A literary habit has accustomed us to speak of the Middle Ages as the Ages of Faith ; and it is no doubt our fond hope that future generations will speak of us by contrast as the Age of Reason. But unless future generations are hypnotized by our pretensions, we are much more likely to be known as the Age of Imagination. We are enormously busied over imagination. We have even reached the position in which we are scientifically educating imagination, developing it and with cold deliberation harnessing it to practical purposes. Yes, it is really quite unfair for an age that dabbles in Spiritism, Christian Science, Theosophy, and Pelmanism to pretend to be reasonable. Possibly the ages that lay between medieval times and our own have some right to that name ; but, since, fortunately, both Queen Anne and Queen Victoria are dead, we have no business to be claiming it. Reason is probably all very well in its way, but not in everybody else’s way.

Now imagination has immense powers. It has founded the Daily Mail, canonized Mrs. Eddy, and deceived “eminent scientists” like Oliver Lodge and Arthur Conan Doyle, whom it is not unkind or frivolous to call dazed knights. Of course it hasn’t deceived them in matters where they know more than we do, in science and literature ; but only in matters where we are at least on their level, at the séance. People ask breathlessly whether one’s faith isn’t upset by this earnest belief in spooks publicly professed by our dazed knights.

At the close of a paper read in Oxford by a very successful psycho-therapeutist, experienced largely in shell-shock cases, a critic exclaimed : “So what we must all do is to go to Harley Street and buy a new soul!” The doctor laughed, but half agreed. Afterwards, a Church of England dignitary said to me : “We shall all have to set up confessionals, else everyone will be going to these doctors !” The doctor had, in fact, alluded with envy to the Catholic Confessional, as responsible for happiness else unattainable, and as saving thousands from fear of, or indeed actual, madness. Psycho-analysis is indeed the fashion; almost a fad. Freudian plays are written ; Punch makes limericks on Jung. Hence it will be useful to disengage a few principles. I deliberately eliminate all I can, without, I hope, sacrificing anything essential. Especially I cannot print, without adaptation, the anecdotes I should wish to ; save in a technical paper, I could not well relate what would be most illustrative, at all.

Throughout the month of July, and until August 8th, the Bishops in communion with the Sees of Canterbury and York will sit in conference at Lambeth. The War which has given the English-speaking peoples, for good or evil, a paramount influence in international politics will therefore add a more than transient spiritual weight to a conference of Bishops discussing world problems in the English tongue.

Even without the gravity which comes to it from the world’s greatest war this Lambeth Conference has a significance almost unique. It is no mere local council. Its Bishops are from all parts of the world. His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury in asking Dr. F. B. Meyer, the President of the Free Church Council, for the prayers and sympathy of the Free Churches, could say :

“The Lambeth Conference will, so far as we can at present tell, include 107 Bishops from the Dioceses in the Dominions, and the Mission Field, 72 Bishops from the United States of America and about 100 Bishops whose work lies in the British Isles.”

The dividends drawn yearly or half-yearly provide incomes for a very considerable number of people, and many by this provision are relieved from the necessity of earning a livelihood. Sometimes these dividends provide incomes for people quite incapable of earning a living for themselves. In other cases they supplement the incomes of hard-working professional men and women.

The incomes from dividends, when sufficiently large, are an assurance to their possessors that the material needs of this life shall be satisfied: that is, that money will be duly forthcoming to pay for necessary food, clothes, and house-room. It may even happen that the income from dividends alone will provide not only the bare necessities of life, but allow us to gratify the desire for pleasant comforts and joyful luxuries, without working.

Small wonder is it then that so great an attention is paid to this matter of dividends.