they bring us of the divinity
behind them.

As men and women feel themselves more and more to be sharers of
universal aims, they will contemplate in each other and in themselves
that aspect of the boundless being under whose influence they are cast,
and will appeal to it for understanding and power. Time, which is for
ever bringing back the old and renewing it, may yet bring back to us
some counterpart of Aphrodite or Hera as they were understood by the
most profound thinkers of the ancient world; and women may again have
her temples and her mysteries, and renew again her radiant life at its
fountain, and feel that in seeking for beauty she is growing more into
her own ancestral being, and that in its shining forth she is giving to
man, as he may give to her, something of that completeness of spirit of
which it is written, "neither is the man without the woman nor the woman
without the man in the Highest."

It may seem strange that what is so clear should require statement, but
it is only with a kind of despair the man or woman of religious mind
can contemplate the materialism of our thought about life. It is not
our natural heritage from the past, for the bardic poetry shows that
a heaven lay about us in the mystical childhood of our race, and a
supernatural original was often divined for the great hero, or the
beautiful woman. All this perception has withered away, for religion has
become observance of rule and adherence to doctrine. The first steps
to the goal have been made sufficient in themselves; but religion is
useless unless it has a transforming power, unless it is able "to turn
fishermen into divines," and make the blind see and the deaf hear.
They are no true teachers who cannot rise beyond the world of sense and
darkness and awaken the links within us from earth to heaven, who cannot
see within the heart what are its needs, and who have not the power to
open the poor blind eyes and touch the ears that have heard no sound of
the heavenly harmonies. Our clergymen do their best to deliver us from
what they think is evil, but do not lead us into the Kingdom. They
forget that the faculties cannot be spiritualized by restraint but in
use, and that the greatest evil of all is not to be able to see
the divine everywhere, in life and love no less than in the solemn
architecture of the spheres. In the free play of the beautiful and
natural human relations lie the greatest possibilities of spiritual
development, for