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Something far greater than she is now doing might be done by the Church to restore the sanctions which once ruled human conduct and gave a living force to public opinion.  Religion in these days is obviously too complaisant.  To watch the Church in the world is to be reminded of a poor relation from the provinces sitting silent and overawed in the gilded drawing-room of a parvenu.  There is no sound of confidence in her voice.  She whines for the world’s notice instead of denouncing its very obvious sins.  She is too much in this world, and too little in the other.  She is too careful not to offend Dives, and too self-conscious to be seen openly in the company of Lazarus.  It is impossible not to think that a coarse world has shaken her faith in Christian virtue.  She clings to her traditions and her doctrines, but she has lost the vigorous faith in spiritual life which gave beauty to those traditions and has ceased to set that example of entire self-sacrifice which rendered her doctrines less difficult of interpretation by the instructed.  She has ceased to preach, even with the dying embers of conviction, that a man may gain the whole world and yet lose his soul alive.

* * * * *

A responsibility hardly to be exceeded by that of aristocracy rests upon the leaders of Labour.  Every voice raised to encourage the economic delusions of Socialism is a voice on the side of vulgarity and irreligion.  Most of the leaders of Labour know perfectly well that economic Socialism is impossible, but by not saying so with honest courage they commit a grave sin, a sin not only against society but against God.  For democracy in England, once the most sensible and kind-hearted democracy in Europe, is placing its faith more and more in the power of wages to buy happiness, turning away with more and more impatience from the divine truth that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us.

It is a grievous thing to corrupt the mind of the simple.  Democracy in England has been the chief representative of veritable Englishness up to these days.  It was never Latinized or Frenchified.  The cottage garden refused to follow the bad example of the “carpet-bedder.”  The poor have always been racy of the soil.  They have laughed at the absurdities of fashion and seen through the pretensions of wealth.  They have believed in heartiness and cheerfulness.  All their proverbs spring out of a keen sense of virtue.  All their games are of a manly character.  To materialize this glorious people, to commercialize and mammonize it, to make it think of economics instead of life, to make it bitter, discontented, and tyrannous, this is to strike at the very heart of England.

But though the leaders of Labour are guilty of this corruption, there is no doubt that the ugliness of spirit in democracy is the reflection of the ugly life led by the privileged classes.  There is no reproach for this democracy when it looks upward.  It sees nothing but the reckless and useless display of wealth, nothing in the full sunshine of prosperity but a Bacchanalian horde of irresponsible sensualists, nothing there but a ramp of unashamed hedonism, and a hedonism of the lowest order.