H. Wells - The World Set Free

memorandum to the teachers which is the key-note of the modern

educational system, was probably entirely his work.

'Whosoever would save his soulshall lose it,' he wrote. 'That is

the device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point

of all we have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything

but a plain statement of fact. It is the basis for your work.

You have to teach self-forgetfulness, and everything else that

you have to teach is contributory and subordinate to that end.

Education is the release of man from self. You have to widen the

horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their

curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge

their sympathies. That is what you are for. Under your guidance

and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to

shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and

passions, and to find themselvesagain in the great beingof the

universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened

out until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose.

And this that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously

yourselves. Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill,

every sort of service, love: these are the means of salvation

from that narrow lonelinessof desire, that brooding

preoccupation with selfand egotistical relationships, which is

hell for the individual, treason to the race, and exile from

God…'

Section 12

As things round themselvesoff and accomplish themselves, one

begins for the first time to seethem clearly. From the

perspectives of a new age one can look back upon the great and

widening stream of literature with a complete understanding.

Things link up that seemed disconnected, and things that were

once condemned as harsh and aimless are seento be but factors in

the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of the

sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth

centuries falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one

seesit as a huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the

conflict of human egotism and personal passion and narrow

imaginations on the one hand, against the growingsense of wider

necessities and a possible, more spacious life.

That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire's

Candide, for example, in which the desirefor justice as well as

happinessbeats against human contrariety and takes refuge at

last in a forced and inconclusive contentment with little things.

Candide was but one of the pioneers of a literature of uneasy

complaint that was presently an innumerable multitude of books.

The novels more particularly of the nineteenth century, if one

excludes the mere story-tellers from our consideration, witness

to this uneasy realisation of changes that call for effort and of

the lack of that effort. In a thousand aspects, now tragically,

now comically, now with a funny affectation of divine detachment,

a countless host of witnesses tell their story of lives fretting

between dreamsand limitations. Now one laughs, now one weeps,

now one reads with a blank astonishment at this huge and almost

unpremeditated record of how the growinghuman spirit, now

warily, now eagerly, now furiously, and always, as it seems,

unsuccessfully, tried to adapt itself to the maddening misfit of

its patched and ancient garments. And always in these books as

one draws nearer to the heart of the matter there comes a

disconcerting evasion. It was the fantastic convention of the

time that a writer should not touchupon religion. To do so was

to rouse the jealousfury of the great multitude of professional

religious teachers. It was permitted to statethe discord, but

it was forbidden to glance at any possible reconciliation.

Religion was the privilege of the pulpit…

It was not only from the novels that religion was omitted. It was

ignored by the newspapers; it was pedantically disregarded in the

discussion of business questions, it played a trivial and

apologetic part in public affairs. And this was done not out of

contempt but respect. The hold of the old religious organisations

upon men's respect was still enormous, so enormous that there

seemed to be a quality of irreverence in applying religion to the

developments of every day. This strange suspension of religion

lasted over into the beginnings of the new age. It was the clear

vision of Marcus Karenin much more than any other contemporary

influencewhich brought it back into the texture of human life.

He sawreligion without hallucinations, without superstitious

reverence, as a common thing as necessary as food and air, as

land and energy to the life of man and the well-being of the

Republic. He sawthat indeed it had already percolated away from

the temples and hierarchies and symbols in which men had sought

to imprison it, that it was already at work anonymously and

obscurely in the universal acceptanceof the greater state. He

gave it clearer expression, rephrased it to the lights and

perspectives of the new dawn…

But if we return to our novels for our evidence of the spiritof

the times it becomes evident as one reads them in their

chronological order, so far as that is now ascertainable, that as

one comes to the latter nineteenth and the earlier twentieth

century the writers are much more acutely aware of secular change

than their predecessors were. The earlier novelists tried to show

'life as it is,' the latter showed life as it changes. More and

more of their charactersare engaged in adaptation to change or

suffering from the effectsof world changes. And as we come up

to the time of the Last Wars, this newer conception of the

everyday life as a reaction to an accelerated development is

continuallymore manifest. Barnet's book, which has served us so

well, is frankly a picture of the world coming about like a ship

that sails into the wind. Our later novelists give a vast gallery

of individual conflicts in which old habits and customs, limited

ideas, ungenerous temperaments, and innate obsessions are pitted

against this great opening out of life that has happened to us.

They tell us of the feelingsof old people who have been wrenched

away from familiar surroundings, and how they have had to make

peace with uncomfortable comfortsand conveniences that are still

strange to them. They give us the discord between the opening

egotisms of youths and the ill-defined limitations of a changing

social life. They tell of the universal struggle of jealousyto

capture and cripple our souls, of romantic failures and tragical

misconceptions of the trend of the world, of the spiritof

adventure, and the urgency of curiosity, and how these serve the

universal drift. And all their stories lead in the end either to

happinessmissed or happinesswon, to disaster or salvation. The

clearer their vision and the subtler their art, the more

certainly do these novels tell of the possibility of salvation

for all the world. For any road in life leads to religion for

those upon it who will follow it far enough…

It would have seemed a strange thing to the men of the former

time that it should be an open question as it is to-day whether

the world is wholly Christian or not Christian at all. But

assuredly we have the spirit, and as surely have we left many

temporary formsbehind. Christianity was the first expression of