Fantastic and paradoxical as it may seem to link together Don Quixote and St. Theresa, I am not sure that we could do better than to accept them as models.  The loud laughter of an age of intellectual ribaldry and self-conceit dies away and the gaunt figure of the last of the Crusaders still stands before us heroic in his childlike refusal of compromise, his burning compassion, his deafness to ridicule.  In a sense we must all be ready to accept the jeering and the scorn that were poured out on the Knight of La Mancha, if like him we are to fight, even foolishly, for the things that are worth fighting for—­either that they may be destroyed, or restored.  And with St. Theresa we must be willing to endure obloquy, suspicion, malice, if like her we live in faith, subjecting our will to the divine will, and then sparing nothing of ourselves in the labour of saving the world for God in the twentieth century as St. Theresa laboured to save it in the sixteenth century.

The call today is for personal service through the right living that follows the discovery of a right relationship to God.  Not a campaign but a crusade; and the figures of St. Louis and St. Francis and St. Theresa, together with all the Knights and Crusaders of Christendom, rise up before us to point the way.  We would find the Great Peace, the world would find the Great Peace also, but

  The way is all so very plain
  That we may lose the way.

We have been told:  “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you, for your Heavenly Father knoweth ye have need of these things.”  If we go forth on this new and knightly quest—­quest indeed in these latter days, for the Holy Grail, lost long since and hidden away from men—­we may, by the grace of God, achieve.  Then, “suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye,” and before we are aware, for “the Kingdom of God cometh not with watching,” we and even the world, shall find that we have compassed the Great Peace, and if we do not live to see it, yet in our “certain hope” we shall know that it will come, if not in our time, yet in God’s good time; if not in our way, yet in His more perfect way.

In these lectures I have from time to time, and perhaps beyond your patience, criticised and condemned many of those concrete institutions which form the working mechanism of life, even suggesting possible substitutes.  In ending I would say as in beginning; this is not because salvation may be found through any device, however perfect, but because this itself, by reason of its excellence on the one hand or its depravity on the other, is, under the law of life, contributory to the operation of the divine spirit (which is the sole effective energy) or a deterrent.  I have tried at long last to gather up this diffuse argument for the supremacy of spiritual force as it works through the individual, and to place it before you in this concluding lecture.  Perhaps I can best emphasize my point thus.