance through the sore that festers, bursts and, the septic conditions done away with, heals itself and returns to normal.

Now the inhuman scale has produced one set of septic conditions in society while what is commonly called "democratization" has produced another. We have a bloated society, but also we have one in which a false theory has grown up and been put in practice, in accordance with which an uniformity of human kind has been assumed which never has existed and does not now, and in the effort to enforce this false theory the achievement of distinction has been impeded, leadership discouraged and leaders largely eliminated, the process of leveling downward carried to a very dangerous point, the sane and vital organization of society brought near to an end and a peculiarly vicious scale and standard of social values established. I have urged the return to human scale in human associations, but this does not imply any admixture of communism, which is its very antithesis, still less does it permit the retention of the theoretical uniformity and the unescapable leveling process of so-called democracy.

Before the law all men are equal, that is, they are entitled to even-handed justice. Before God all men are equal, that is, they are granted charity and mercy which transcends the law, also they possess immortal souls of equal value. Here their equality stops. In every other respect they vary in character, capacity, intelligence and potentiality for development along any or all these lines, almost beyond the limits of computation. A sane society will recognize this, it will organize itself accordingly, it will deny to one what it will concede to another, it will foster emulation and reward accomplishment, and it will add another category to those in which all men are equal, that is, the freest scope for advancement, and the greatest facility for passing from one social group into another, the sole test being demonstrated merit.

I am prepared at this point to use the word "aristocracy" for we have the thing even now, only in its worst possible form. The word itself means two things: a government by the best and most able citizens and, to quote a standard dictionary "Persons noted for superiority in any character or quality, taken collectively." There is no harm here, but the harm comes, and the odium also, and justly, when an aristocratic government degenerates into an oligarchy of privilege without responsibility, and when socially it is not "superiority in character or quality" but political cunning, opulence and sycophancy that are the touchstones to recognition and acceptance. The latter are the antithesis of Christianity and common sense, the former is consonant with both and, paradoxical as it may seem, it is also the fulfilling of the ideals of a real democracy, since its honours and distinctions imply service, its relations with those in other estates are reciprocal, it is not a closed caste but the prize of meritorious achievement, and it is therefore equality of opportunity, utilization of ability and the abolition of privilege without responsibility.

Men are forever and gloriously struggling onward towards better things, but there is always the gravitational pull of original sin which scientists denominate "reversion to type." The saving grace in the individual is the divine gift of faith, hope and charity implanted in every soul. These every man must guard and cherish for they are the way of advancement in character. But society is man in association with men, in a sense a new and complex personality, and the same qualities are as necessary here as in the individual. Society, like man, may be said to possess body, soul and spirit, and it must function vitally along all these lines if it is to maintain a normal and wholesome existence. Somewhere there must be something that achieves high ideals of honour, chivalry, courtesy; that maintains right standards of comparative value, and that guards the social organism as a whole from the danger of surrender to false and debased standards, to plausible demagogues, and to mob-psychology.

The greater the prevalence of democratic methods, the greater is the danger of this surrender to propaganda of a thousand sorts and to the dominance of the demagogue, and the existence of an estate fortified by the inheritance of high tradition, measurably free from the necessity of engaging too strenuously in the "struggle for life," guaranteed security of status so long as it does not betray the ideals of its order, but open to accessions from other estates on the basis of conspicuous merit alone, such a force operating in society has proved, and will prove, the best guardian of civilization as a whole and of the interests and liberties of those who may rank in what are known as lower social scales.

But, it may be objected, such an institution as this has never existed. Every political or social aristocracy in history has been mixed and adulterated with bad characters and recreant representatives. There never has been and never will be a perfect aristocracy. Quite true; neither has there ever been a perfect democracy, or a perfect monarchy for that matter. As men we work with imperfections, but we live by faith, and our sole duty is to establish the highest ideals, and to compass them, in so far as we may, with unfailing courage, patience and steadfastness. The _ideal_ of democracy is a great ideal, but the _working_ of democracy has been a failure because, amongst other things, it has tried to carry on without the aid of true aristocracy. If the two can be united, first in ideal and in theory, then in operation, our present failure may be changed into victory.

What, after all, does this imply, so far as the social organism is concerned? It seems to me, something like this. First of all, recognition of the fact that there are differences in individuals, in strains of blood, in races, that cannot be overcome by any power of education and environment, and can only be changed through very long periods of time, and that these differences must work corresponding differences in position, function and status in the social organism. Second, that since society automatically develops an aristocracy of some sort or other, and apparently cannot be stopped from doing this, it must be protected from the sort of thing it has produced of late, which is based on money, political expediency and the unscrupulous cleverness of the demagogue, and given a more rational substitute in the shape of a permanent group representing high character and the traditions of honour, chivalry and courtesy. Third, that character and service should be fostered and rewarded by that formal and august recognition, that secure and unquestioned status, and those added opportunities for service that will form a real and significant distinction. Finally, that this order or estate must be able to purge itself of unworthy material, and also must be freely open to constant accessions from without, whatever the source, and for proved character and service.

I fear I must argue this case of the inequality in individual potential, that inequality that does not yield to complex education or favourable environment, for it is fundamental. If it does not exist, then my argument for the organization of society along lines that recognize and regularize diversity of social status and functions, falls to the ground. I affirm that, the doctrine of evolution and modern democratic theory to the contrary, it does exist and that the mitigating influence of education, environment and inherited acquired characters, is small at best.