Page:Future of England - Peel.djvu/208

196 agitate, as well as the best of us, for the good things of this life, and is utterly material in his baser rites. For in Asia the religious torch burns dark at its foot.

But that consideration opens up at once a grave issue for ourselves. If in the East, as elsewhere, the old contests between the spirit and the flesh have their hard-fought battlefield, and if materialism gains ground visibly, are we justified in thus marching, horse and foot, in rescue of the latter? To make life worth living, and to raise the standard of comfort, sounds well. Yet the East may say that to stimulate unruly affections, and to put an edge to appetites, is practically our mission, and a disputable one. It is not an unquestionable thing to substitute the multiplicity of desires for the multiplicity of deities. Is England to be the agent provocateur of disbelief? For the rising flood of our western rationalism saps the foundations of the tabernacles where the tribes go up. We lay our unwitting axe in the primeval woodland of the divinities. We make our clearings in the matted jungle of the gods.

All this is dubious work, even from a practical point of view. For, as Comte wrote in his Cours de Philosophie, "a decisive experience has proved the necessary instability of all purely material regimes, founded only on men's interests, independently of their affections and convictions." That thesis is being verified in India: Sir John Strachey, who knew that country administratively