into contact with students, and with the younger and more vigorous clergy, are aware how far this revolt has proceeded:  how completely, in the minds of those young people who are interested in religion, the Social Gospel now overpowers all other aspects of the spiritual life.  Again and again we are assured by the most earnest among them that in their view religion is a social activity, and service is its proper expression:  that all valid knowledge of God is social, and He is chiefly known in mankind:  that the use of prayer is mainly social, in that it improves us for service, otherwise it must be condemned as a merely selfish activity:  finally, that the true meaning and value of suffering are social too.  A visitor to a recent Swanwick Conference of the Student Christian Movement has publicly expressed his regret that some students still seemed to be concerned with the problems of their own spiritual life; and were not prepared to let that look after itself, whilst they started straight off to work for the social realization of the Kingdom of God.  When a great truth becomes exaggerated to this extent, and is held to the exclusion of its compensating opposite, it is in a fair way to becoming a lie.  And we have here, I think, a real confusion of ideas which will, if allowed to continue, react unfavourably upon the religion of the future; because it gives away the most sacred conviction of the idealist, the belief in the absolute character of spiritual values, and in the effort to win them as the great activity of man.  Social service, since it is one form of such an effort, a bringing in of more order, beauty, joy, is a fundamental duty—­the fundamental duty—­of the active life.  Man does not truly love the Perfect until he is driven thus to seek its incarnation in the world of time.  No one doubts this.  All spiritual teachers have said it, in one way or another, for centuries.  The mere fact that they feel impelled to teach at all, instead of saying “My secret to myself”—­which is so much easier and pleasanter to the natural contemplative—­is a guarantee of the claim to service which they feel that love lays upon them.  But this does not make such service of man, however devoted, either the same thing as the search for, response to, intercourse with God; or, a sufficient substitute for these specifically spiritual acts.

Plainly, we are called upon to strive with all our power to bring in the Kingdom; that is, to incarnate in the time world the highest spiritual values which we have known.  But our ability to do this is strictly dependent on those values being known, at least by some of us, at first-hand; and for this first-hand perception, as we have seen, the soul must have a measure of solitude and silence.  Therefore, if the swing-over to a purely social interpretation of religion be allowed to continue unchecked, the result can only be an impoverishment of our spiritual life; quite as far-reaching and as regrettable as that which follows from an unbridled individualism.  Without the inner life of prayer and-meditation, lived for its own sake and for no utilitarian motive, neither our judgments upon the social order nor our active social service will be perfectly performed; because they will not be the channel of Creative Spirit expressing itself through us in the world of to-day.