Memory Hold-The-Door by John Buchan — Read

All of us in the last War had moments when we felt the stable universe dissolving about us. We were like pilgrims who, journeying on a road to an assured and desirable goal, suddenly found themselves on the edge of a precipice with nothing beyond but a great void. The common way of describing such moods was to say that our civilisation had become insecure and was in danger of perishing.

What did we mean by civilisation? The little comforts which made life easy and pleasant and gave us leisure; an ordered ritual which enabled us to plan for the future? But our dread was based upon something deeper than the loss of such amenities. By civilisation we meant especially the rule of law which gave us freedom to possess our souls. What we feared was a welter of anarchy which would reduce life to its bare rudiments. We defined civilisation as something more than the cushioned life made possible by science. It was not a mechanical apparatus but a spirit. The Greeks of the fifth century before Christ had an existence so simple that to our modern appetites it seems almost brutish. They lived chiefly on fruits and vegetables, their clothes were plain, their amusements were few, their transport was rudimentary, but no one can deny their high civilisation. So most of us came to define civilisation as the free development of the personality. That involved physical conditions of life lifted above the primitive man's struggle for bread. It involved an ordered society and the rule of law. But, since these things are negative only, it involved also a soul to develop, a mind which could rejoice in the things of the mind, an impulse towards spiritual perfection.