“If you ask me what that something is, I don’t know.  I believe it to be a sort of life-force, which can and does mingle itself with our own life; and I believe that we are all affected by it, just as every drop of water on the earth is affected by the moon’s attraction—­though we can measure that effect in an ocean by observing the tides, when we can’t measure it in a basin of water.  We are not all equally conscious of it, and I don’t know why that is.  Sometimes I am aware of it myself, and sometimes not.  But I have had enough experience of it to feel that something is making signals to me, affecting me, attracting me.  And the reason why I am a Christian is because in Christianity and in the teaching of Christ I feel the influence of it in a way that I feel it nowhere else in the same degree.  I feel that Christ was closer to what I recognise as God; knew God better than anyone that ever lived, and in a different kind of way—­from inside, so to speak.  But it’s a life that I find in the Gospel, and not a creed:  and I believe that this is religion, to be somehow in touch with a higher life and a higher sort of beauty.

“But I personally don’t want this explained and defined and codified.  That seems to me only to hem it in and limit it.  The moment I find it reduced to dogma and rule, to definite channels of grace, to particular powers entrusted to particular persons, then I begin to be stifled and, what is worse, bored.  I don’t feel it to be a logical affair at all—­I feel it to be a living force, the qualities of which are virtue, beauty, peace, enthusiasm, happiness; all the things which glow and sparkle in life, and make me long to be different—­to be stronger, wiser, more patient, more interested, more serene.  I want to share my secret with others, not to keep it to myself.  But when I argue with my friend, I don’t feel it is my secret but his, and that in his mind the force itself is missing, while a lot of rules and logical propositions and arrangements have taken its place.  It is just as though I were in love with a girl, and were taken to task by someone, and informed of a score of conventions which I must observe if I wish to be considered really in love.  I know what love means to me, and I know, how I want to make love; and the same sort of thing is happening to lovers all the world over, though they don’t all make love in the same way.  You can’t codify the rules of love!”

Presently he went on:  “It seems to me like this—­like seeing the reflection of the moon.  You may see it in the marble basin of a fountain, clear and distinct.  You may see it blurred into ripples on a wind-stirred sea.  You may see it moulded into liquid curves on a swift stream.  The changing shapes of it matter little—­you are sure that it is the same thing which is being reflected, however differently it appears.  I believe that human nature has a power of reflecting God, and the different denominations seem to me to reflect