is at present outside the sphere of practical politics.  Yet the obligation of response to those stirrings is laid on all who feel them; and unless some will first make this venture of faith, our possible future will never be achieved.  Christ was born among those who expected the Kingdom of God.  The favouring atmosphere of His childhood is suggested by these words.  It is our business to prepare, so far as we may, a favourable atmosphere and environment for the children who will make the future:  and this environment is not anything mysterious, it is simply ourselves.  The men and women who are now coming to maturity, still supple to experience and capable of enthusiastic and disinterested choice—­that is, of surrender in the noblest sense—­will have great opportunities of influencing those who are younger than themselves.  The torch is being offered to them; and it is of vital importance to the unborn future that they should grasp and hand it on, without worrying about whether their fingers are going to be burnt.  If they do grasp it, they may prove to be the bringers in of a new world, a fresh and vigorous social order, which is based upon true values, controlled by a spiritual conception of life; a world in which this factor is as freely acknowledged by all normal persons, as is the movement of the earth round the sun.

I do not speak here of fantastic dreams about Utopias, or of the coloured pictures of the apocalyptic imagination; but of a concrete genuine possibility, at which clear-sighted persons have hinted again and again.  Consider our racial past.  Look at the Piltdown skull:  reconstruct the person or creature whose brain that skull contained, and actualize the directions in which his imperious instincts, his vaguely conscious will and desire, were pressing into life.  They too were expressions of Creative Spirit; and there is perfect continuity between his vital impulse and our own.  Now, consider one of the better achievements of civilization; say the life of a University, with its devotion to disinterested learning, its conservation of old beauty and quest of new truth.  Even if we take its lowest common measure, the transfiguration of desire is considerable.  Yet in the things of the Spirit we must surely acknowledge ourselves still to be primitive men; and no one can say that it yet appears what we shall be.  All really depends on the direction in which human society decides to push into experience, the surrender which it makes to the impulsion of the Spirit; how its tendency to novelty is employed, the sort of complex habits which are formed by it, as more and more crude social instinct is lifted up into conscious intention, and given the precision of thought.