government by a class, should we not have a heaven which is likewise a democratic state, swept clear of sceptred pomp and triumphant might, where no longer inconsistently "armies of the ransomed saints" to the "ringing of a thousand harps . . . cast crowns before the feet" of a Prince of Peace who sitteth on the right hand of God? For such a spiritual potentate attended with majesty's proper ceremonial and display, such a paternal despot propitiated by offerings of praise and prayer, such a dictator, rex et imperator, combining in his own person executive, legislative, and judicial functions, his administration safeguarded by the most ancient and complete system of sedition laws extant, such an imperialistic Commander-in-Chief, Defender of the Faithful and Scourge of the Unbeliever, surely he is not the proper head for the ideal state in this theoretically democratic year of grace, 1920.
And what of the traditional Christian virtues, official passport to heaven: humility, unquestioning obedience, and self-preservation at any cost? These, the cardinal virtues of the loyal subject and the private soldier in autocracy's ranks, may sound archaic and unfamiliar to the citizens of this world, when the millennium by socialists foretold shall have been established upon the earth.
Such anachronisms derived from ancient tribal rituals and mediaeval dreams of empire may be in part the cause of the rift between orthodox religion and daily life to-day. The younger generation can be but little impressed by such obsolescent conceptions, whether presented as symbol or substance of reality, which serve only to separate the Church from the State as they know it. The barriers and lines of demarcation which religious instruction has so often constructed between heaven and earth, between one's duty toward God and toward neighbor, have caused heaven, not earth, to suffer in the estimation of youth otherwise quick to see God's handiwork in the firmament and his glory in the heavens—youth with an adolescent eagerness for fellowship and service, prone to see in the earth and every common sight the glory and the freshness of a dream.
That modern realist, too, the Man on the Street—distinguished by a genuine if covert idealism from his brother the Tired Business Man—is blessed with a native spirit of reverence and an inarticulate yearning for an object of devotion, even while he rejects the alien arguments of personal salvation, self-abnegation, and the romantic escape of the other world. To many such, the war seemed
