be true must become a religion.
And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown
its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having
hidden Himself from man. But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must
be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only
that is spiritual which makes its own form. If I may not find its secret
within myself, I shall never find it: if I have not got it already, it
will never come to me.

Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am
convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have
suffered a wrong and unjust system. But, somehow, I have got to make
both of these things just and right to me. And exactly as in Art one is
only concerned with what a particular thing is at a particular moment to
oneself, so it is also in the ethical evolution of one's character. I
have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The
plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum till
one's finger-tips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each
day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to
necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at,
the silence, the solitude, the shame--each and all of these things I have
to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single
degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a
spiritualising of the soul.

I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite simply, and
without affectation that the two great turning-points in my life were
when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison. I
will not say that prison is the best thing that could have happened to
me: for that phrase would savour of too great bitterness towards myself.
I would sooner say, or hear it said of me, that I was so typical a child
of my age, that in my perversity, and for that perversity's sake, I
turned the good things of my life to evil, and the evil things of my life
to good.

What is said, however, by myself or by others, matters little. The
important thing, the thing that lies before me, the thing that I have to
do, if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed, marred, and
incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me, to
make it part of me, to accept it without complaint, fear, or reluctance.
The supreme vice