s valid the distinction
between the religious life and its own. Hence comes a general
lowering of Man's aims. As the secular life is content to regard
itself as godless, and so deprives itself of any central and unifying
aim, it is but natural that success in each of its many branches
should come to be regarded as an end in itself. It is but natural, to
take examples at random, that the artist should follow art for art's
sake, that the man of science should deify positive knowledge, that
the statesman should regard political power as intrinsically
desirable, that the merchant and the manufacturer should live to make
money, and that the highest motive which appeals to all men alike
should be the desire to bulk large in the eyes of their fellow-men.
Even the ardent reformer, whose enthusiasm makes him unselfish,
pursues the ideal to which he devotes himself, as an end in itself,
and makes no attempt to define or interpret it in terms of its
relation to that supreme and central ideal which he ought to regard
as the final end of human endeavour. When we remind ourselves,
further, that secularism, equally with supernaturalism, tends to
identify "Nature" with lower nature--in other words, with the
material side of the Universe and the carnal side of Man's being,--we
shall realise how easy it is for the secular life, once it has lost,
through its divorce from religion, the tonic stimulus of a central
aim, to sink, without directly intending to do so, into the mire of
materialism,--a materialism of conduct as well as of thought.

But if the loss to the secular life, from its compulsory
despiritualisation, is great, the loss to religion, from the
secularisation of so much of Man's rational activity, is greater
still. The very distinction between the secular and the religious
life is profoundly irreligious, in that it rests on the tacit
assumption that there is no unity, no central aim, in human life;
and the fact that official religion is ready to acquiesce in the
distinction, is ready, in other words, to make a compromise with its
enemy "the world," is a proof that it is secretly conscious of its
own failing power, and is even beginning to despair of itself. As it
resigns itself to this feeling (as yet perhaps but dimly realised),
its reasons for entertaining it must needs grow stronger. The
progressive enlargement of the sphere of Man's secular activities is
accompanied, step for step, by the devitalisation of the idea of the