At first we talked of his Institute and its work.  Then we came to shipping and transport.  Whenever one talks now of human affairs one comes presently to shipping and transport generally.  In Paris, in Italy, when I returned to England, everywhere I found “cost of carriage” was being discovered to be a question of fundamental importance.  Yet transport, railroads and shipping, these vitally important services in the world’s affairs, are nearly everywhere in private hands and run for profit.  In the case of shipping they are run for profit on such antiquated lines that freights vary from day to day and from hour to hour.  It makes the business of food supply a gamble.  And it need not be a gamble.

But that is by the way in the present discussion.  As we talked, the prospect broadened out from a prospect of the growing and distribution of food to a general view of the world becoming one economic community.

I talked of various people I had been meeting in the previous few weeks.  “So many of us,” I said, “seem to be drifting away from the ideas of nationalism and faction and policy, towards something else which is larger.  It is an idea of a right way of doing things for human purposes, independently of these limited and localised references.  Take such things as international hygiene for example, take this movement.  We are feeling our way towards a bigger rule.”

“The rule of Righteousness,” said Mr. Lubin.

I told him that I had been coming more and more to the idea—­not as a sentimentality or a metaphor, but as the ruling and directing idea, the structural idea, of all one’s political and social activities—­of the whole world as one state and community and of God as the King of that state.

“But I say that,” cried Mr. Lubin, “I have put my name to that.  And—­it is here!”

He struggled up, seized an Old Testament that lay upon a side table.  He stood over it and rapped its cover.  “It is here,” he said, looking more like Gladstone than ever, “in the Prophets.”

4

That is all I mean to tell at present of that conversation.

We talked of religion for two hours.  Mr. Lubin sees things in terms of Israel and I do not.  For all that we see things very much after the same fashion.  That talk was only one of a number of talks about religion that I have had with hard and practical men who want to get the world straighter than it is, and who perceive that they must have a leadership and reference outside themselves.  That is why I assert so confidently that there is a real deep religious movement afoot in the world.  But not one of those conversations could have gone on, it would have ceased instantly, if anyone bearing the uniform and brand of any organised religious body, any clergyman, priest, mollah, of suchlike advocate of the ten thousand patented religions in the world, had come in.  He would have brought in his sectarian spites, his propaganda of church-going, his persecution of the heretic and the illegitimate, his ecclesiastical politics, his taboos, and his doctrinal touchiness....  That is why, though I perceive there is a great wave of religious revival in the world to-day, I doubt whether it bodes well for the professional religions....