t 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."

"Yes," I said, "all that is true and good; it is the exclusive claim and
not the inclusive which one regrets. It is the voice which says, 'Accept
my exact faith, or you have no part in the inheritance,' which is wrong.
The real voice of religion is that which says, 'You are my brother and
my sister, though you know it not.' And if one says, 'We