Rex Warner (1905–1986)

Surprising as had been much that we had heard, no one, it seemed, had for that reason allowed his attention to wander; and this fact seemed to me a tribute to the personal force of the man before us who, without any obvious effort or deliberate style of oratory, still compelled us to hang upon his words and to remember them, as I knew we should do, long after his speech was finished. Even now, though we as yet did not perfectly understand the creed and faith that was being put before us, and though there was more of severity than of comfort in what was being said, nevertheless we listened to him with a kind of joy, for it seemed that his own confidence was was infused into us so that we believed that any conclusion which he reached must be accurate, necessary, and inspiring.

”I should like you to understand,” he would say, “that it is by no means sufficient to blame society for its inefficiency, its waste, its stupidity. These are merely symptoms. It is against the souls of the people themselves that we are fighting. It is each and every one of their ideas that we must detest. Think of them as earth-bound, grovelling from one piece of mud to another, and feebly imagining distinctions between the two, incapable of envisaging a distant objective, tied up forever in their miserable and unimportant histories, indeed in the whole wretched and blind history of life on earth. Religion, which for many centuries was did exercise an ennobling, if a misleading, effect, has gone. The race which we, of all people, are now required to protect is a race of money-makers and sentimentalists, undisciplined except by forces which they do not understand, insensitive to all except the lowest, the most ordinary, the most mechanical stimuli. Protect it! We shall destroy what we cannot change.”