----The last scenes in the present-day epoch of commercialism promise to be like the last scenes in the old-time epoch of feudalism, picturesque, violent, and significant rendings and tearings of the whole body politic prior to a re-formation on the basis of a larger unity. Then they portended the unification of England under the Tudors, or the unification of France under the eleventh Louis. Now they portend--what?
Some larger, more spiritual unity, it may be guessed, that shall quietly and with unprecedented swiftness make use of the materialistic objects which the short-sighted leaders of commercialism now have in mind, and after a manner they no more dream is implied in their success than the royal dynasties of England and France dreamed that the bloody heads of kings would be the fruit of the new nationality.
----To the leaders of the commercial world-movement, their materialistic objects are ends in themselves, very substance of very substance. But the Time-spirit already laughs them to scorn and tosses them, as mere tools out of place, to some more convenient corner of her spacious work-shop, where they make but one with a mass of other such tools awaiting the mastery of her history-shaping hand.
The tumults of South Africa and China are but signs of the vaster tumult in which these tumults shall be devoured and assimilated.
----In the world of faith, too, how restless is the aggregate organism! Ruptures and dissolutions are splitting and fusing orthodoxies and heterodoxies.
And in the withdrawn and secret world of the human consciousness the ferment of new desires and potencies, opposed by all the organized and settled forces of opinion, is permeating thought, and stirring the slumbering soul to try the unguessed faculties of its idealism, as if the real king of the total Unquietness held there his throne.
The world of politics and commerce, the world of faith and intelligence tend, it would seem, already, towards that synthetic development foreseen in 1855, by one whom the obtuse world may yet have reason enough to recognize as one of the clearest-brained statesmen of the nineteenth century, though her trade was poetry not politics--Elizabeth Barrett Browning, when she said of the future:
"What I expect is a great development of Christianity in opposition to the churches, and of humanity generally in opposition to the nations."