the less formalism it employs, the more ethical it
becomes, the nearer it approaches the ideal of the great Master. A
pure and saintly inspiration, an ennobling and yet subduing influence,
a solemn stillness and hushing of the senses that would contend for
mastery, an odour blown from "the everlasting hills," filling life with
an indescribable fragrance; such is religion as professed and taught by
Jesus, and such is the ideal of the Church of Emerson, builded on the
purified emotions of the human heart.

Perhaps I have now indicated what I mean by religion, "pure and
undefiled," though I know too well what truth lies hid in those words
of the "Over-soul," "Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act
of the soul". The spoken word does but suggest, and that faintly, what
the inner word of the soul expresses on matters so sublime. Still, so
far as the limitations of thought and speech permit, we have shown how
religion is the communion of man's spirit with the "Over-soul," the
baring of his heart before the immensities and eternities which
encompass him, the deep and beautiful soliloquy of the soul in the
silence of the Great Presence.

Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line
Severing rightly His from thine,
Which is human, which Divine.
--_Conduct of Life_.

Let us now pass on to inquire what are the relations between religion
so conceived and ethics or morality. In the first place, it must be
laid down as clearly as words will permit that religion and morality
should always be conceived as separate realities. Of course, there can
be no such thing as religion "pure and undefiled" without morality or
right conduct; nevertheless, the two words connote totally distinct
activities of the soul of man. We shall best explain our meaning by
pointing to the obvious fact that there have not been wanting men in
all times who have exhibited an almost ideal devotion to duty without
betraying any sympathy whatsoever with religious emotion such as has
been described. They have no sense of the infinite, as others have no
sense of colour, art or music, and in nowise feel the need of that
transcendent world wherein the object of religion is enshrined. I
should say that the elder Mill was such a man, and his son, John Stuart
Mill, until the latter years of his life, when his views appear to have
undergone a marked change. Some of his disappointed friends ascribed
the change to the serious shock he suffered