“Yes,” said Amroth, “but that is because religion has fallen so much into the hands of the wrong people, and is grievously misrepresented.  It has too often come to be identified, as you say, with human law, as a power which leaves one severely alone, if one behaves oneself, and which punishes harshly and mechanically if one outsteps the limit.  It comes into the world as a great joyful motive; and then it becomes identified with respectability, and it is sad to think that it is simply from the fact that it has won the confidence of the world that it gains its awful power of silencing and oppressing.  It becomes hostile to frankness and independence, and puts a premium on caution and submissiveness; but that is the misuse of it and the degradation of it; and religion is still the most pure and beautiful thing in the world for all that; the doctrine itself is fine and true in a way, if one can view it without impatience; it upholds the right things; it all makes for peace and order, and even for humility and just kindliness; it insists, or tries to insist, on the fact that property and position and material things do not matter, and that quality and method do matter.  Of course it is terribly distorted, and gets into the hands of the wrong people—­the people who want to keep things as they are.  Now the Gospel, as it first came, was a perfectly beautiful thing—­the idea that one must act by tender impulse, that one must always forgive, and forget, and love; that one must take a natural joy in the simplest things, find every one and everything interesting and delightful ... the perfectly natural, just, good-humoured, uncalculating life—­that was the idea of it; and that one was not to be superior to the hard facts of the world, not to try to put sorrow or pain out of sight, but to live eagerly and hopefully in them and through them; not to try to school oneself into hardness or indifference, but to love lovable things, and not to condemn or despise the unlovable.  That was indeed a message out of the very heart of God.  But of course all the acrid divisions and subdivisions of it come, not from itself, but from the material part of the world, that determines to traffic with the beautiful secret, and make it serve its turn.  But there are plenty of true souls within it all, true teachers, faithful learners—­and the world cannot do without it yet, though it is strangely fettered and bound.  Indeed, men can never do without it, because the spiritual force is there; it is full of poetry and mystery, that ageless brotherhood of saints and true-hearted disciples; but one has to learn that many that claim its powers have them not, while many who are outside all organisations have the secret.”