you have to teach is contributory and subordinate to that end.

Education is the release of man from self. You have to widen the

horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their

curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge

their sympathies. That is what you are for. Under your guidance

and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to

shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and

passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the

universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened

out until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose.

And this that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously

yourselves. Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill,

every sort of service, love: these are the means of salvation

from that narrow loneliness of desire, that brooding

preoccupation with self and egotistical relationships, which is

hell for the individual, treason to the race, and exile from

God…'

Section 12

As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one

begins for the first time to see them clearly. From the

perspectives of a new age one can look back upon the great and

widening stream of literature with a complete understanding.

Things link up that seemed disconnected, and things that were

once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but factors in

the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of the

sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth

centuries falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one

sees it as a huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the

conflict of human egotism and personal passion and narrow

imaginations on the one hand, against the growing sense of wider

necessities and a possible, more spacious life.

That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire's

Candide, for example, in which the desire for justice as well as

happiness beats against human contrariety and takes refuge at

last in a forced and inconclusive contentment with little things.

Candide was but one of the pioneers of a literature of uneasy

complaint that was presently an innumerable multitude of books.

The novels more particularly of the nineteenth century, if one

excludes the mere story-tellers from our consideration, witness

to this uneasy realisation of changes that call for effort and of

the lack of that effort. In a thousand aspects, now tragically,

now comically, now with a funny affectation of divine detachment,

a countless host of witnesses tell their story of lives fretting

between dreams and limitations. Now one laughs, now one weeps,

now one reads with a blank astonishment at this huge and almost

unpremeditated record of how the growing human spirit, now

warily, now eagerly, now furiously, and always, as it seems,

unsuccessfully, tried to adapt itself to the maddening misfit of

its patched and ancient garments. And always in these books as

one draws nearer to the heart of the matter there comes a

disconcerting evasion. It was the fantastic convention of the

time that a writer should not touch upon religion. To do so was

to rouse the jealous fury of the great multitude of professional

religious teachers. It was permitted to state the discord, but

it was forbidden to glance at any possible reconciliation.

Religion was the privilege of the pulpit…

It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted. It was

ignored by the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in the

discussion of business questions, it played a trivial and

apologetic part in public affairs. And this was done not out of

contempt but respect. The hold of the old religious organisations

upon men's respect was still enormous, so enormous that there

seemed to be a quality of irreverence in applying religion to the

developments of every day. This strange suspension of religion

lasted over into the beginnings of the new age. It was the clear

vision of Marcus Karenin much more than any other contemporary

influence which brought it back into the texture of human life.

He saw religion without hallucinations, without superstitious

reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food and air, as

land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of the

Republic. He saw that indeed it had already percolated away from

the temples and hierarchies and symbols in which men had sought

to imprison it, that it was already at work anonymously and

obscurely in the universal acceptance of the greater state. He

gave it clearer expression, rephrased it to the lights and

perspectives of the new dawn…

But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spirit of

the times it becomes evident as one reads them in their

chronological order, so far as that is now ascertainable, that as

one comes to the latter nineteenth and the earlier twentieth

century the writers are much more acutely aware of secular change

than their predecessors were. The earlier novelists tried to show

'life as it is,' the latter showed life as it changes. More and

more of their characters are engaged in adaptation to change or