piritual idleness as I have
mentioned may nevertheless return the moralist's scorn with scorn. If
they are advocates of art for art's sake, of mere beauty as the
highest good, they find the restlessness of the {179} moralists hectic
or barbarous. If they are mystical quietists, they regard mere
moralism as the struggling of a soul that is not saved. If moral
endeavour were the last word, they insist, we should all of us be in
the Hades of Sisyphus. And no doubt their scorn, even if ill-founded,
deserves consideration. For even the most one-sided emphasis upon any
aspect of spiritual truth is instructive, if only your eyes are open.

Such are some of the ways in which, in the course of human history,
the religiously minded and the moralists have been divided. To sum up:
Certain of the lovers of religion have, upon occasion, condemned
moralists, sometimes as legalists who do not know that there is any
highest good, sometimes as vain optimists who ignore the danger of
perdition, sometimes as despisers of divine grace, sometimes as the
barbarous troublers of spiritual peace. Certain moralists, in their
turn, and according as they ignore or accept the postulates upon which
the religious interest is based, have condemned the devout, sometimes
as the slanderers of our healthy human nature, sometimes as seekers in
the void for a light that does not shine, sometimes as slavish souls
who hope to get from grace gifts that they have not the courage to
earn for themselves, sometimes as idlers too fond of "moral holidays."
And, as moralists, their common cry has been, ever since the times of
Amos: "Woe unto those who are at ease in Zion."

{180}

We have reviewed, then, some of these conflicts. I hope that you see
upon what general issue they all alike turn. The moralists are
essentially the partisans of action. They seek a good. But their great
postulate is that there is something right for us to do. Therefore the
issue is that between our need of something not ourselves to save us
and our power to win a greater or lesser good through our own moral
activity. Whoever so exclusively emphasises the fact that the divine
is not of our making, and that its ways are not our ways, and that its
good is something beyond our power to create or attain of
ourselves--whoever, I say, so exclusively emphasises these things that
he makes light of our efforts to attain the good somewhere comes into
conflict with moralists. Whoever, as moralist, so