rity
and simplification, for others RICHNESS is the supreme imaginative
requirement.[303] When one's mind is strongly of this type, an
individual religion will hardly serve the purpose. The inner need is
rather of something institutional and complex, majestic in the
hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with authority descending
from stage to stage, and at every stage objects for adjectives of
mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort from the Godhead who
is the fountain and culmination of the system. One feels then as if in
presence of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or architecture; one
hears the multitudinous liturgical appeal; one gets the honorific
vibration coming from every quarter. Compared with such a noble
complexity, in which ascending and descending movements seem in no way
to jar upon stability, in which no single item, however humble, is
insignificant, because so many august institutions hold it in its
place, how flat does evangelical Protestantism appear, how bare the
atmosphere of those isolated religious lives whose boast it is that
"man in the bush with God may meet."[304] What a pulverization and
leveling of what a gloriously piled-up structure! To an imagination
used to the perspectives of dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme
seems to offer an almshouse for a palace.

[303] The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical
importance with the analogous difference in character. We saw, under
the head of Saintliness, how some characters resent confusion and must
live in purity, consistency, simplicity (above, p. 275 ff.). For
others, on the contrary, superabundance, over-pressure, stimulation,
lots of superficial relations, are indispensable. There are men who
would suffer a very syncope if you should pay all their debts, bring it
about that their engagements had been kept, their letters answered
their perplexities relieved, and their duties fulfilled, down to one
which lay on a clean table under their eyes with nothing to interfere
with its immediate performance. A day stripped so staringly bare would
be for them appalling. So with ease, elegance, tributes of affection,
social recognitions--some of us require amounts of these things which
to others would appear a mass of lying and sophistication.

[304] In Newman's Lectures on Justification Lecture VIII. Section 6,
there is a splendid passage expressive of this aesthetic way of feeling
the Christian scheme. It