is to be engulfed, is to transform existence into a system of radical and irremediable evil, and thus to make genuine religion impossible; and not only religion, but also all cordial political union and order, for this gets and keeps a footing amid the shifting affairs of this sense-world, only because it is the outward image of the religious vision. Belief in the sovereign goodness of the universe and its grounding Light is the life alike of religious faith and of political fealty. It is impossible that either faith or fealty can long endure after we have come to the realising conviction that the whole of which we form a part, and the central Principle of the whole, are hostile, or even indifferent, not simply to the permanent existence of the soul, but to its aspirations after completion in moral life. A nominal God, who either cannot or will not bring to fulfilment the longing after infinite moral growth that has once arisen in a spirit, is not, and cannot be, for such a spirit, true God at all: —
No life may fail beyond the grave,
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?
*******
Man, the last work, who seemed so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer —
