Now while one curve descends and throws off its reformative reactions in the process, the other is ascending, preparatory to determining the coming era for its allotted space of five centuries.  In this process it also throws off its own reactions, but these are for the purpose of lifting the line more rapidly, bringing its force into play before its determined time.  These also are exaggerations, over-emphasized qualities that are inherent in the ascending force, and they are no more to be accepted as authoritative than are the others.  They have their value however, for they are prophetic, and even in their exaggeration there is the clear forecast of things to be.  Trace them in turn to the source.  What is their source?  The new power issues out of obscurity and its character is veiled, but we can estimate it from the very nature of the exaggerated reactions we can see.  If something shows itself, in sociology, economics, politics, religion, art, what you will, that is especially a denial of what has been a controlling agency during the past four or five hundred years:  if it is by common consent impractical and “outside the current of manifest evolutionary development,” then, shorn of its exaggerations, reduced to its essential quality, it is very probably a clear showing forth of what is about to come to birth and condition human life for the next five hundred years.  This, I suppose, explains the comprehensive return to Medievalism that, to the scorn of biologists, sociologists and professors of political economy, is flaunting itself before us today, at the hands of a very small minority, in all the categories I have named, as well as in many others besides.

A glance at the diagram will show a curious pattern round about the nodal point.  One may say that the reactions are somewhat mixed.  Quite so.  At this moment we are beaten upon by numberless reforms, both “radical” and “reactionary.”  Materialism, democracy, rationalism, anarchy contending against Medievalism of twenty sorts, and strange mysticisms out of the East.  Which shall we choose, if we choose, and do not content ourselves with an easier inertia that allows nature to take its course?  It is simply the question; On which wave will you ride; that which is descending to oblivion or that which has within itself the power and potency to control man’s destiny for the next five hundred years?

APPENDIX B

CERTAIN BOOKS SUGGESTED FOR COLLATERAL READING

ADAMS, HENRY Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres.

ADAMS, HENRY Degradation of the Democratic Dogma.

BAUDRILLART, A. Catholic Church, Renaissance and Protestantism.

BELL, BERNARD IDDINGS Right and Wrong after the War.

BELLOC, HILAIRE The Servile State.

BRYCE, VISCOUNT Modern Democracies.

BULL, PAUL B. The Sacramental Principle.

CHESTERTON, G.K.  Orthodoxy.