e our method of action at special times and to be absent at
others. It is better occasionally to travel in one way or another to
some beloved place (or to some place wonderful and desired for its
associations), haunted by our mission, yet falling into every ordinary
levity, than to go about a common voyage in a chastened and devout
spirit. I fear this is bad theology, and I propound it subject to
authority. But, surely, if a man should say, "I will go to Redditch to
buy needles cheap," and all the way take care to speak no evil of his
neighbour, to keep very sober, to be punctual in his accounts, and to
say his regular prayers with exactitude, though that would be a good
work, yet if he is to be a _pilgrim_ (and the Church has a hundred
gates), I would rather for the moment that he went off in a gay,
tramping spirit, not oversure of his expenses, not very careful of all
he said or did, but illuminated and increasingly informed by the great
object of his voyage, which is here not to buy or sell needles, or what
not, but to loose the mind and purge it in the ultimate contemplation of
something divine.

There is, indeed, that kind of pilgrimage which some few sad men
undertake because their minds are overburdened by a sin or tortured with
some great care that is not of their own fault. These are excepted from
the general rule, though even to these a very human spirit comes by the
way, and the adventures of inns and foreign conversations broaden the
world for them and lighten their burden. But this kind of pilgrimage is
rare and special, having its peculiar virtues. The common sort (which
how many men undertake under another name!) is a separate and human
satisfaction of a need, the fulfilling of an instinct in us, the
realisation of imagined horizons, the reaching of a goal. For whoever
yet that was alive reached an end and could say he was satisfied? Yet
who has not desired so to reach an end and to be satisfied? Well,
pilgrimage is for the most a sort of prefiguring or rehearsal. A man
says: "I will play in show (but a show stiffened with a real and just
object) at that great part which is all we can ever play. Here I start
from home, and there I reach a goal, and on the way I laugh and watch,
sing and work. Now I am at ease and again hampered; now poor, now rich,
weary towards the end and at last arrived at that end. So my great life
is, and so this little chapter shall be." Thus he packs up the meaning
of life into a l