The evils which surround a wealthy church are great and easily to be understood, nor need we lay stress on them.  There is, indeed, cause for wonder in the spectacle of the followers of him “who had not where to lay his head” become, in the Middle Ages, the greatest owners of land in Europe; and we can see how temptations and abuses without number might and did often arise from this very fact.  Ambition, the desire of wealth, the mere love of ease, led many to profess a religious life who had never passed through that transformation of will and understanding which is the essence of religion.  The very purpose of religion was forgotten, or allowed to be hidden away under things excellent in themselves, yet not essential; and difference of view about these unessential things led to fierce and bitter controversy, and later to open strife and war.

We take religion, in its human aspect, to mean the growth of a new and wider consciousness above the keen, self-assertive consciousness of the individual; a superseding of the personal by the humane; a change from egotism to a more universal understanding; so that each shall act, not in order to gain an advantage over others, but rather to attain the greatest good for himself and others equally; that one shall not dominate another for his own profit, but shall rather seek to draw forth in that other whatever is best and truest, so that both may find their finest growth.  Carried far enough, this principle, which makes one’s neighbor a second self, will bring to light in us the common soul, the common life that has tacitly worked in all human intercourse from the beginning.  Individual consciousness is in no way effaced; something new, wider and more humane, something universal, is added to it from above; something consciously common to all souls.  And through the inspiration of that larger soul, the individual life for the first time comes to its true power—­a power which is held by all pure souls in common.

We can see that something like this was the original inspiration of the religious orders.  Their very name of Friars or Brothers speaks of the ideal of a common life above egotism.  They sought a new birth through the death of selfishness, through self-sacrifice and renunciation.  All their life in common was a symbol of the single soul inspiring them, the very form of their churches bearing testimony to their devotion.  More than that, the beauty and inspiration which still radiate from the old abbey buildings show how often and in how large a degree that ideal was actually attained.

Nevertheless we can very well see how the possession of large wealth and costly offerings might be a hindrance to that spirit, fanning back to life the smouldering fires of desire.  We can see even more clearly that the division between the secular and the religious life would tend to raise a moral barrier, hardening that very sense of separation which the humane and universal consciousness seeks to kill.  Finally,