ligion be allowed to
continue unchecked, the result can only be an impoverishment of our
spiritual life; quite as far-reaching and as regrettable as that which
follows from an unbridled individualism. Without the inner life of
prayer and-meditation, lived for its own sake and for no utilitarian
motive, neither our judgments upon the social order nor our active
social service will be perfectly performed; because they will not be the
channel of Creative Spirit expressing itself through us in the world of
to-day.

Christ, it is true, gives nobody any encouragement for supposing that a
merely self-cultivating sort of spirituality, keeping the home fires
burning and so on, is anybody's main job. The main job confided to His
friends is the preaching of the Gospel. That is, spreading Reality,
teaching it, inserting it into existence; by prayers, words, acts, and
also if need be by manual work, and always under the conditions and
symbolisms of our contemporary world. But since we can only give others
that which we already possess, this presupposes that we have got
something of Reality as a living, burning fire in ourselves. The soul's
two activities of reception and donation must be held in balance, or
impotence and unreality will result. It is only out of the heart of his
own experience that man really helps his neighbour: and thus there is an
ultimate social value in the most secret responses of the soul to grace.
No one, for instance, can help others to repentance who has not known it
at first-hand. Therefore we have to keep the home fires burning, because
they are the fires which raise the steam that does the work: and we do
this mostly by the fuel with which we feed them, though partly too by
giving free access to currents of fresh air from the outer world.

We cannot read St. Paul's letters with sympathy and escape the
conviction that in the midst of his great missionary efforts he was
profoundly concerned too with the problems of his own inner life. The
little bits of self-revelation that break into the epistles and,
threaded together, show us the curve of his growth, also show us how
much, lay behind them, how intense, and how exacting was the inward
travail that accompanied his outward deeds. Here he is representative of
the true apostolic type. It is because St. Augustine is the man of the
"Confessions" that he is also the creator of "The City of God." The
regenerative work of St. Francis was accompanied by an unremi