of duty and devotion to his country and the Empire.

The final aim of all education is to make ideals realities, the moving force to thought and action. After all, man is religious in the degree in which ultimate ideals are real to him.

EPILOGUE

INDIVIDUALS Come and go; they die and their work-whether for good or evil-lives after them. Families come and go; they rise in honour and prosperity or decline in obscurity or dishonour. Village and metropolitan communities develop their individual character in life, their political and social spirit, and rise or sink as they may be administered with integrity or corruption, or often as they are influenced by the prominence of one or more outstanding or hard-working individuals. Counties and whole districts modify their character by the nature of the predominant occupation of their inhabitants, and the spirit infused into them by their administrators or leading citizens. Nations have constantly changed in their history, swinging from liberalism to reaction, varying their policies and traditions, even their religion, often in short spans of time. Races have ever, in the history and pre-history of man, been interspersed confusedly among the various nations, mixed within them out of all recognition of their original character. Religions have been founded, have been reformed or died away, unrecognisable-even the most conservative and stereotyped of them-if considered in the original form given to them by their founders or earliest adherents.

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Only ideas last, good or evil ones; and these establish traditions, good or evil. But the most consoling thought which the history of this world gives, is that the true ideas survive when the false ideas pass away. Of all things spiritual ideals last the longest because they are purest in spirit and truest, untarnished by the accidents of material existence. The truest are those that are at once most good and most beautiful. But even these ideals must be revised in their form and vitality, by the intellect of man permeating and directing his imagination. They must thus change and grow higher and lower as is the power of the intellect and the purity, the loftiness of the imagination of man. Within all changes, however, there remains the principle of the perfect form as the lasting attribute of all ideals. It is the spiritual harmony which transfuses man's world into the spirit of infinity-the spirit of God.

Thus what is considered by superficial thinkers the least absolute, the most relative, changing and personal of man's spiritual powers, his longing for beauty and harmony, is the most lasting and all-embracing and absolute of spiritual elements. It underlies all religion, all theology, as it is the foundation for all belief in the Perfect and Supernatural.

It means the spiritual rule of Harmonism.

THE END

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