seem to have a difficulty about loving reactionaries, and some about
loving revolutionaries. And in institutional religion there are people
of real ardour, called by those beautiful names Catholic and
Evangelical, who do not seem able to see each other in the light of this
wide-spreading love. Yet they would meet at the centre. And it is at the
centre that the real life of the Spirit aims first; thence flowing out
to the circumference--even to its most harsh, dark, difficult and
rugged limits--in unbroken streams of generous love.

Such love is creative. It does not flow along the easy paths, spending
itself on the attractive. It cuts new channels, goes where it is needed,
and has as its special vocation--a vocation identical with that of the
great artist--the "loving of the unlovely into lovableness." Thus does
it participate according to its measure in the work of Divine
incarnation. This does not mean a maudlin optimism, or any other kind of
sentimentality; for as we delve more deeply into life, we always leave
sentimentality behind. But it does mean a love which is based on a deep
understanding of man's slow struggles and of the unequal movements of
life, and is expressed in both arduous and highly skillful actions. It
means taking the grimy, degraded, misshapen, and trying to get them
right; because we feel that essentially they can be right. And further,
of course, it means getting behind them to the conditions that control
their wrongness; and getting these right if we can. Consider what human
society would be if each of its members--not merely occasional
philanthropists, idealists or saints, but financiers, politicians,
traders, employers, employed--had this quality of spreading a creative
love: if the whole impulse of life in every man and woman were towards
such a harmony, first with God, and then with all other things and
souls. There is nothing unnatural in this conception. It only means that
our vital energy would flow in its real channel at last. Where then