Hence the blunder and the tragedy of those who seek to know life by experience, when they mean experience gained by participation in life’s evil as well as in its good.  They succeed in soiling life rather than in understanding it; for participation in evil effectually prevents our understandings of good.  It is on the face of things that the farther a man goes into sin, the less is righteousness intelligible to him.  Our Lord’s rule “He that doeth the will shall know of the doctrine” is not an arbitrary maxim, but embodies the deepest psychological truth.  There is but one path to full understanding, and that is the path of sympathy.  And therefore are we sure of our Lady’s understanding and come to her unhesitatingly for the help of her intercession.  She understands our case because she sees it revealed in the mind of her Son.

It cannot be questioned that much of the weakness of religion to-day is due to the fact that Christian ideals make but faint appeal.  By many they are frankly repudiated as impossible of attainment in a world such as this, and as weakening to human character so far as they are attained.  Christians, of course, are unable to take this point of view, and, therefore, they treat the ideals with respect, but continue to govern their lives by motives which are not harmonious with them.  It is tacitly assumed on all sides that a consistent pursuit of Christians ideals will assure failure in social or business life.  This, of course, is tantamount to a confession that social and business life are unchristian, and raises the same sort of grave questions as to the duty of a Christian as were raised in the early days of the Church under the heathen empire.  With that, however, we may not concern ourselves now.  We are merely concerned to note and to emphasise the fact that, whatever may be true of society or business, our religion is lamentably ineffective because of its failure to emphasise the ideals of sanctity and to present those ideals as the ideals of all Christian life, not as the ideals of a select few.  While religious teachers asquiesce in the present set of compromises as an adequate expression of Christian character, we may expect a decline in the Church as a spiritual force, whatever may be true of it as a social force.

If Christian ideals are to resume their appeal to the membership of the Church as a whole it is requisite that they be studied by the clergy and intelligently presented.  But little is to be hoped in this direction so long as our theological training ignores religion and concentrates its attention on something that it takes for scholarship.  The raw material that is sent by our parishes to the seminaries to be educated for Holy Orders is commonly turned out of the seminary with less religion that it entered.  The outlook for the presentation of Christian ideals is not hopeful.  We seem destined to drift on indefinitely in our habitual compromises.