This sense he had of thinking openly in the sight of God, enabled him to see the adventure of Lady Sunderbund without illusion and without shame.  He saw himself at once honest and disingenuous, divided between two aims.  He had no doubt now of the path he had to pursue.  A stronger man of permanently clear aims might possibly turn Lady Sunderbund into a useful opportunity, oblige her to provide the rostrum he needed; but for himself, he knew he had neither the needed strength nor clearness; she would smother him in decoration, overcome him by her picturesque persistence.  It might be ridiculous to run away from her, but it was necessary.  And he was equally clear now that for him there must be no idea of any pulpit, of any sustained mission.  He was a man of intellectual moods; only at times, he realized, had he the inspiration of truth; upon such uncertain snatches and glimpses he must live; to make his life a ministry would be to face phases when he would simply be “carrying on,” with his mind blank and his faith asleep.

His thought spread out from this perennial decision to more general things again.  Had God any need of organized priests at all?  Wasn’t that just what had been the matter with religion for the last three thousand years?

His vision and his sense of access to God had given a new courage to his mind; in these moods of enlightenment he could see the world as a comprehensible ball, he could see history as an understandable drama.  He had always been on the verge of realizing before, he realized now, the two entirely different and antagonistic strands that interweave in the twisted rope of contemporary religion; the old strand of the priest, the fetishistic element of the blood sacrifice and the obscene rite, the element of ritual and tradition, of the cult, the caste, the consecrated tribe; and interwoven with this so closely as to be scarcely separable in any existing religion was the new strand, the religion of the prophets, the unidolatrous universal worship of the one true God.  Priest religion is the antithesis to prophet religion.  He saw that the founders of all the great existing religions of the world had been like himself—­only that he was a weak and commonplace man with no creative force, and they had been great men of enormous initiative—­men reaching out, and never with a complete definition, from the old kind of religion to the new.  The Hebrew prophets, Jesus, whom the priests killed when Pilate would have spared him, Mohammed, Buddha, had this much in common that they had sought to lead men from temple worship, idol worship, from rites and ceremonies and the rule of priests, from anniversaryism and sacramentalism, into a direct and simple relation to the simplicity of God.  Religious progress had always been liberation and simplification.  But none of these efforts had got altogether clear.  The organizing temper in men, the disposition to dogmatic theorizing, the distrust of the discretion of the