step. Today our civil life is a tangle of petty personal interests and
competitions. The co-operative movement is, as I have said, a vast
turning movement of humanity heavenwards, or, at least, to bring them
face round to the Delectable City. When this psychological change takes
place the democratic associations--which have grown up haphazard as the
workers found it easiest to create them--will be changed and remodeled
by men who will have the mass of people behind them in their efforts to
make a more majestic structure of society for the enlargement of the
lives and spirits of men.





XII.



We have descended from the national soul to the material plane, and we
must still continue here for a time, because the doctrine that a sane
mind can only manifest through a sane body is as true in reference to
the State as to the individual, and necessitates a study of social
fabrics. The soul creates tendencies and habits in the body, and the
body repeats these vibrations automatically and infects the soul again
with its old desires. Our religious hatreds created sectarian
organizations, and these react again in the national soul, which would,
I believe, willingly pass away from that mood, but finds itself
incarnated in organizations habituated to sectarian action, and its
energies are turned into these hateful channels unwillingly. So a
drunkard who now realizes that intemperance is rotting his nature is