To-day it sounds for Consummation, for the dissolution of the Old Order and the uprising of the New. The chemist, brewing wholesale death in new and horrible forms, pauses in his work to listen to it. The feet of millions armed and drilled for murder keep time to its tolling. The politician, the publisher, the preacher—all hear it but none give it heed. Only the people do not hear, or if they hear, they fail to understand: they are busied with their own concerns—affairs of the market, or of marriage, or of sport.

The potent seed of all good and evil is hidden in the hearts of men: from the minds of men come all those evils which embitter life. Hence spring the poison-weeds of Passion, Envy and Desire, the causes of wars and tumults, of misery, of want, and of degradation. This truth none may deny: all men know it, yet no man will acknowledge it. It has no seat at their councils, no weight in the scales of their judgments.

Nor is the reason far to seek. The evils which afflict mankind go deep below the surfaces of life. The things which men bewail and suffer are but effects: the origins lie deep-rooted in the world of causes—of spiritual verities.

To cure, the remedy must reach the cause; to prescribe it, calls for vision which few possess. So men, mistaking shadow for substance, build and demolish, tinker and patch, endlessly re-arranging their little box of effects. Their cardboard castles are swept to ruin by eddying currents of conflicting thought—unstable, insecure.

The nations are in a pitiable plight, “full of wounds and bruises and putrefying sores.” A very little while, and the people will no longer be deceived by boastful words or