growth—­then, new paths of social discharge would have been made for-our chief desires and impulses; and along these they would tend more and more to flow freely and easily, establishing new social-habits, unhampered by solicitations from our savage past.  To us already, on the whole, these solicitations are less insistent than they were to the men of earlier centuries.  We see their gradual defeat in slave emancipation, factory acts, increased religious tolerance, every movement towards social justice, every increase of the arc over which our obligations to other men obtain.  They must now disguise themselves as patriotic or economic necessities, if we are to listen to them:  as, in the Freudian dream, our hidden unworthy wishes slip through into consciousness in a symbolic form.  But when their energy has been fully sublimated, the social action will no longer be a conflict but a harmony.  Then we shall live the life of Spirit; and from this life will flow all love-inspired reform.

Yet we are, above all, to avoid the conclusion that the spiritual life, in its social expression, shall necessarily push us towards mere change; that novelty contains everything, and stability nothing, of the will of the Spirit for the race.  Surely our aim shall be this:  that religious sensitiveness shall spread, as our discovery of religion in the universe spreads, so that at last every man’s reaction to the whole of experience shall be entinctured with Reality, coloured by this dominant feeling-tone.  Spirit would then work from within outwards, and all life personal and social, mental and physical, would be moulded by its inspiring power.  And in looking here for our best hope of development, we remain safely within history; and do not strive for any desperate pulling down or false simplification of our complex existence, such as has wrecked many attempts to spiritualize society in the past.

Consider the way by which we have come.  We found in man an instinct for a spiritual Reality.  A single, concrete, objective Fact, transcending yet informing his universe, compels his adoration, and is apperceived by him in three main ways.  First, as the very Being, Heart and Meaning of that universe, the universal of all universals, next as a Presence including and exceeding the best that personality can mean to him, last as an indwelling and energizing Life.  We saw in history the persistent emergence of a human type so fully aware of this Reality as to subdue to its interests all the activities of life; ever seeking to incarnate its abiding values in the world of time.  And further, psychology suggested to us, even in its tentative new findings, its exploration of our strange mental deeps, reason for holding such surrender to the purposes of the Spirit to represent the condition of man’s fullest psychic health, and access to his real sources of power.  We found in the universal existence of religious institutions further evidence of this profound human need of spirituality.