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Malvern was revolutionary only in the sense that it recognized the existence of a social revolution. The problem was as plain as hunger. The world over, the masses must be provided with food, clothing, work. To provide these necessities was a duty no Christian might shirk. Not to provide them was an incitement to civil war. For, unlike Bolshevism or Fascism, Malvern's revolution did not glorify the impersonal power politics of the war of classes or the iron economic laws against whose predestined operation there can be only abject, unconditional surrender. Its proper subject was not Political Man or Economic Man, but man's relation to man as a consequence of man's relation to God. Malvern's New Order was as revolutionary as the New Testament. "The great function of the Church," says York's Archbishop, "is to be the conscience of the State."
If, in the troubled days of peace to come, the Church fails to be this conscience, there will be at first only deepening doldrums in what Lytton Strachey once called "the vast calm waters of Christian thought."
If it succeeds, Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, will pay it the reverence of contumely and hate.