“When I spoke to you just now,” he began, “I fell unintentionally into the use of a Greek word, epitelesei.  It was written to me in a letter from a friend with another word that also I am now going to quote to you.  This letter touched very closely upon the things I want to say to you now, and so these two words are very much in my mind.  The former one was taken from the Epistle to the Philippians; it signifies, ’He will complete the work begun’; the one I have now in mind comes from the Epistle to the Ephesians; it is Epiphausei—­or, to be fuller, epiphausei soi ho Christos, which signifies that He will shine upon us.  And this is very much in my thoughts now because I do believe that this world, which seemed so very far from God a little while ago, draws near now to an unexampled dawn.  God is at hand.

“It is your privilege, it is your grave and terrible position, that you have been born at the very end and collapse of a negligent age, of an age of sham kingship, sham freedom, relaxation, evasion, greed, waste, falsehood, and sinister preparation.  Your lives open out in the midst of the breakdown for which that age prepared.  To you negligence is no longer possible.  There is cold and darkness, there is the heat of the furnace before you; you will live amidst extremes such as our youth never knew; whatever betide, you of your generation will have small chance of living untempered lives.  Our country is at war and half mankind is at war; death and destruction trample through the world; men rot and die by the million, food diminishes and fails, there is a wasting away of all the hoarded resources, of all the accumulated well-being of mankind; and there is no clear prospect yet of any end to this enormous and frightful conflict.  Why did it ever arise?  What made it possible?  It arose because men had forgotten God.  It was possible because they worshipped simulacra, were loyal to phantoms of race and empire, permitted themselves to be ruled and misled by idiot princes and usurper kings.  Their minds were turned from God, who alone can rule and unite mankind, and so they have passed from the glare and follies of those former years into the darkness and anguish of the present day.  And in darkness and anguish they will remain until they turn to that King who comes to rule them, until the sword and indignation of God have overthrown their misleaders and oppressors, and the Justice of God, the Kingdom of God set high over the republics of mankind, has brought peace for ever to the world.  It is to this militant and imminent God, to this immortal Captain, this undying Law-giver, that you devote yourselves to-day.

“For he is imminent now.  He comes.  I have seen in the east and in the west, the hearts and the minds and the wills of men turning to him as surely as when a needle is magnetized it turns towards the north.  Even now as I preach to you here, God stands over us all, ready to receive us....”

And as he said these words, the long nave of the cathedral, the shadows of its fretted roof, the brown choir with its golden screen, the rows of seated figures, became like some picture cast upon a flimsy and translucent curtain.  Once more it seemed to the bishop that he saw God plain.  Once more the glorious effulgence poured about him, and the beautiful and wonderful conquest of men’s hearts and lives was manifest to him.