requires you to serve as God's will. Through loyalty,
then, not only the absolute moral insight, but the absolute religious
insight, as you grow in grace and persist in service, may be and will
be gradually and truthfully revealed to you.

For loyalty, though justifying no "moral holidays," shows you the will
of the spiritual world, the divine will, and so gives you rest in
toil, peace in the midst of care. And loyalty also, though leaving you
in no mystic trance, displays to you the law that holds the whole
rational world together; though showing you the divine grace, calls
upon you for the strenuous giving of your whole self to action; though
requiring of you no philosophical training, tells you what the highest
reason can but justify; and, though concerned with no mere signs and
wonders, shows you the gracious and eternal miracle of a spiritual
realm where, whatever fortunes and miracles and divine beings there
may be, you, in so far as you are loyal, are and are to be always at
home.

{208}

And all this is true because the spirit of loyalty at once expresses
your own personal need and reason, and defines for you the only
purpose that could be justified from the point of view of one who
surveyed all voluntary and rational life. This is the purpose to
further the unity of whatever spiritual life you can influence, and to
do this by your every rational deed, precisely in so far as your
powers permit. This is a law for all rational beings. No angels could
do more than this.

There is a famous word that Chaucer put into the mouth of his Griselda
at the moment when her husband tried her patience with his last and
utmost cruelty. That word, uttered by a woman to a mere individual
human creature who happened to be her husband, seems helplessly
pathetic and slavish enough. Yet Chaucer himself warns us that the old
tale, truly interpreted, should be viewed as an allegory of the deeper
relations between the soul and God. Even so, to many of our leading
modern minds the allegory, when interpreted in this way, may seem
harsh enough. Mere moralists may make light of it, because it seems
opposed to the dignity of the moral spirit of individual self-respect.
Only the partisans of a divine grace, administered through inscrutable
divine decrees, would, you might suppose, still see any worth in so
cruel an allegory. Nevertheless, this judgment of the allegory is
false. Let a truly loyal being--our lighthouse keeper, for
instanc