firmness of purpose.  Pleasure saps high interests, and the weakening of high interests leaves more undisputed room for pleasure.”  “The political spirit has grown to be the strongest element in our national life; the dominant force, extending its influence over all our ways of thinking in matters that have least to do with politics, or even nothing at all to do with them.  There has thus been engendered among us the real sense of political responsibility.  In a corresponding degree has been discouraged ... the sense of intellectual responsibility....  Practically, and as a matter of history, a society is seldom at the same time successfully energetic both in temporals and spirituals; seldom prosperous alike in seeking abstract truth and nursing the political spirit.”

The result of the new phase of English life was, on the one hand, industrialism with its material values, and on the other hand the beginnings of a Socialism equally pagan.  The motto of both schools was that a man’s life consisteth in the abundance of the things that he possesseth, that you should seek first all these things, and that the Kingdom of God and His righteousness may be added unto you, if you have any room for them.  Make yourself secure of all these other things; seek comfort whether you be rich or poor; make this world as agreeable to yourself as your means will allow, and seek to increase your means of making it still more agreeable.  After you have done all that, anything that is left over will do for your idealism.  Your God can be seen to after you have abundantly provided for the needs of your body.  Nothing could be more characteristic paganism than this, which makes material comfort the real end of life, and all spiritual things a residual element.  It is the story which Isaiah tells, with such sublimity of sarcasm, of the huntsman and craftsman who warms his hands and cries to himself, “Aha!  I am warm.  I have seen the fire.”  He bakes bread and roasts flesh, and, with the residue of the same log which he has used for kindling his fire, he maketh a god.  So this modern god of England, when England had become materialised, was just that ancient fire-worship and comfort-worship in its nineteenth-century phase.  In the first demand of life there is no thought of God or of idealism of any kind.  These, if they appear at all, have to be made out of what is left.  “Of the residue he maketh a god.”

It is by insidious degrees that materialism invades a nation’s life.  At first it attacks the externals, appearing mainly in the region of work, wealth, and comfort.  But, unless some check is put upon its progress, it steadily works its way to the central depths, attacking love and sorrow, and changing them to sensuality and cynicism.  Then the nation’s day is over, and its men and women are lost souls.  Many instances might be quoted in which this progress has actually been made in the literature of England.  At present we are only pointing to the undoubted fact that the forces of