testimony to theological truth but a crusade for social change. Of
course, my interest in theology has persisted; but its place in my
life has tended to become ever more subordinate to other and more
directly practical interests. You know how the character of my
preaching has changed since I first entered the Messiah pulpit. You
know with what [8] waxing intensity of expression I have moved to
the left of our various divisions on the social question. You do not
know, hence I must tell you, how this intensity of radical
conviction is destined to continue in the years that are now before
us. For the war has accelerated the social crisis beyond all
forecasting. In two years has transpired what fifty years could not
have consummated under more normal conditions. Three great
empires--Russia, Germany, Austria--and several newborn countries,
like that of the Czecho-Slovaks, have been captured by the
Socialists; and the British Empire seems promised to the British
Labor Party in not more than another decade or two. The social
revolution long prophesied, long hoped for, long feared, is here;
and this means in countries like our own, still untouched by change,
such a "sturm and drang periode," as makes even the Great War pale
into insignificance. Now in these years which are before us, I
propose to speak and serve for the speediest and most thoroughgoing
social reconstruction. I am committed both by conviction and
temperament to the program of the British Labor Party and its policy
of indirect or political action for the advancement of that program.
This is my predominant interest at this moment, and through what is
destined I suppose to be the whole period of my life. This is as
much the cause of our day as abolition was the cause of the days
before the Civil War. To this I have given all I have--from this I
intend to withdraw nothing that I have given. Not in any sense of
bitterness or violence in method, but in every sense of utter change