life can be modeled. Therefore I beseech audience not only of the churches, but of the poets, writers, and thinkers of Ireland for their aid in this labor. They alone can create in wide commonalty the ideals which can dominate society. It is the work of the artist to create for us images of desirable life, to manifest to us the ideal humanity, and to prefigure that vaster entity which I have called the national being. I said in an earlier page that part of the failure of Ireland must be laid to the poets who had dropped out of the divine procession and sang a solitary song; to the writers who had turned from contemplating the great to the portrayal of the little in human nature. I know how difficult it is to constrain the spirit, and how futile it is to ask artists or poets to create what they are not inspired to create. But we can ask all men—artists, poets, litterateurs, and scientists—to be citizens, and if they realize imaginatively the spiritual conception of the State, we may assume that this imaginative realization of the State will influence the labors of the mind, and what is done will, consciously or unconsciously, have reference to that collective being which must dominate society more and more, which will dominate it as a tyranny if we fail in our labors, or liberate and make more majestical the spirit of man if we imagine rightly. All greatness is brought about by a conspiracy of the imagination and the will. Our literature certainly manifests beauty, but not greatness or majesty, for majesty only arises where there is an orchestration of humanity by some mighty conductor; and as a people we shall never manifest the highest qualities in literature or life until we are under the dominion of one, at least, of the great fundamental ideas which have been the inspiration of races. Our feebleness arises from our economic individualism. We continually neutralize each other’s efforts. Yet there is no less power in humanity today than there ever was. We see now clearly what untamed elemental fires lay underneath the seeming placidity of the world. There was a feeling in society that, just as the earth itself had settled down to be a habitable globe, and was forgetting its ancient ferocities of earthquake that opened up gulfs between land and land and rended sea from sea, so, too, humanity was losing those wilder energies we surmised in the cave-dweller or the hunters of mastodon, mammoth, and cave-tiger. But it was all a dream—a dream, we suspect, about the earth as well as about humanity. While we indulged in these pleasing speculations on society, the scientists of our generation were placing beyond question or argument the doctrine of the indestructibility of energy and matter and we may be sure that while there is immortal life there must be immortal energies as its companions through time, and they will never be less powerful than they are today or were in the morning of the world. There will be no weakening of that mighty God-begotten brotherhood of elemental powers; and, while we cannot hope that by the wastage of time these powers will be feebler, we may hope that by an understanding of them we may get mastery over them. The wild elephant of the woods, with a greater strength than man’s, has yet been trained to be his servant, and that arcane power we call electricity, which, if it shoots out of its channel, shrivels up the body of man, is now our servant. So we may hope, too, that the elemental energies in humanity itself, which break out in wars and Armageddons, will come under control. We should not hope that man will ever be a less powerful being. To hope that would be to wish for his degradation. We should wish him to become ever more and more powerful by understanding himself, and by the unity of the spiritual faculties and the elemental energies in him into one harmonious whole. At present he is feeble because he is, to use the scriptural illustration, a house divided against itself.
Our feebleness is due to the conflict of powers in us and our conflict with each other. Get the two mightiest bulls in a herd, put them opposing each other in a narrow passage, and they, being of equal strength, will reduce each other to feebleness. Neither will make headway. Let them unite together in their charge, and what will oppose them? Men at conflict in their own hearts, opposing each other in the world, reduce themselves and each other to wretchedness. The race which could eliminate the factors which promote internal conflict in society and could organize human energies in harmony, would be powerful beyond our wildest dreams. Every now and then in world-history we come across instances of what organized humanity could accomplish. There are fragments of an architecture so majestic that they awe us as the high rocks of nature do, and they seem almost like portions of nature itself, and truly they are so, being portions of nature remade by man, who is also a nature energy of divine origin. Europe by its conflicts today is reducing itself to barbarism and powerlessness, and these conflicts arose out of the internal conflicts in society, for individuals and nations act outside themselves as they act inside themselves. The problem for Europe is to create a harmonious life, and it is the problem for us in Ireland, and we will have to work this out for ourselves. The creation of a harmonious life among a people must come from within. It can never come by the imposition of an external law imposed by another people: Never did master and slave work in true unison, no matter how benevolent the master or how yielding the slave, for there is in every man, no matter what his condition, a spark of divine life, and it will always
