“I very much doubt it. He’s a returned war hero, and he wants a chance of keeping on being a hero—or something like that.”
“But even that is a new feeling,” he persisted.
“Yah!” she said, rather wearily sceptical. “I’d rather even believe in William James. There seems to me more real feeling even in him: deeper, at any rate. Your Jacks are shallow really.”
“Nay, he seemed a man to me.”
“I don’t know what you mean by your men. Really, I give it up, I don’t know what you do want. You change so. You’ve always said you despise politics, and yet here you are.” She tailed off as if it were hopeless.
“It’s not the politics. But it is a new life-form, a new social form. We’re pot-bound inside democracy and the democratic feeling.”
“But you know what you’ve said yourself. You didn’t change the Roman Empire with a revolution. Christianity grew up for centuries without having anything at all to do with politics—just a feeling, and a belief.”
This was indeed what he had said himself, often enough: that a new religious inspiration, and a new religious idea must gradually spring up and ripen before there could be any constructive change. And yet he felt that preaching and teaching were both no good, at the world’s present juncture. There must be action, brave, faithful action: and in the action the new spirit would arise.
“You see,” he said, “Christianity is a religion which preaches the despising of the material world. And I don’t believe in that part of it, at least, any longer. I believe that the men with the real passion for life, for truth, for living and not for having, I feel they now must seize control of the material possessions, just to safeguard the world from all the masses who want to seize material possessions for themselves, blindly, and nothing else. The men with soul and with passionate truth in them must control the world’s material riches and supplies: absolutely put possessions out of the reach of the mass of mankind, and let life begin to live again, in place of this struggle for existence, or struggle for wealth.”
“Yah, I don’t believe it’s so all-important who controls the world’s material riches and supplies. That’ll always be the same.”