Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TEN YEARS AFTER THE Great Thousand Years" was written in the winter of 1907-8, and in December 1910 it was published in " Pax," the magazine of the Benedictine monks of Caldey in South Wales. In giving it now for printing in more permanent form, I am impelled to provide a commentary drawn up in the light of war, and to call it " Ten Years After." As for the article itself, it is reprinted exactly in its original form, with only a few verbal corrections. When it appeared there was, in the circumstances of time, no shadow of justification either for its assumptions or the deductions that followed therefrom, a fact that was not concealed from the author by numerous and plausible critics. The events of the last three-and- a-half years have in some cases revised original criticism, but thus far the primary inference, the necessity for a new outpouring of the monastic impulse and a return to Mediaeval models for the basis of a new life, is still rejected with general unanimity. When "The Great Thousand Years" was written, neither I nor anyone else looked forward to the possibility of a world-war as a possible joint crowning and destruction of that " modern civilization " in which we had no confidence and for which we expressed no admiration. Even Fr. Figgis in his " Civilization at the Cross Roads," and Mr. Chesterton in his "What's Wrong with the World " (both published in this same year of 1910), indicate no vision of possible war as the last act of the five-century drama. That the curtain had risen on a denouement that was bound to be tragical in its universal destruction, after the fashion both of Classical and Elizabethan drama, was clear, but the motive and the progress of events were buried in profound mystery. Four years later we were justified in our anticipations, eve... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.