Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

a62 STANDISH o' GRADY
fable stocks and stones followed that primaeval chanter
of celestial melodies, for truth and courage, love and justice,
and the perception and enactment of the divine laws are
the deepest music and the strongest. The other that
enters through the ear is but a type and an echo. The
spirit in which the Reformers worked you know. Well,
Paganism is long since dead, and mediseval superstition,
swollen up these modern times as with dropsies, is dying.
She has been to the wars, the termagant, and come home,
not with victory perched on her banners. She carries
lead in her heart ; never mind the galvanic contortions.
Now and here the foes with whom we are called upon to
grapple as for life and death are so different. Anarchy
as wide as the world, shoreless and bottomless, not here
only but everywhere. Materialism, the gross and
sensual perception of things grossly and sensually pleasant,
and of those alone ;
and like a thin bright varnish. Hypo-
crisy, political, commercial, social, and religious, con-
cealing from the vulgar eye whither all these things tend.
A world, rotting from top to bottom and from centre to
surface, with hardly a part or atom where the stream of
life still throbs, summons you to its aid, and not at all
generally, but here in your own land, where moulders
the dust of so many generations of brave men, your
ancestors, who in their time did actually do the work to
which the times called them. For unless you approach
this work in the same spirit as that which filled the saints
and heroes of old, better not approach it at all.
Once well entered on your task, aiding influences innu-
merable will be on your side, influences good and bad,