[Footnote:  Psalm xx. 5.]

Yes, this fair world of ours wears an altered face, and what this year is “the promise of May”?  It is the promise of good and truth and fruitfulness forcing their way through “the rank vapours of this sin-worn mould.”  It is the promise of strong endurance, which will bear all and suffer all in a righteous cause, and never fail or murmur till the crown is won.  It is the promise of a brighter day, when the skill of invention and of handicraft may be once more directed, not to the devices which destroy life, but to the sciences which prolong it, and the arts which beautify it.  Above all, it is the promise of a return, through blood and fire, to the faith which made England great, and the law which yet may wrap the world in peace.

“For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as the garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all the nations” (Isa. lxi.  II).

VI

PAGEANTRY AND PATRIOTISM

Long years ago, when religious people excited themselves almost to frenzy about Ritualism, Mr. Gladstone surveyed the tumult with philosophic calm.  He recommended his countrymen to look below the surface of controversy, and to regard the underlying principle.  “In all the more solemn and stated public acts of man,” he wrote, “we find employed that investiture of the acts themselves with an appropriate exterior, which is the essential idea of Ritual.  The subject-matter is different, but the principle is the same:  it is the use and adaptation of the outward for the expression of the inward.”  The word “ritual” is by common usage restricted to the ecclesiastical sphere, but in reality it has a far wider significance.  It gives us the august rite of the Convocation, the ceremonial of Courts, the splendour of regiments, the formal usages of battleships, the silent but expressive language of heraldry and symbol; and, in its humbler developments, the paraphernalia of Masonry and Benefit Societies, and the pretty pageantry of Flag-days and Rose-days.  Why should these things be?  “Human nature itself, with a thousand tongues, utters the reply.  The marriage of the outward and the inward pervades the universe.”

The power of the outward reaches the inward chiefly through the eye and the ear.  Colour, as Ruskin taught us, is not only delightful, but sacred.  “Of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn....  Consider what sort of a world it would be if all flowers were grey, all leaves black, and the sky brown.”  The perfection of form—­the grace of outline, the harmony of flowing curves—­appeals, perhaps, less generally than colour, because to appreciate it the eye requires some training, whereas to love colour one only needs feeling.  Yet form has its own use and message, and so, again, has the solemnity of ordered movement; and when all these three elements of charm—­colour and form and motion—­are combined in a public ceremony, the effect is irresistible.