The National Being

In the year nineteen hundred and fourteen Anno Domini, amid a world conflict, the birth of the infant State of Ireland was announced. Almost unnoticed this birth, which in other times had been cried over the earth with rejoicings or anger. Mars, the red planet of war, was in the ascendant when it was born. Like other births famous in history, the child had to be hidden away for a time, and could not with pride be shown to the people as royal children were wont to be shown. Its enemies were unforgiving, and its friends were distracted with mighty happenings in the world. Hardly did they know whether it would not be deformed if it survived: whether this was the Promised, or another child yet to be conceived in the womb of the Mother of Parliaments. Battles were threatened between two hosts, secular champions of two spiritual traditions, to decide its fate. That such a conflict threatened showed indeed that there was something of iron fibre in the infant, without which in their makeup individuals or nations do nothing worthy of remembrance. Hercules wrestled with twin serpents in his cradle, and there were twin serpents of sectarianism ready to strangle this infant State of ours if its guardians were not watchful, or if the infant was not itself strong enough to destroy them.

Civilizations are externalizations of the soul and character of races. They are majestic or mean according to the treasure of beauty, imagination, will, and thought laid up in the soul of the people. That great mid-European State, which while I write is at bay surrounded by enemies, did not arrive at that pitch of power which made it dominant in Europe simply by militarism. That military power depended on and was fed by a vigorous intellectual life, and the most generally diffused education and science existing perhaps in the world. The national being had been enriched by a long succession of mighty thinkers. A great subjective life and centuries of dream preceded a great objective manifestation of power and wealth. The stir in the German Empire which has agitated Europe was, at its root, the necessity laid on a powerful soul to surround itself with equal external circumstance. That necessity is laid on all nations, on all individuals, to make their external life correspond in some measure to their internal dream. A lover of beauty will never contentedly live in a house where all things are devoid of taste. An intellectual man will loathe a disordered society.

We may say with certainty that the external circumstances of people are a measure of their inner life.

We may now consider the proletarian in our cities. The worker in our modern world is the subject of innumerable unapplied doctrines. The lordliest things are predicated of him, which do not affect in the least the relationship with him of those who employ his labor. The ancient wisdom, as it is recounted to him on God’s day, assures him of his immortality: that the divine signature is over all his being, that in some way he is co-related with the Eternal, that he is fashioned in a likeness to It. He is a symbol of God Himself. He is the child of Deity. His life is Its very breath. The Habitations of Eternity await his coming, and the divine event to which he moves is the dwelling within him of the Divine Mind, so that Deity may become his very self. So proud a tale is told of him, and when he wakens on the morrow after the day of God he finds that none will pay him reverence. He, the destined comrade of Seraphim and Cherubim, is herded with other Children of the King in fetid slum and murky alleys, where the devil hath his many mansions, where light and air, the great purifiers, are already dimmed and corrupted before they do him service. He is insecure in the labor by which he lives.