The Inner Life

IT IS not difficult to realize that this passage from Phillips Brooks might have been written yesterday rather than more than forty years ago? But spiritual vision, insight into the fundamental springs and tendencies of human endeavor are outside the limitations of Space and Time; they ally themselves with Eternal Word.

Phillips Brooks said:

The real question everywhere is whether the world, distracted and confused as everybody sees that it is, is going to be patched up and restored to what it used to be, or whether it is going forward into a quite new and different kind of life, whose exact nature nobody can pretend to foretell, but which is to be distinctly new, unlike the life of any age which the world has seen already.

Men say, “The world has been disturbed before. Classes have clashed with one another. Governed and governors, employed and employers, rich and poor, have come to blows in other days; but things have always adjusted themselves again. The stronger have grown kinder; the weaker have grown humbler; the paternal governor has grown more fatherly; the obedient subject has grown more filial, and things have gone on again as smoothly as before.” “So shall it be again,” men say.

That is what they expect as the outcome of all this conflict. But other men see clearer. It is impossible that the old conditions, so shaken and broken, can ever