icent expression in the loyalty of the Scottish people and
in its later and far-reaching service of some of the noblest causes
that men know. Yet these clans loved cattle-thieving and tortured
their enemies. When did they begin to be really patriots and servants
of mankind? When did they begin to be truly and heartily religious?
Who of us can tell?

Greed and blindness are natural to man. His form of consciousness
renders him unable, in many cases, to realise their unreasonableness,
even when he has already come into sincerely spiritual relations with
the cause of all the loyal. What we _can_ know is that greed and
blindness are never of themselves religious, and that the way of
salvation is the way of loyalty. But I know not what degrees of greedy
blindness are consistent with an actual membership in the invisible
church, as I have just defined its membership. When I meet, however,
with the manifestations of the spirit of universal loyalty, whether in
clansman, or in crusader, or in Elizabethan and piratical English
defender of his country's faith, or in the Spaniard whom he hated, I
hope that I may be able to use, not the greed or the passions of these
people, but their {285} religious prowess, their free surrender of
themselves to their cause, as a source of insight.

Membership in the invisible church is therefore not to be determined
by mere conventions, but by the inward spirit of the faithful, as
expressed in their loyal life according to their lights. Yet of those
who seem to us most clearly to belong to the service of the spirit, it
is easy to enumerate certain very potent groups, to whose devotion we
all owe an unspeakably great debt. The sages, the poets, the prophets,
whose insight we consulted in our opening lecture, and have used
throughout these discourses, form such groups. It is indifferent to us
to what clime or land or tongue or visible religious body they
belonged or to-day belong. They have sincerely served the cause of the
spirit. They are to us constant sources of religious insight. Even the
cynics and the rebels, whom we cited in our opening lecture, have
been, in many individual cases, devoutly religious souls who simply
could not see the light as they consciously needed to see it, and who
loyally refused to lie for convention's sake. Such have often served
the cause of the spirit with a fervour that you ill understand so long
as their words merely shock you. They often seem as if they were
ho