o us the same need for human
companionship as a means to salvation, but presents it in the winning
guise of salvation beginning through love, without the main stress
being laid upon the previous despair. In such cases the despair may be
mentioned but at once relieved. The religion of friendship and of love
is a familiar human experience. James, in his fear of debasing
religion by romantic or by grosser associations, unjustly neglects it
in his study of "varieties." In fact, to seem to find the divine in
the person of your idealised friend or beloved is a perfectly normal
way of beginning your acquaintance with the means of grace. You meet,
you love, and--you seem to be finding God. Or, to use our present
interpretation of what reveals the {72} divine, love seems to furnish
you with a vision of a perfect life, to give you a total survey of the
sense of your own life, and to begin to show you how to triumph. If
there be any divine life, you say, this is my vision of its beauty and
its harmony. So the divine appears in one of Browning's later lyrics:

"Such a starved bank of moss.
Till, that May morn.
Blue ran the flash across;
Violets were born!

"Sky--what a scowl of cloud
Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud
Splendid! a star!

"World--how it walled about
Life with disgrace,
Till God's own smile came out;
That was thy face!"

In the sonnets of Shakespeare this religion of friendship has found
some of its most perfect expressions.

"Haply I think of thee, and then my state.
Like to the lark's, at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate."

And again, in Mrs. Browning's "Sonnets from the Portuguese," the
religion of love not only uses speech intensely personal, fond,
intimate, but also, {73} and deliberately, accompanies all this with
words derived from reflective metaphysics, or from theology, and
intended to express the miracle that the nearest movings of affection
are also a revelation of the highest powers of the spiritual world.

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being, and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the