harden the fibre of the soul as
Catholicism has done to relax it, the tendency of both religions
being to destroy that elasticity of fibre which mediates between
hardness and flabbiness, and which has its counterpart in vigorous
health and strength.

The truth is--but it is a truth which Protestantism is apt
to misinterpret, and which Catholicism finds it expedient to
ignore--that religion is not a branch or department of human life,
but a way of looking at life as a whole. Indeed, it is of the essence
of religion (as has been already suggested) that it should look
at life as a whole, and so be able to look at each of its details
in the light of that supreme synthesis which we call Divine. And
the religion which sanctions, and by its own action necessitates,
the division of life into two branches--the secular and the
religious--has obviously missed its destiny and betrayed its trust.

* * * * *

A brief summary of the contents of this chapter will prepare the way
for the next. The movements of higher thought in the West have been
dominated, nominally by the professional thinker, really by the
average man. As a thinker, the average man is incurably dualistic.
Enslaved as he is to the requirements of his instrument, language, he
instinctively opposes mind to body, spirit to matter, good to evil,
the Creator to the Creation, God to Man; and in each case he fixes a
great gulf between the "mighty opposites" that constitute the given
antithesis. Confronted by the mystery of existence, he has explained
it by the story of Creation. Confronted by the twin mysteries of sin
and sorrow, he has explained them by the story of the Fall. From the
story of the Fall he has passed on to the doctrine of original sin,
to the belief that Nature in general, and human nature in particular,
is corrupt and ruined, and therefore intrinsically evil. Shrinking
from the hopeless prospect which this belief opens up to him, he
has found refuge in the conception of another world,--of a world
above and beyond Nature, a world of Divine perfection from which
information and guidance can at God's good pleasure be doled out
to Man. For a "supernatural revelation" (as theologians call this
sending of help from God to Man) special instruments are obviously
needed,--a special People, a special Scripture, a special Lawgiver,
a special Prophet, a special Church. Hence has arisen the idea that
certain persons, certain castes, c