The full life of the Spirit must be more rich and various in its expression than any life that we have yet known, and find place for every worthy and delightful activity.  It does not in the least mean a bloodless goodness; a refusal of fun and everlasting fuss about uplift.  But it does mean looking at and judging each problem in a particular light, and acting on that judgment without fear.  Were this principle established, and society poised on this centre, reforms would follow its application almost automatically; specific evils would retreat.  New knowledge of beauty would reveal the ugliness of many satisfactions which we now offer to ourselves, and new love the defective character of many of our social relations.  Certain things would therefore leave off happening, would go; because the direction of desire had changed.  I do not wish to particularize, for this only means blurring the issue by putting forward one’s own pet reforms.  But I cannot help pointing out that we shall never get spiritual values out of a society harried and tormented by economic pressure, or men and women whose whole attention is given up to the daily task of keeping alive.  This is not a political statement:  it is a plain fact that we must face.  Though the courageous lives of the poor, their patient endurance of insecurity may reveal a nobility that shames us, it still remains true that these lives do not represent the most favourable conditions of the soul.  It is not poverty that matters; but strain and the presence of anxiety and fear, the impossibility of detachment.  Therefore this oppression at least would have to be lightened, before the social conscience could be at ease.  Moreover as society advances along this way, every—­even the most subtle—­kind of cruelty and exploitation of self-advantage obtained to the detriment of other individuals, must tend to be eliminated; because here the drag-back of the past will be more and more completely conquered, its instincts fully sublimated, and no one will care to do those things any more.  Bringing new feelings and more real concepts to our contact with our environment, we shall, in accordance with the law of apperception, see this environment in a different way; and so obtain from it a fresh series of experiences.  The scale of pain and pleasure will be altered.  We shall feel a searching responsibility about the way in which our money is made, and about any disadvantages to others which our amusements or comforts may involve.

Here, perhaps, it is well to register a protest against the curious but prevalent notion that any such concentrated effort for the spiritualization of society must tend to work itself out in the direction of a maudlin humanitarianism, a soft and sentimental reading of life.  This idea merely advertises once more the fact that we still have a very mean and imperfect conception of God, and have made the mistake of setting up a water-tight bulkhead; between His revelation, in nature and His