Let us look back for a moment at some of our conclusions about the individual life.  We said that this life, if fully lived, exhibited the four characters of work and contemplation, self-discipline and service:  deepening and incarnating within its own various this-world experience its other-world apprehensions of Eternity, of God.  Its temper should thus be both social and ascetic.  It should be doubly based, on humility and on given power.  Now the social order—­more exactly, the social organism—­in which Spirit is really to triumph, can only be built up of individuals who do with a greater or less perfection and intensity exhibit these characters, some upon independent levels of creative freedom, some on those of discipleship:  for here all men are not equal, and it is humbug to pretend that they are.  This social order, being so built of regenerate units, would be dominated by these same implicits of the regenerate consciousness; and would tend to solve in their light the special problems of community life.  And this unity of aim would really make of it one body; the body of a fully socialized and fully spiritualized humanity, which perhaps we might without presumption describe as indeed the son of God.

The life of such a social organism, its growth, its cycle of corporate behaviour, would be strung on that same fourfold cord which combined the desires and deeds of the regenerate self into a series:  namely, Penitence, Surrender, Recollection, and Work.  It would be actuated first by a real social repentance.  That is, by a turning from that constant capitulation to its past, to animal and savage impulse, the power of which our generation at least knows only too well; and by the complementary effort to unify vigorous instinctive action and social conscience.  I think every one can find for themselves some sphere, national, racial, industrial, financial, in which social penitence could work; and the constant corporate fall-back into sin, which we now disguise as human nature, or sometimes—­even more insincerely—­as economic and political necessity, might be faced and called by its true name.  Such a social penitence—­such a corporate realization of the mess that we have made of things—­is as much a direct movement of the Spirit, and as great an essential of regeneration, as any individual movement of the broken and contrite heart.

Could a quick social conscience, aware of obligations to Reality which do not end with making this world a comfortable place—­though we have not even managed that for the majority of men—­feel quite at ease, say, after an unflinching survey of our present system of State punishment?  Or after reading the unvarnished record of our dealings with the problem of Indian immigration into Africa?  Or after considering the inner nature of international diplomacy and finance?  Or even, to come nearer home, after a stroll through Hoxton:  the sort of place, it is true, which we have not exactly made