d living Reality can reach
us--and, even so, these facts reach us practically always, at first,
through human teachers already experienced in these things. The need of
such facts and such persons to teach them are, in the first years of
every man, and for long ages in the history of mankind, far more
pressing than any question of toleration. Even vigorous persecution or
keen exclusiveness of feeling have--_pace_ Lord Acton--saved for
mankind, at certain crises of its difficult development, convictions of
priceless worth--as in the Deuteronomic Reform and the Johannine
Writings. In proportion as men become more manysidedly awake, they
acquire at least the capacity for greater sensitiveness concerning the
laws and forces intrinsic to the various ranges and levels of life; and,
where such sensitiveness is really at work, it can advantageously
replace, by means of the spontaneous acceptance of such objective
realities, the constraints of past ages--constraints which now, in any
case, have become directly mischievous for such minds. None the less
will men, after this change as before, require the corporate experience
and manifestation of religion as, in varying degrees and ways, a
permanent necessity for the vigorous life of religion. Indeed, such
corporate tradition operates strongly even where men's spiritual sense
seems most individual, or where, with the retention of some ethical
nobility of outlook, they most keenly combat all and every religious
institution. So with George Fox's doctrine of the Divine Enlightenment
of every soul separately and without mediation of any kind, a doctrine
derived by him from that highly ecclesiastical document, the Gospel of
St. John; and with many a Jacobin's fierce proclamation of the rights of
Man, never far away from reminiscences of St. Paul.

This permanent necessity of Religious Institutions is primarily a need
for men to teach and exemplify, not simply Natural, This-World Morality,
but a Supernatural, Other-World Ethic; and not simply that abstraction,
Religion in General or a Religious Hypothesis, but that rich concretion,
this or that Historical Religion. In proportion as such an Historical
Religion is deep and delicate, it will doubtless contain affinities with
all that is wholesome and real within the other extant historical
religions. Nevertheless, all religions are effectual through their
special developments, where these developments remain true at all. As
well deprive a flo