Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/115

Rh constitute a nucleus or rallying point for all that is most vital in the English world, the ultimate influence of which it would be difficult to overrate.

This is the highest of all the functions to which we aspire. Our supreme duty is the winnowing out by a process of natural selection, and enlisting for hearty service for the commonweal all those who possess within their hearts the sacred fire of patriotic devotion to their country.

Who is there among the people who has truth in him, who is no self-seeker, who is no coward, and who is capable of honest, painstaking effort to help his country? For such men we would search as for hid treasures. They are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, and it is the duty and the privilege of the wise man to see that they are like cities set on the hill which cannot be hid.

The great word which has now to be spoken in the ears of the world is that the time has come when men and women must work for the salvation of the State with as much zeal and self-sacrifice as they now work for the salvation of the individual. To save the country from the grasp of demons innumerable, to prevent this Empire or this Republic becoming an incarnate demon of lawless ambition and cruel love of gold, how many men or women are willing to spend even one hour a month or a year? The religious side of politics has not yet entered the minds of men.

What is wanted is a revival of civic faith, a quickening of spiritual life in the political sphere, the inspiring of men and women with the conception of what may be done towards the salvation of the world, if they will but bring to bear upon public affairs the same spirit of self-sacrificing labour that so many thousands manifest in the ordinary drudgery of parochial and evangelistic work. It may, no doubt, seem an impossible. dream.

That which we really wish to found among our readers is in very truth a civic church, every member of which should zealously—as much as it lay within him—preach the true faith, and endeavour to make it operative in the hearts and heads of its neighbours. Were such a church founded it would be as a great voice sounding out over sea and land the summons to all men to think seriously and soberly of the public life in which they are called to fill a part. Visible in many ways is the decadence of the Press. The mentor of the young democracy has abandoned philosophy, and stuffs the ears of its Telemachus with descriptions of Calypso’s petticoats and the latest scandals from the Court. All the more need, then, that there should be a voice which, like that of the muezzin from the Eastern minaret, would summon the faithful to the duties imposed by their belief.

This, it may be said, involves a religious idea, and when religion is introduced harmonious co-operation is impossible. That was so once; it will not always be the case.

To establish a periodical circulating throughout the English-speaking world, with its affiliates or associates in every town, and its correspondents in every village, read as men used to read their Bibles, not to waste an idle hour, but to discover the will of God and their duty to man, whose staff and readers alike are bound together by a common faith and a readiness to