Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/527

No. 3.] modern Europe, in the guard about whose scaffold I should most cheerfully stand, if he had any scaffold. So much of the spirit that opposes the community I have and have always had in me, simply, elementally, deeply. Over against this natural ineffectiveness in serving the community, and over against this rebellion, there has always stood the interest which has taught me what I nowadays try to express by teaching that we are saved through the community.

The resulting doctrine of life and of the nature of truth and of reality which I have tried to work out, to connect with logical and metaphysical issues, and to teach to my classes, now seems to me not so much romanticism, as a fondness for defining, for articulating, and for expounding the perfectly real, concrete, and literal life of what we idealists call the 'spirit,' in a sense which is indeed Pauline, but not merely mystical, super-individual; not merely romantic, difficult to understand, but perfectly capable of exact and logical statement.

The best concrete instance of the life of a community with which I have had the privilege to become well acquainted, has been furnished to me by my own Seminary, one of whose meetings you have so kindly and graciously permitted me to attend as leader, on this to me so precious occasion.

... But why should you give so kind an attention to me at a moment when the deepest, the most vital, and the most practical interests of the whole community of mankind are indeed imperilled, when the spirit of mankind is overwhelmed with a cruel and undeserved sorrow, when the enemies of mankind often seem as if they were about to triumph?

Let me simply say in closing, how deeply the crisis of this moment impresses me, and how keenly I feel the bitterness of being unable to do anything for the Great Community except to thank you for your great kindness, and to hope that we and the Community shall see better times together. Certainly unless the enemies of mankind are duly rebuked by the results of this war, I, for one, do not wish to survive the crisis. Let me then venture, as I close, to quote to you certain words of the poet Swinburne. You will find them in his Songs before Sunrise. Let the poet