Let us suppose that the whole Church of Christ was engaged in teaching men this high mystery, this open secret, that all such great associations as the Christian Students’ Movement, the Adult Sunday School Movement, the World Association for Adult Education, and all the numerous Missionary Societies throughout the whole earth—­let us suppose that the entire Church of Christ was at work in the world teaching Christ’s teaching, educating men, bringing it home to the heart and mind of humanity that “life is mental travel,” that it is in our thoughts we live and by our thoughts we are shaped, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, that all terrestrial values are radically false, that to hunger and thirst after anything is to get it, that the power of “the dominant wish” is our fate, that in love alone can we live to the full stature of our destiny, that the Kingdom of God is within us, that the engine of faith has not yet been exerted by the whole human race in concert, that conquests await us in the spiritual world before which all the conquests of the material world will pale into insignificance, that we are spirits finding our way out of the darkness of an animal ancestry into the Light of an immortal inheritance as children of God; let us suppose that this, and not dogma was the Voice of the Church; must we not say that by such teaching the whole world would eventually be rescued from our present chaos and in the fulness of time be born again into the knowledge of spiritual reality?

I believe it is only when a man realises that in its final analysis the whole universe is invisible, and ceases to think of himself as an animal and becomes profoundly sensible of himself as a spirit, and a spirit in communion with a spiritual reality closer than hands and feet, that it is possible for him to fulfil the two great commandments on which hang all the Law and the Prophets.  And without that fulfilment there must always be chaos.

If the Church will not teach the world, modern science will inspire philosophy to take up anew the teaching of Plato, and the world will go forward into the light, but with no creative love in its soul to save it from itself.  “If therefore,” said Christ, “the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.”