Indubitably the Christian church took a wide stride from the kingship of God when it placed a golden throne for the unbaptised Constantine in the midst of its most sacred deliberations at Nicaea.  But it seems to me that this abandonment of moral judgements in the present case by the Holy See is an almost wider step from the church’s allegiance to God....

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Thought about the great questions of life, thought and reasoned direction, this is what the multitude demands mutely and weakly, and what the organised churches are failing to give.  They have not the courage of their creeds.  Either their creeds are intellectual flummery or they are the solution to the riddles with which the world is struggling.  But the churches make no mention of their creeds.  They chatter about sex and the magic effect of church attendance and simple faith.  If simple faith is enough, the churches and their differences are an imposture.  Men are stirred to the deepest questions about life and God, and the Anglican church, for example, obliges—­as I have described.

It is necessary to struggle against the unfavourable impression made by these things.  They must not blind us to the deeper movement that is in progress in a quite considerable number of minds in England and France alike towards the realisation of the kingdom of God.

What I conceive to be the reality of the religious revival is to be found in quarters remote from the religious professionals.  Let me give but one instance of several that occur to me.  I met soon after my return from France a man who has stirred my curiosity for years, Mr. David Lubin, the prime mover in the organisation of the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome.  It is a movement that has always appealed to my imagination.  The idea is to establish and keep up to date a record of the food supplies in the world with a view to the ultimate world control of food supply and distribution.  When its machinery has developed sufficiently to a control in the interests of civilisation of many other staples besides foodstuffs.  It is in fact the suggestion and beginning of the economic world peace and the economic world state, just as the Hague Tribunal is the first faint sketch of a legal world state.  The King of Italy has met Mr. Lubin’s idea with open hands. (It was because of this profoundly interesting experiment that in a not very widely known book of mine, The World Set Free (May, 1914), in which I represented a world state as arising out of Armageddon, I made the first world conference meet at Brissago in Italian Switzerland under the presidency of the King of Italy.) So that when I found I could meet Mr. Lubin I did so very gladly.  We lunched together in a pretty little room high over Knightsbridge, and talked through an afternoon.

He is a man rather after the type of Gladstone; he could be made to look like Gladstone in a caricature, and he has that compelling quality of intense intellectual excitement which was one of the great factors in the personal effectiveness of Gladstone.  He is a Jew, but until I had talked to him for some time that fact did not occur to me.  He is in very ill health, he has some weakness of the heart that grips him and holds him at times white and silent.