ARE LAWS INEXORABLE OR CONTROLLABLE? 347
irreconcilable parochial states and a desolating oecumenical peace im-
posed through the delivery of a knock-out blow. The reward for success
in running the gauntlet of these adamantine Symplegades, whose clash-
ing jaws had crushed every vessel that had attempted to make the passage
up to date, might be the Argonauts' legendary experience of bursting
out of the perilous straits into a hitherto un-navigated open sea. If the
children of one of the civilizations one day were to accomplish this feat
of pioneering, such an achievement might well open a new chapter of
history with a new spiritual climate. It was obvious, however, that this
happy issue out of some of the afflictions that Man had been bringing on
himself in the Age of the Civilizations could not be ensured by any
talismanic blue-print of a federal constitution for an oecumenical polity.
The precise constitutional arrangements best calculated to secure the
saving harmony of multiplicity-in-unity and unity-in-multiplicity would
necessarily vary according to the nature of the particular circumstances
in which the challenge presented itself; and the most adroit and oppor-
tune political engineering applied to the structure of a body social could
never serve as a substitute for the spiritual redemption of souls. Such
proximate causes of breakdown and disintegration as the horizontal
schism cleft in the Body Social by warfare between parochial states and
the vertical schism cleft in it by strife between classes were in truth no
more than political symptoms of a spiritual disease; and a wealth of
experience had long since demonstrated beyond dispute that technically
perfect institutions were of no avail to save froward souls from bringing
themselves and one another to grief, whereas brethren who had attuned
their wills to dwell together in unity would find no insuperable difficulty
in making technically imperfect institutions work by short-circuiting a
mimetic social drill through flashes of 'light caught from a leaping flame'1
and by subordinating the things that are Caesar's to the things that are
God's.2
If the prospects of Man in Process of Civilization, on his arduous climb
up a precipitous cliff-face towards an unattained and invisible ledge
above,3 evidently depended above all on his ability to recover a lost
control of the pitch, it was no less evident that this issue was going to be
decided by the course of Man's relations, not just with his fellow men
and with himself, but, above all, with God his Saviour.
1 Plato's Letters, No. 7, 541 B-E, quoted in III. iii. 345.
4 Matt. xxii. 21; Mark xii. 17; Lukexr. 25.
3 See II. i. 192-4.