Let us cease trying materialistic and intellectual means for supplying the power to live the spiritual life and let us each one establish the needful relationship with the true source of power.  May our time not be likened to the Oriental traveler, who, appreciating the convenience and force of electricity as seen in a room he occupied, fitted his palace, on his return, with a set of elaborate fixtures and was surprised to find no illumination therefrom!  We are torches who can not shine in themselves, but who, when connected with the great central Source of Power, the Blessed Trinity in its three glorious manifestations, can show forth the light of the world.  Christians should be torch bearers, and the true torch bearer lights not his own path so much as the path of those who come after him.  And this brings us to the fundamental reason for personal responsibility.  Our motive in seeking personal righteousness it not, as might hastily be thought, because of a selfish desire to save our own souls, or to withdraw either here or hereafter from other souls, but for “their sakes” to sanctify ourselves; for the lives we live today create the spiritual atmosphere of tomorrow.

From Spain come the following suggestive thoughts in regard to the value of the person.  “The individual is the real purpose of the universe.  We may seek the hero of our thought in no philosopher who lived in flesh and blood, but in a being of fiction and of action, more real than all the philosophers.  He is Don Quixote.  One cannot say of Don Quixote that he was strictly idealistic.  He did not fight for ideas:  he was of the spirit and he fought for the spirit.  Quixotism is a madness descended from the madness of the cross; therefore it is despised by reason; Don Quixote will not resign himself to either the world or its truth, to science or logic, to art or aesthetics, to morals or ethics.  And what did he leave behind him? one may ask.  I reply that he left himself, and that a man, a man living and immortal, is worth all theories and all philosophies.  Other countries have left us institutions and books:  Spain has left soul.  St. Theresa is worth all institutions whatever, or any ‘Critique of Pure Reason.’”

Yes, this is I think the lesson we have to learn, now at this turning point in history with the epoch of intellect crumbling about our ears, and the great World’s Fair of multiplied, ingenious mechanisms we have called “modern civilization” at a point of practical bankruptcy.  It is the spirit that counts, the soul of “man living and immortal,” and only through our own living, and the spiritual force that we can command, and through ourselves apply, shall we be able to compass that social regeneration that is the only alternative to social degeneration and catastrophe.  The man who does not live his belief is powerless to redeem or to create, though he were a Solon, a Charlemagne, a Napoleon or a Washington; the man who lives his belief, even if he is a mill-hand in Fall River, is contributing something of energizing force to the task of re-creation.  “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord of Hosts.”