raves not for a goal’ is one of his hard and characteristic sayings, and here he seems to me typical both of modern thought in general and especially of English thought, and that both for good and ill.  We see in him the want of precision, the lack of logical coherence, that have prevented us from ever producing a philosopher of the first rank.  At the same time there is something true and profound in his instinct that the moment has not yet come in which to formulate our faith.  We all feel that we are on the brink of tremendous, perhaps terrifying, discoveries; we resent any cut-and-dried solution, however pleasant, perhaps all the more if it is pleasant, and we resent it because we feel that at bottom our hopes would be travestied by any conception we, with our little intellect and minute knowledge, could at present frame.  It was once said to me by a far-seeing friend[74] that the modern dislike of church-going, the modern incapacity to write a long coherent poem, the modern passion for music and for realism, even for sordid realism, all sprang from the same roots, from the thirst for an infinite harmony, the belief that everything was somehow involved in that harmony, and the conviction that all systems, as yet made or makeable, were entirely inadequate.

And to the list we may add, I think, the modern passion for history and for science.  We study history not merely to be warned by failures or inspired by shining examples:  at bottom we have a belief that somehow the lives and struggles of those men in the distant past are still quite as important as our own.  We follow the discoveries of science not only for their commercial value or because we share the excitement of the chase, but because, deeper than all, we suspect that the universe is a glorious thing.

And there is another matter, perhaps the most important of all, on which I would dwell as I draw to a close, where Meredith leads directly to the dominant thought of the present day.  I mean his feeling that, if the universe is to be proved acceptable to man’s conscience, it will be through the effort of man himself struggling towards his own ideal.  It is as though the world itself had to be redeemed by man.  This hope is the real hope of our time.  So far as the modern world believes the doctrine of the Incarnation, it is in this sense that it believes.

And this belief we find everywhere in all hopeful writers, great or small.  It gives dignity to the latest writings of H.G.  Wells, this faith in a spirit moving in man greater than man himself, worthy to fight and fit to overcome all that is wrong in the universe.  Bernard Shaw’s creed is just the same, sometimes thinly disguised under respect for ’the Life-Force’, sometimes coming boldly forward in audacious, profound assertions that God needs Man to accomplish His own will and is helpless without him.  ‘There is something I want to do,’ Shaw imagines his God as saying, ’and I don’t know what it is; I must make a brain, the human brain, to find it out.’  Rodin modelled a mighty hand, the Hand of God, holding within it Man and Woman.  Shaw, it is reported, asked the sculptor:  ‘I suppose you meant your own hand after all?’ ‘Yes,’ said Rodin, ‘as the tool.’