time: the refreshing river 



*This is the law of the house . . . the whole limit thereof 

 round about shall be most holy. Behold, this is the law of the 

 house.' 



"The sacred is far from being the 'wholly other'; it is the quality 

 of the secular raised to its highest power and consecrated to the 

 noblest purposes. As each part of life is integrated into the social 

 organism, it finds itself, and takes on the special quality that belongs 

 to a part of a new whole. On the other hand, transcendentalism 

 withers away. It is no longer necessary to project into another world 

 the order, the justice, and the beauty, which we cannot achieve in 

 this. The life process of society loses its veil of mystery when it 

 becomes a process carried on by a free association of producers, 

 under their conscious and purposive control." 



I make no apology for quoting this splendid passage at length, 

 since it perfectly gives the judgment for which we were looking. It 

 embodies the profoundly christian doctrine that the world is redeem- 

 able. There is nothing holy but flesh and blood. The essence of our 

 purpose should be, not so much, as M. Polanyi would have it, to keep 

 science "holy," but to make the whole of human society holy. This 

 is only another way of pointing to the high levels of social organisation 

 to which humanity has yet to climb. At those high levels scientific 

 truth will be well able to look after itself, since on the foundation of 

 scientific truth alone can those high levels be built. The scientist, it 

 was said, is not only a scientist, he is a citizen as well. He must be 

 a citizen, not only of that temporal nation to which he happens to 

 belong to-day, but also a citizen of no mean city, the Civitas Dei, 

 or, if you prefer to call it so, the World Co-operative Commonwealth. 



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