Deep in the depths of this dark universe our little daily sun is shining, but up above there is another Sun.  At times throughout our life we rise to the surface, and for a minute catch a glimpse of that Sun’s light:  at each of these times we shall have attained unto Jerusalem and have completed a pilgrimage within the pilgrimage.  There is light on the faces of those living heroically:  it is the light of the vision of Jerusalem.

VII

THE MESSAGE FROM THE HERMIT

The question remains, “Who is the tramp?” Who is the walking person seen from the vantage ground of these pages?  He is necessarily a masked figure; he wears the disguise of one who has escaped, and also of one who is a conspirator.  He is not the dilettante literary person gone tramping, nor the pauper vagabond who writes sonnets, though either of these roles may be part of his disguise.  He is not merely something negligible or accidental or ornamental, he is something real and true, the product of his time, at once a phenomenon and a portent.

He is the walking hermit, the world-forsaker, but he is above all things a rebel and a prophet, and he stands in very distinct relation to the life of his time.

The great fact of the human world to-day is the tremendous commercial machine which is grinding out at a marvellous acceleration the smaller and meaner sort of man, the middle class, the average man, “the damned, compact, liberal majority,” to use the words of Ibsen, and the world daily becomes “more Chinese”.  The rocks are fraying one another down to desert sand, and mankind becomes a new Sahara.

But over and against the commercial machine stand the rebels, the defiers of it, those who wish to limit its power, to redeem some of the slaves, and to rebuild the temples which it has broken down.

Commercialism is at present the great enemy of the individual man.  One already reads in leading articles such phrases as “our commercial, national, and imperial welfare”—­commercial first, national second, imperial third, and spiritual nowhere.

Commercialism has already subdued the Church of Christ in Western Europe, it has disorganised the forces of art, and it tends to deny the living sources of religion, art, and life.

It remains for the rebel to assert that even though the name and idea of Christianity be sold—­as was its Founder—­for silver, though it be rendered an impotent and useless word, yet there is in mankind a religion which is independent of all names and all words, a spring of living water that may be subterraneanised for a while, but can never be altogether dammed and stopped; that there is an art which shall blossom through all ages, either in the secret places of the world or in the open, in the place of honour, as long as man lives upon the world.

And he does more than assert, than merely wind upon his horn outside the gates of the enchanted city, he is a builder, collector, saver.  He wishes to find the few who, in this fearful commercial submersion, ought to be living the spiritual life, and showing forth in blossom the highest significance of the Adam tree.  He himself lives the life which more must of necessity live, if only as a matter of salt to save the body politic.