Page:The way of Martha and the way of Mary (1915).djvu/240

218 quickly it was May again and time to set out upon a new adventure. So I took up my quest of Martha and Mary once more and set out for Egypt, hoping to be able to go from Egypt to Russia the way Christianity came to her. For a great deal of Russian Christianity came from the Egyptian deserts and had its source in the life led there by the hermits during the first five centuries after Christ.

Doubtless the quiet life of the hermit saints had more power to change the world than all the clangorous wars of their time, than the talk and the gossip and the cheering and the hooting, than the foes laid low or tyrants raised to power. There is a beautiful passage of Nietzsche—"The thoughts that change the world come on doves' feet. The world revolves round the inventors of new values; noiselessly it revolves." So if we would know what sort of a Europe is going to be, or of Russia what sort of an East she will be—

Oh! Russia, what sort of an East will you be,

The East of Xerxes or of Christ?

it is necessary to seek the ideas of to-morrow in the quiet places where they lurk unseen, not in the clash of the Great War. The trenches are pungent with fumes, the earth itself deaf from the sound of artillery, both Nature and Man's work lie blasted and ruined along a long but narrow stretch of land—that is the front, the War, the biggest and only thing in the world. But I must leave it and go