Brave New World
One hears so much about the brave new world, purified as by fire, which must emerge out of the welter of this global war that it may be well to bear in mind how much of the Old Adam is bound to survive in it and tincture its fabric. There seems no warrant for assuming that this fabric will be pure white, nor yet the flaming red of the communist. It is more likely to be a rather faded pink than a jaundiced yellow.
The parallelogram of social, national and international forces will infallibly produce a resultant, different from and better than that of elder years, but still a compromise between stresses and strains. What one may dismiss completely is the notion that things will be for the worse; for that would be a negation of the faith that through the ages one increasing purpose runs—a negation which the whole course of human history repudiates. In the light of man's steady progress it is difficult to avoid the poet's conclusion that there's a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. The hewing has been terribly rough, yet somehow mankind has tended toward the good, despite occasional throw-backs due to such as have insisted that God was a lie and civilization a sham.
