of soulless forms.

This is not an over-coloured picture. Can we not see, then,
what was the inner reason for the war? Can we not understand
that it was needful to shake mankind loose from gossip and pink
teas, and sword-worship, and Saturday night drunks, and self-
seeking politics and theological quibbles--to wake them up and
make them realise that they stand upon a narrow knife-edge
between two awful eternities, and that, here and now, they have
to finish with make-beliefs, and with real earnestness and
courage face those truths which have always been palpable where
indolence, or cowardice, or vested interests have not obscured
the vision. Let us try to appreciate what those truths are
and the direction which reform must take. It is the new
spiritual developments which predominate in my own thoughts, but
there are two other great readjustments which are necessary
before they can take their full effect. On the spiritual side I
can speak with the force of knowledge from the beyond. On the
other two points of reform, I make no such claim.

The first is that in the Bible, which is the foundation of
our present religious thought, we have bound together the living
and the dead, and the dead has tainted the living. A mummy and
an angel are in most unnatural partnership. There can be no
clear thinking, and no logical teaching until the old
dispensation has been placed on the shelf of the scholar, and
removed from the desk of the teacher. It is indeed a wonderful
book, in parts the oldest which has come down to us, a book
filled with rare knowledge, with history, with poetry, with
occultism, with folklore. But it has no connection with modern