51�Թ�

The whole treatise, of which this extract is a fragment in a rudimentary and imperfect stage, is, of course, an impassioned appeal for the restoration of the quickening, exuberant imagination, not merely in art, but in all the inmost places of life.

Universal love is none the less the absolute moral ideal because it would be absurd to say that beasts of prey do wrong in devouring other creatures, or because war is sometimes necessary as a means to the end of love at our present imperfect stage of social and intellectual development.

Do you not feel that true religion, even in its most imperfect stage, is not merely an escape from hell after death but the only real state for a man—the only position to live in in this world—the only frame of mind which will give anything like happiness here. 

War belongs, no doubt, to an imperfect stage of society; it has a side of pure brutality.

The northern peoples, who would in time form the nations of Europe, were essentially violent and warlike, and would have recognised no pacific counsels in that imperfect stage of their religious development.