consciousness, I am quite unable to persuade myself that anything of the sort is going on.  I do perceive a search for large forms into which the prevalent impulse to devotion can be thrown.  But the organised religious bodies, with their creeds and badges and their instinct for self-preservation at any cost, stand between men and their spiritual growth in just the same way the forestallers stand between men and food.  Their activities at present are an almost intolerable nuisance.  One cannot say “God” but some tout is instantly seeking to pluck one into his particular cave of flummery and orthodoxy.  What a rational man means by God is just God.  The more you define and argue about God the more he remains the same simple thing.  Judaism, Christianity, Islam, modern Hindu religious thought, all agree in declaring that there is one God, master and leader of all mankind, in unending conflict with cruelty, disorder, folly and waste.  To my mind, it follows immediately that there can be no king, no government of any sort, which is not either a subordinate or a rebel government, a local usurpation, in the kingdom of God.  But no organised religious body has ever had the courage and honesty to insist upon this.  They all pander to nationalism and to powers and princes.  They exists so to pander.  Every organised religion in the world exists only to exploit and divert and waste the religious impulse in man.

This conviction that the world kingdom of God is the only true method of human service, is so clear and final in my own mind, it seems so inevitably the conviction to which all right-thinking men must ultimately come, that I feel almost like a looker-on at a game of blind-man’s bluff as I watch the discussion of synthetic political ideas.  The blind man thrusts his seeking hands into the oddest corners, he clutches at chairs and curtains, but at last he must surely find and hold and feel over and guess the name of the plainly visible quarry.

Some of the French and Italian people I talked to said they were fighting for “Civilisation.”  That is one name for the kingdom of God, and I have heard English people use it too.  But much of the contemporary thought of England stills wanders with its back to the light.  Most of it is pawing over jerry-built, secondary things.  I have before me a little book, the joint work of Dr. Grey and Mr. Turner, of an ex-public schoolmaster and a manufacturer, called Eclipse or Empire? (The title World Might or Downfall? had already been secured in another quarter.) It is a book that has been enormously advertised; it has been almost impossible to escape its column-long advertisements; it is billed upon the hoardings, and it is on the whole a very able and right-spirited book.  It calls for more and better education, for more scientific methods, for less class suspicion and more social explicitness and understanding, for a franker and fairer treatment of labour.  But why does it call for these things?  Does it call for them because they are right?  Because in accomplishing them one serves God?