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must go. Every ideal and system of ideals has to be adaptable to new conditions, or it lapses into the hands only of the weak and reactionary, and dies with them. In our day some of the most cherished which have come to us from the past we see in this perilous state. As St. Paul, St. Augustine and St. Gregory adapted primitive Christianity to the methods of thought and action of the Greek and Roman and medieval world, so now modernists and liberals (and perhaps conservatives, who knows?) must teach it to live and grow in a new soil and new climate. If it will not, what remains for it but extinction? And if we wish to maintain these or any old standards, it behoves us not to cheapen them by sentimentality and talk-talk. Here is the function of humor and even cynicism; they are wholesome and clear the air, and avert, for a time at least, the secular tempest which clears by destroying.

To look through literature at history, then, shows that there are all kinds of people at all times, all paying more or less sincere and practical homage to the great and permanent ideals of our race; some strong and dominating souls enforcing respect for the temporary ideals which are needed to restore the balance or meet the emergencies of the age, and a host of weaker souls, convinced by their arguments, dazzled by their brilliance, controlled by their force, following, exaggerating, distorting, wearing threadbare. The difference of one age from another really means the enthronement of one type of person; a weak specimen of that type may even prevail over a strong person of the contrary type, because society is pushing him from behind. People appear different to us as we look back at various ages because at one time one sort of person is orthodox, at another time another sort is orthodox; it is principally orthodoxy, the ideal, which is expressed in literature.

Another conclusion we come to is that unmitigated insistence on ideals defeats itself. Intellectual history shows us that half our ideals are one-sided and will be displaced. They are the pattern by which we are trying to mould the

world of reality, but we must not forget the nature of the material. Men do not make filigree of marble, nor statues of wire. All this is why I have chosen most of my examples from the Middle Ages, when ideals were most loudly voiced, and most different from reality. The Middle Ages were the world's great experiment in complete idealism, and it failed. We should heed the failure, and look to it that we fit our treasure better to the earthen vessels in which we have it.

As we thus reconnoiter the past we notice another thing. Some of these temporary ideals are recurring ideals. It is easy to make out a series of pendulum-swings in the changes of man's standards and likings; how often we can detect cycles as well it is too early to say. There was a strange spiritual affinity between the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, with their cold intellectualism, their childlike fondness for "sentence" and "sentiments" (wisdom in sealed packages), their ideality and optimism, their belief in the attainability of the absolute. This is no paradox; the Middle Ages were not nearly so romantic to themselves as they are to us. Strange things believed in are not romantic, they are merely disquieting. Other cases of recurrence can easily be seen, and others may be foreseen. Eighteen hundred years ago the world of pagan culture was laden with a sense of sin, a purifying pain, which grew from barbarous beastliness and the vice of unmoral civilization. This sense of sin drew men to religions which offered redemption, that of Mithra and finally that of Christ. Beginning a hundred years ago with what is called liberal religion, with its insistence on the mildness and fatherhood of God, the world began to lose the severer side of religion, and make it into a mere comfort and luxury. Fear almost disappeared as a religious motive. Simultaneously science has been more and more showing us the inexorable severity of nature. The world of religion, and the world of nature, have been growing more and more unlike. The mild and easy being of whom we may hear on Sunday, without even

a Devil to put the blame on, does not look to the average man like the soul of that universe of which he learns and has experience during the week. When men have to choose between faith and sight, no wonder they incline to choose sight, and religion suffers. But the world needs religion, in some sense, and may need it more. With our superficiality, our restless pursuit of pleasure, our ruthless selfseeking, we may need a revival of the sense of sin, and may even be seeking a source of redemption. What science may tell us of the injury to ourselves and to society wrought by our course of life is not enough; the heedless world will take chances. The world needs the absolute to come down and stiffen it. Yet neither of our modern religions can bring this, neither the narrow old nor the flabby new. Such dilemmas, in which the thinking man constantly finds himself, intellectual history helps us to understand, and one day may help us to solve.

When one talks of the past, a certain feeling of chivalry leads one to take up the cudgels in behalf of our now helpless ancestors. They were not all fools, even though they are dead. But more than this, they and the view of history which we get through surveying them may teach us some precious things; things for which in these trying days of world-history we may be grateful. They teach us to stand firm and not to be swept off our feet by new isms and new ideals, which too may pass away; not to give up ourselves to everyone who has just found, or forged, a new key to the kingdom of heaven. They give us renewed confidence in the good sense and good feeling of the bulk of humanity; they show that in the long run the world has always acted rationally, under its circumstances, and that where the world has gone wrong it has been led wrong by ill-proportioned ideals. They make us feel that action and reaction, recurrence and cycle, have been due to intelligent free-agents trying to square themselves and their world with an absolute good beyond them; and that we can do no less, and with their guidance may do it better.

MANU AND THE FISH

(Translated from the Mahabharata.)

ARTHUR W. RYDER

There was a gentle, holy sage
Named Manu, in a former age.

The woes of life he would not blink;
For many years he did not wink.

With ragged clothes and frowsy hair
He lived beside a stream. And there
He saw a fish who thus began
To speak to him. "O holy man,

I am a little fish, you see;
And bigger fishes frighten me.
For bigger fishes eat the small;
It is their nature, once for all.

So dreadful terror weighs me down;
Besides, I fear that I shall drown.
Then save me. Some day I will do
An equal favor, sir, to you."

So Manu, when he heard his wish, Stretched forth a hand, and took the fish,

And dropped him in a water-jar

That was as bright as moonbeams are.

And in the jar the little fish

Had everything his heart could wish.

He grew and thrived on food and fun,
For Manu loved him like a son.

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