something orderly and static.  But, like the jet of water in the fountain, his life is forever collapsing and collapsing, falling in upon itself, its apparent permanence nothing but a rapid and glittering succession of impermanences.  The dread of growing old is chiefly that, as years come on, life changes more and faster, becomes a continual process of readjustment.  Therefore we want something fixed; like the sailor with his compass, we must have some needle, even if a tremulous one, always pointing toward a changeless star.  Yet this is but one half of the picture.  Does man desire continuity?—­quite as much does he wish for variety, cessation of old ways, change and fresh beginnings.  The most terrible figure which the subtle imagination of the Middle Ages conjured up was that of the Wandering Jew, the man who could not die!  Here, then, we arrive at knowledge, the genuine values of experience, by this same balancing of opposites.  Continuity alone kills; perpetual change strips life of significance; man must have both.

Now, it is in the religious field that this interests us most.  We have seen that what we have been doing there of late has been to ignore the fact that reality is found only through this balancing of the law of difference and identity, contrast and likeness.  We have been absorbed in one half of reality, identifying man with nature, prating of his self-sufficiency, seeing divinity almost exclusively as immanent in the phenomenal world.  Thus we have not merely been dealing with only one half of the truth, but that, to use a solecism, the lesser half.

For doubtless men do desire in religion a recognition of the real values of their physical nature.  And they want rules of conduct, a guide for practical affairs, a scale of values for this world.  This satisfies the craving for temporal adjustment, the sense of the goodness and worth of what our instinct transmits to us.  But it does nothing to meet that profound dissatisfaction with this world and that sense of the encumbrances of the flesh which is also a part of reality and, to the religious man, perhaps the greater part.  He wants to turn away from all these present things and be kept secretly in a pavilion from the strife of tongues.  Here he has no continuing city.  Always while we dwell here we have a dim and restless sense that we are in an unreal country and we know, in our still moments, that we shall only come to ourselves when we return to the house of our Father.  Hence men have never been satisfied with religious leaders who chiefly interpreted this world to them.

And indeed, since July, 1914, and down to and including this very hour, this idealizing of time, which we had almost accepted as our office, has had a ghastly exposure.  Because there has come upon us all one of these irrevocable and irremediable disasters, for which time has no word of hope, to which Nature is totally indifferent, for which the God of the outgoings and incomings of the morning is too small.  For