contemplation and effort, ought to have his times alike of humble study
of the past and of intercourse with other living artists; and great and
enduring art forms more often arise within a school, than in complete
independence of tradition. It seems, then, that the advocates of
corporate and personal religion are both, in a measure, right: and that
once again a middle path, avoiding both extremes of simplification,
keeps nearest to the facts of life. We have no reason for supposing that
these principles, which history shows us, have ceased to be operative:
or that we can secure the best kind of spiritual progress for the race
by breaking with the past and the institutions in which it is conserved.
Institutions are in some sort needful if life's balance between
stability and novelty, and our links with history and our fellow-men,
are to be preserved; and if we are to achieve such a fullness both of
individual and of corporate life on highest levels as history and
psychology recommend to us.

The question of this institutional side of religion and what we should
demand from it falls into two parts, which will best be treated
separately. First, that which concerns the character and usefulness of
the group-organization or society: the Church. Secondly, that which
relates to its peculiar practices: the Cult. We must enquire under each
head what are their necessary characters, their essential gifts to the
soul, and what their dangers and limitations.

First, then, the Church. What does a Church really do for the
God-desiring individual; the soul that wants to live a full, complete
and real life, which has "felt in its solitude" the presence and
compulsion of Eternal Reality under one or other of the forms of
religious experience?

I think we can say that the Church or institution gives to its loyal
members:--

(1) Group-consciousness.

(2) Religious union, not only with its contemporaries
but with the race, that is with
history. This we may regard as an extension
into the past--and so an enrichment--of
that group-consciousness.

(3) Discipline; and with discipline a sort of
spiritual grit, which carries our fluctuating
souls past and over the inevitably recurring
periods of slackness, and corrects subjectivism.

(4) It gives Culture, handing on the discoveries
of the saints.

In so far as the free-lance gets any of these four things, he gets them
ultimately,