Page 264 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

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A Twentieth-Century Outlook. 245

by methods ideally perfect. Time and staying
power must be secured for ourselves by that
rude and imperfect, but not ignoble, arbiter,
force, — force potential and force organized,
which so far has won, and still secures, the
greatest triumphs of good in the checkered his-
tory of mankind. Our material advantages,
once noted, will be recognized readily and ap-
propriated with avidity; while the spiritual
ideas which dominate our thoughts, and are
weighty in their influence over action, even with
those among us who do not accept historic
Christianity or the ordinary creeds of Christen-
dom, will be rejected for long. The eternal
law, first that which is natural, afterwards that
which is spiritual, will obtain here, as in the
individual, and in the long history of our own
civilization. Between the two there is an in-
terval, in which force must be ready to redress
any threatened disturbance of an equal balance
between those who stand on divergent planes of
thought, without common standards.
And yet more is this true if, as is commonly
said, faith is failing among ourselves, if the prog-
ress of our own civilization is towards the loss
of those spiritual convictions upon which it was