And then on the other hand I am aware of much quiet talking.  This book tells of how I set out to see the war, and it is largely conversation....  Perhaps men have always expected miracles to happen; if one had always lived in the night and only heard tell of the day, I suppose one would have expected dawn to come as a vivid flash of light.  I suppose one would still think it was night long after the things about one had crept out of the darkness into visibility.  In comparison with all previous wars there has been much more thinking and much more discussion.  If most of the talk seems to be futile, if it seems as if everyone were talking and nobody doing, it does not follow that things are not quietly slipping and sliding out of their old adjustments amidst the babble and because of the babble.  Multitudes of men must be struggling with new ideas.  It is reasonable to argue that there must be reconsideration, there must be time, before these millions of mental efforts can develop into a new collective purpose and really show—­in consequences.

But that they will do so is my hope always and, on the whole, except in moods of depression and impatience, my belief.  When one has travelled to a conviction so great as mine it is difficult to doubt that other men faced by the same universal facts will not come to the same conclusion.  I believe that only through a complete simplification o religion to its fundamental idea, to a world-wide realisation of God as the king of the heart and of all mankind, setting aside monarchy and national egotism altogether, can mankind come to any certain happiness and security.  The precedent of Islam helps my faith in the creative inspiration of such a renascence of religion.  The Sikh, the Moslem, the Puritan have shown that men can fight better for a Divine Idea than for any flag or monarch in the world.  It seems to me that illusions fade and effigies lose credit everywhere.  It is a very wonderful thing to me that China is now a republic....  I take myself to be very nearly an average man, abnormal only by reason of a certain mental rapidity.  I conceive myself to be thinking as the world thinks, and if I find no great facts, I find a hundred little indications to reassure me that God comes.  Even those who have neither the imagination nor the faith to apprehend God as a reality will, I think, realise presently that the Kingdom of God over a world-wide system of republican states, is the only possible formula under which we may hope to unify and save mankind.