Page:In the days of the comet.djvu/289

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and immoderate, scornful of reason and any choice of expedients, opposed to balance, skill, and knowledge. Incontinently full of grace, like thin old wine-skins over-filled, they felt they must burst if once they came into contact with hard fact and sane direction.

So the former revivals spent themselves; but the Great Revival did not spend itself, but grew to be, for the majority of Christendom at least, the permanent expression of the Change. For many it has taken the shape of an outright declaration that this was the Second Advent--it is not for me to discuss the validity of that suggestion, for nearly all it has amounted to an enduring broadening of the issues of life. . . .


8


One irrelevant memory comes back to me, irrelevant, and yet by some subtle trick of quality it summarises the Change for me. It is the memory of a woman's very beautiful face, a woman with a flushed face and tear-bright eyes who went by me without speaking, rapt in some secret purpose. I passed her when in the afternoon of the first day, struck by a sudden remorse, I went down to Menton to send a telegram to my mother telling her all was well w