e for all action.

But even this is not the whole meaning of what the spirit of loyalty
has to teach you. Your cause, thus concretely and yet universally
defined, is something of which you can always, and now truthfully and
without any pathetic fallacy, say, what Browning's lover said in the
lyric that I quoted in our second lecture:

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

{206} For your cause can only be revealed to you through some presence
that first teaches you to love this unity of the spiritual life. This
presence will come to you in a beloved form, as something human, dear,
vitally fascinating. It may be a person--a face--or a living
community of human beings that first reveals it to you. You can,
indeed, choose it as your cause. Your will is needed. Loyalty is no
mere sentiment. It is the willing and practical and thorough-going
devotion of a self to a cause. But you can never choose your cause
until you have first found it. And you must find it in human shape.
And you must love it before you can choose its service.

_Therefore, however far you go in loyalty, you will never regard your
loyalty as a mere morality. It will also be in essence a religion._ It
will always be to you a finding of an object that comes to you from
without and above, as divine grace has always been said to come. Hence
loyalty is a source not only of moral but of religious insight. The
spirit of true loyalty is of its very essence a complete synthesis of
the moral and of the religious interests. The cause is a religious
object. It finds you in your need. It points out to you the way of
salvation. Its presence in your world is to you a free gift from the
realm of the spirit--a gift that you have not of yourself, but through
the willingness of the world to manifest to you the way of salvation.
This free gift first compels your love. Then you freely give yourself
in return.

{207}

Therefore, the spirit of loyalty completely reconciles those bitter
and tragic wrangles between the mere moralists and the partisans of
divine grace. It supplies in its unity also the way to define, in
harmonious fashion, the ideal of what your individual experience seeks
in its need, of what your social world, groaning and travailing in
pain together, longs for as our common salvation, of what the reason
conceives as the divine unity of the world's meaning, of what the
rational will