equilibrium, even though it bring to pass the while a day of trouble and of treading down and of perplexity; when prayer voices, "hoarse with long silence," lift themselves to avert "the day of the great slaughter, when the towers fall."

To this condition of tenseness, of social strain, we have on the other side the spectacle of a sick church. The dying out of altar fires and the perishing of the gods, would be a bodeful thing in any age. But in an age of unprecedented increase in wealth, and the self-indulgence and social restiveness which an enormous increase of wealth inevitably brings, a mortal sickness on the part of her religion foretells for civilization a grave crisis. We are hard up against a libertinage armoured with intellectual certitude. And that libertinage would not be confined to those at the top. Not without reason, prophets vision a day "when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, and the doors shall be shut in the streets, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low; when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way."

Froude will not be accused of hysteria. He drew a parallel between the era that witnessed the overthrow of the Roman Republic, and our own day. He says, of that period in Rome: "The whole spiritual atmosphere was saturated with cant cant moral, cant political, cant religious; an affectation of high principle which had ceased to touch the conduct, and flowed on in increas

ing volume of insincere and unreal speech." And he adds: "Tendencies now in operation may a few generations hence land modern society in similar conclusions, unless other convictions revive meanwhile and get the mastery of them; of which possibility no more need be said than this, that unless there be such a revival in some shape or other, the forces, whatever they be, which control the forms in which human things adjust themselves, will make an end again, as they made an end before, of what are called free institutions. Popular forms of government are possible only when individual men can govern their own lives on moral principles, and when duty is of more importance than pleasure, and justice than material expediency."

CHAPTER XX

TRANSFIGURED

THE Conclusion of the whole matter is reassuring. We have seen that the economic is the master knot of human fate. Below all surface facts, the tramp of armies, pageantry of empire, intonings of liturgy, and even the systematizings of doctrine - for theology too has been most responsive to economic stimuli — stretches the bed-rock, man's industrial status. So that christianity needs to get a new set of words. Historians who have awakened to the importance of the economic, have staked out the richest pay dirt at present under claim. Christianity took its rise in an economic convulsion. It was the flowering forth of Israel's age-old stalk of liberty an attempt at a world-wide democratism which should countervail Rome's world-wide absolutism. Its Leader was slaughtered by Rome and her Caiaphas allies as an agitator, a disturber of the peace: and his followers were hunted with fire and crosses through more than a hundred years. Unable to compass its destruction by violence, Rome thereupon resorted to craftiness. She annexed christianity. Sicklied o'er with philosophy, religion ceased to be the spontaneous upreach of man to his Maker, and became an engine of social control. But the "leaven hid in the meal" refused to be annexed;

so that to-day the world is yeasty with insurgency and upheaval.

The "fierce democratie" is to many a scare and a bogie. Its imperturbable advance, at a rate against which no barriers are effectual, has to them something bodeful about it "a certain fearful looking for of judgment. To which mood of the soul an ancient saw seems applicable: The wicked flee when no man pursueth. For these nightmares come from an overloaded conscience. They think of democracy's coronation as a day of burnings and fuel of fire, with confused noise and garments rolled in blood. But the red sky which these take for a conflagration might it not be the red of dawn?

The charge is brought against the social democracy that it is an inflamer of the masses. But the masses need to be inflamed. To be set aflame is not that quite the divinest thing that can happen to a man or to a set of men? The cold, dull heart of humanity needs fire. Art, literature, politics, religion, are judged solely by the extent to which they are inflammatory of otherwise inert and dead humanity. Not incapacity for government but indifference to it, has ever been the nub of the difficulty. Prometheus was the saviour type because he was the fire-bringer. And Jesus showed his saviourhood nowhere more convincingly than in his manifesto: "I am come to bring fire on the earth.' The awakenment of the populace, while the most difficult, is also the most splendid work the goal toward which all education, all inspiration through the slow centuries have climbed. Whatsoever is pure and lovely and of good report, comes from souls that have been set on fire: whilst, with the

dying out of the fires of the spirit, immoralities come trooping in. Dante was guided by a sure instinct when he broke with tradition and pictured hell as a cold and soggy swamp, the negation of life and warmth. The event to which the whole creation moves, is that humanity might have life, and that it might have it more abundantly.

Civilization is threatened with the sleeping sickness. America's danger is not the boiling over of the caldron; her danger is lest the fire be drawn from under and the boiling stop altogether. For the vices of civilization are taking the place of the vices of barbarism - and are more to be feared. There came a time in Rome when her people lost the desire for self-government; it was the second death, and from there there is no resurrection. The trouble is, the people are too conservative. The natural man prefers the flesh-pots of Egypt to the high adventure in the wilderness. The people conquered and content, refusing the fire even when it is brought to them that is the vulture which tears the liver of a prometheus, and which wrings from every saviour heart the cry of god-forsakenness. In all ages the difficulty has been that God is in a hurry and man is not.

Let America's working class once have their spirit broken, and it would be all up with her. When selfrespect is no longer the inhabiter of the house, decadence knocks at the door. America's industrialism dominates the world, because her industrialists are high spirited. Let that nerve be snapped her industry's proud magnificence would be overtaken with a palsy. Nature will not be subjugated by men who are themselves in sub