The Ideal State 233 



the Apocalypse, or when Malachi finished his prophecy." 

 ..." God is not dumb that He should speak no 

 more," and we have to seek for the gradual unfolding 

 of His message to His creatures in the highest and 

 ripest thoughts of our time. Reason may be a faulty 

 instrument, but it is the machine through which the 

 Divine thought enters the mind of man. Hence the 

 man who can interpret the best thought of his day in 

 such a manner as to render it accessible to the general 

 intelligence of his age is the true prophet of his time. 

 Like the greatest prophet of our time — Thomas Carlyle 

 — he recognised that the intellectual is essentially the 

 moral, and that the best thought of any time is of 

 necessity the Divine thought in so far as it has entered 

 the mind of the individual man, acknowledged to have 

 given forth the best thought of the epoch in which he 

 lives. " We believe in God, in England, and in 

 Humanity." The English-speaking race is one of the 

 chief of God's agents for executing coming improve- 

 ments in the lot of mankind. He is no Jingo, although 

 to him we owe the " two-keels-to-one standard " of 

 naval supremacy ; he believes in England on account 

 of her desire to alleviate human misery, and in the 

 advantage of her guiding hand in all the affairs of the 

 world, and more particularly in dealing with subject 

 races, and acknowledging this as the result of her more 

 advanced spiritual evolution. 



He quotes Carlyle to the effect that " the wise are 

 few," and gives an extract from this greatest of modern 

 prophets, which it will not be inappropriate to repro- 

 duce now. Stead calls it Carlyle's last political will and 

 testament to the English people. " There is still, we 

 hope, the unclassed aristocracy by nature, not in- 

 considerable in numbers, and supreme in faculty, in 

 wisdom, in human talent, nobleness and courage, who 

 derive their patent of nobility direct from Almighty 



