are the outcome of the
desire for a precise certainty in the minds of business-like people--the
people who say that they wish to know exactly where they are. Now I don't
go so far as to say, or even to think, that religion will always be as
mysterious a thing as it is now. I fully expect that we shall know much
more about it some day. But we don't at present know very much about the
central things of all--the nature of God, the relation of good and evil,
life after death, human psychology. We have not reached the point of being
able definitely to identify the moral force of the world with the forces
which do not appear to be moral, but are undoubtedly, active--with
realities, that is, as we come into contact with them. There are no
scientific certainties on these points--we simply have not reached that
stage. My friend's view is that out of a certain number of denominations,
one is undoubtedly right. My view is that all are necessarily incomplete.
But the moment I say this, he says that my religion is so vague as not to
be a religion at all.

"Now my own position is this, that I think religion, by which I mean our
relation to the Power behind the world, is the most important fact in the
world, as well as the most absorbingly interesting. Whatever form of
religion I study, I seem to see the same thing going on. The saints,
however much they differ in dogma, seem to me to have a strong family
likeness. Mysticism is a very definite thing indeed, and I have never any
doubt that all mystics have the same or a very similar experience, namely,
the perception of some perfectly definite force--as real a force as
electricity, for instance--with which they are in touch. Something, which
is quite clearly there, is affecting them in a particular way.

"If you ask me what that something is, I don't know. I believe it to be a
sort of life-force, which can and does mingle itself with our own life; and
I believe that we are all affected by it, just as every drop of water on
the earth is affected by the moon's attraction--though we can measure that
effect in an ocean by observing the tides, when we can't measure it in a
basin of water. We are not all equally conscious of it, and I don't know
why that is. Sometimes I am aware of it myself, and sometimes not. But I
have had enough experience of it to feel that something is making signals
to me, affecting me, attracting me. And the reason why I am a Christian is
because in Christianity and