"ELEMENTS THAT ARE WANTED"
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amaterial cause which explains the past failure without limiting
the future hope. Well, we must not put inadequate answers into
Mr. Eliot's mouth, but it is indeed hard to imagine the answer that
will satisfy our historical skepticism, a skepticism which is
uoused, too, by Mr. Eliot's unexpressed sense that there wa,s once
apast whose political virtues are worthy and possible of recapture.
So much for our premissed objections. They are certainly not
diminished by the particular recommendations which Mr. Eliot
goes on to make. He projects a society which will exist iu three
aspects-what he calls the Christian State, the Christian Com–
munity and the Community of Christians. This more or less Pla–
tonic triad exists, as we cannot help observing, on a rather mini–
mal Christianity. For of the heads of his Christian State Mr. Eliot
demands no more than that they be educated to think in Christian
categories; for the rest, the criterion of their value is to be the
same to which statesmen have always submitted-not devoutness
but effectiveness. "They may," Mr. Eliot says, "frequently per–
form un-Christian acts; they must never attempt to defend their
actions on un-Christian principles." The State, we are told, is
Christian only negatively and is no more than the reflection of the
Christian society which it governs. Yet this society itself is not
permeated by a very intense Christianity. The mass of its citizens
make up the Christian Community and their behavior is to be
"largely unconscious"-for, because "their capacity for
thinking
about the objects of faith is small, their Christianity may be almost
wholly realised in behaviour: both in their customary and periodic
religous observances and in a traditional code of behaviour
towards their neighbours."
What is left, then, to give the positive Christian tone to the
Christian Society is what Mr. Eliot calls the Community of Chris–
tians, a group reminiscent of Coleridge's "clerisy" but more ex–
clusively an elite, constituted of those clerics and laymen who con–
aciously live the Christian life and who have notable intellectual
and/or spiritual gifts. It is they who, by their "identity of belief
and aspiration, their background of a common system of education
and a common culture" will collectively form "the conscious mind
and conscience of the nation." They are not to constitute a caste
and so are to be loosely joined together rather than organized, and
Mr.
Eliot compares them in their possible wide effectiveness with
