§ 34

It has been read from my dream, so far, that, while material welfare of the people is one object, and a prominent one, the Commune, as the guiding spirit of the new life, is fully conscious of the wise saying of Jesus Christ, “Man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the Spirit of God.” We had eyes and saw not, ears and heard not; noble intuitions we repulsed, aspirations we neglected, and we were taught elaborate creeds out of touch with realities. Blind, too often, to the beauties of nature and its sisters “The Arts,” we had grown deaf to the songs of birds, to music of the winds moaning, or joyfully singing, among forest trees. We had ceased to sing as we worked. Indeed, the natural joys granted us to receive have ceased to please, ceased to be a part of life. To the arts, which seek to crystallise visions inspired by God’s gift of exquisite nature, we had become blind and deaf. They had ceased to move us, ceased to inspire us, ceased to raise us from the mire of money grabbing. So eager we were for wealth that we pursued it blindly as the only object of our energies. We had lost touch with half, and the better half, of life, and the soul of England was becoming hardened, insensitive, and ANIMAL. Good, in some ways the hard Puritan was dead to the beauty of God’s work. He thought he was spiritual. He did not know that there is soul in all matter. In this respect he was more unchristian than a pagan, who, at least, saw the gods and recognised them in the movement of the stars, in the dawn, in the shining midday, and the splendour of sunset time. The old pagan found God in all nature, as he found him in great art. He saw into the very heart of the marble from which Phidias carved Olympian Zeus. He saw the spirit of Pallas Athene under the ivory and golden statue in the Parthenon.

The Puritan cut himself off from All Beauty. Instead of seeing good in God’s greatest works and in man’s most inspired creations, he saw evil. His mind was distorted, a cripple; and little did he dream that his spiritual nature was really a material one. To his narrow and crooked creed much of the apathy of the modern mind is to be traced. “As it was wicked to see beauty, to worship it as God made it, let us make ourselves rich.” What a Creed?

With the neglect of agriculture came the Tyranny of industrialism. With an apathy towards Art, towards its great mission to display the beauty of the soul in the array of material presentation, the soul of England was growing degenerate. It was becoming German, and what lower place than that can be found for a country so great as England has been! We have to remake England, and we mean to do it. We mean to learn from the Pagans, to reinstate much of their teaching. We mean to cultivate the teaching of Jesus Christ, who drew a lesson from the “lilies of the field,” the death of a sparrow, His generosity to the mistake of a troubled woman. Who, from the Cross blessed a thief, who, dying in agony, forgave his enemies, who taught the gospel of thou more than I, who would give to Cæsar as well as to God, and, above all, whose noble life was pressed on by human as well as Divine love. Jesus Christ was a poet and artist as well as a prophet and reformer. The life of the soul was everything to Him. Wealth for wealth’s sake is a phantom, a chimera. We mean to go back to find a fairer road to happiness than the modern world would give us. While we accept facilities for greater comfort, we mean to use them wisely, not to overwhelm us, but to help us. We wish to help the people to see beauty, and in their lives to live up to the vision. To live, not as a preparation for another and happier life, to reward in a future state, but to live and see with clear eyes the one which is now ours to make or mar it. Every man and woman who labours is praising God, so long as the labour is not from greed, but from a fixed principle to enrich the soul of the people by first enriching our own.