THE    MARQH    OF   'THE    CARAVAN-	l8l
The Oxford Movement—the great ecclesiastical revival of the
'forties —had already spent its force or had lost itself in stagnant
Roman backwaters. But Disraeli, with his enigmatic eye ever on
some remote future, continued in a sceptical age to preach the
necessity of faith. Man, he declared, was born to adore and obey.
Without something to worship he would merely "fashion his
own divinities and find a chieftain in his passions."^1 "If no
Church comes forward with its title-deeds of truth, sustained by
the tradition of sacred ages and by the conviction of countless
generations, to guide him," he told the graduates of Oxford in the
Shddonian Theatre, "he will find altars and idols in his own
heart and his own imagination."^2 The scientists might have
exploded a few false scriptural glosses: but they had not touched
the central rock of religion. "Science may prove the insignific-
ance of this globe in the scale of creation, but it cannot prove the
insignificance of man." Battle had been joined between those
who labelled man an ape and those who believed him an angel:
the cynic Disraeli, who like Charles II. knew men to a hair,
amused his contemporaries by coming down on the side of the
angels.^3
Disraeli laughed at a society which, having mastered a few
scientific principles, mistook comfort for civilisation. Material
progress meant nothing for man—a spiritual being—if not
accompanied by moral purpose and enlightenment. Otherwise
the gifts with which science was enriching humanity would prove
not instruments of life but of destruction. The tendency of the
age was to emulate the scientists and measure all things by a
material rule, forgetting that more than half of man's nature and
existence could not be measured by any such rule, "The spiritual
nature of man is stronger than codes or constitutions. No govern-
ment can endure which does not recognise that for its foundation
and no legislation can last which does not flow from that-founda-
tion, . , , Religion invigorates the intellect and expands the
heart. He who has a sense of his relations to God is best qualified
to fulfil his duties to man."*
For England to lose her sense of spiritual values seemed to
^Coningsby. A prophecy horribly fulfilled by the totalitarian Greeds -which arose
from the ruins of the age of reason.
*Monypenny S? Buckle, //, 105.
*Pvnch depicted him dressing for a Bal Masque with wings and stars.   7oi XL 711,
^239 (^a5& ^Nov-> 1864)-
*Monypenny & Buckle, /, 606,
Monypemy S? Buckle, II, 605.
E.S.	«