In fact, not only the history of the soul, but that of all full human achievement, as studied in great creative personalities, shows us that such achievement has always two sides. (1) There is the solitary vision or revelation, and personal work in accordance with that vision.  The religious man’s direct experience of God and his effort to correspond with it; the artist’s lonely and intense apprehension of beauty, and hard translation of it; the poet’s dream and its difficult expression in speech; the philosopher’s intuition of reality, hammered into thought.  These are personal immediate experiences, and no human soul will reach its full stature unless it can have the measure of freedom and withdrawal which they demand.  But (2) there are the social and historical contacts which are made by all these creative types with the past and with the present; all the big rich thick stream of human history and effort, giving them, however little they may recognize it, the very initial concepts with which they go to their special contact with reality, and which colour it; supporting them and demanding from them again their contribution to the racial treasury, and to the present too.  Thus the artist, as, well as his solitary hours of contemplation and effort, ought to have his times alike of humble study of the past and of intercourse with other living artists; and great and enduring art forms more often arise within a school, than in complete independence of tradition.  It seems, then, that the advocates of corporate and personal religion are both, in a measure, right:  and that once again a middle path, avoiding both extremes of simplification, keeps nearest to the facts of life.  We have no reason for supposing that these principles, which history shows us, have ceased to be operative:  or that we can secure the best kind of spiritual progress for the race by breaking with the past and the institutions in which it is conserved.  Institutions are in some sort needful if life’s balance between stability and novelty, and our links with history and our fellow-men, are to be preserved; and if we are to achieve such a fullness both of individual and of corporate life on highest levels as history and psychology recommend to us.

The question of this institutional side of religion and what we should demand from it falls into two parts, which will best be treated separately.  First, that which concerns the character and usefulness of the group-organization or society:  the Church.  Secondly, that which relates to its peculiar practices:  the Cult.  We must enquire under each head what are their necessary characters, their essential gifts to the soul, and what their dangers and limitations.

First, then, the Church.  What does a Church really do for the God-desiring individual; the soul that wants to live a full, complete and real life, which has “felt in its solitude” the presence and compulsion of Eternal Reality under one or other of the forms of religious experience?