634 PROSPECTS OF THE WESTERN CIVILIZATION
his religious life in the same age, a comparable endurance in the exercise
of self-command was the spiritual feat that was required of him.

Western souls, apprised by experience of the limits and the nemesis of
Rationalism, must school themselves, in their consequent quest for re-
conciliation with God, to the prospect of finding themselves commanded
by Conscience to check their panic impulse to try to force a premature
entry into the Promised Land. They must repress their eagerness to take
sanctuary again on soil hallowed by the tombs of the Patriarchs. They
must even face the prospect that Conscience's injunction might sentence
them to end their days in the Wilderness, like the generation of Israelites
who after their exodus from Egypt had had to wander in the Wilderness
for forty years until not a man of them was left alive save Caleb the son
of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun;1 and they must steel them-
selves by recalling that in that generation the sternest test of fortitude had
been reserved for the Israelite in whom God had been best pleased; for
Moses' last experience in This Life had been a tantalizing Pisgah sight2 of
a Promised Land which his own feet were never to tread. 'I have caused
thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither'3 had
been the last words of the Lord that had fallen on a dying Moses' ears.4

The temptation to run for shelter and the duty of riding the storm
have been eloquently described by a nineteenth-century Western man
of letters who divined, with the intuition of a poet, a truth that his genera-
tion came and went too early to have learnt from experience.

*AU deep earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the Soul to keep
the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of Heaven and
Earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore. But, as in
landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—
so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite than be ingloriously dashed
Upon the lee, even if that were safety.*5

The writer of this Study, who happened to have been born into a genera-
tion in whose time this ordeal had come to be a common Western expe-
rience, once had a personal intimation of the truth uttered by Herman
Melville. In the summer of A.D. 1936, in a time of physical sickness and
spiritual travail, he dreamed, during a spell of sleep in a wakeful night,
that he was clasping the foot of the crucifix hanging over the high altar

1 Num. xiv. 26-35 and xxvi. 64-65.

* Deut. xxxiv. i. 3 Deut. xxadv. 4.

* A few -weeks after he had -written this passage, the writer came across a charac-
teristically sincere and noble exposition of the same idea by a Western scholar-banker
of an older generation, Walter Leaf (vivebat A.D. 1852-1927), with whom the writer had
the good fortune to become personally acquainted after the publication of Leaf's Troy,
A Study in Homeric Geography (London 1912, Macmillan), when Leaf was preparing
for the press his Homer and History (London 1915, Macmillan).

'I am sure that we are working together to win a new form in which all the hearts of
men will again be able to join in common worship, as they have hardly been able to do
for many years. But the time does not seem near yet; and meanwhile a great deal of pain-
ful lonely groping has to be done by each one for himself. New faiths, like children, must
be brought forth in sorrow, and many souls will have to pass through struggles greater than
they can bear.... I feel that the minds of all men are slowly working their way from
Trouble to Truth' (Walter Leaf, letters written on the ist and the 4th April, 1894, to
Charlotte M. Symonds, before their marriage on the stand May, 1894, in Walter Leaf
(London 1932, John Murray), by Charlotte M. Leaf, pp. 180 and 182),

s Melville, Herman; Moby Dick, chap, xxiii.