These two, in all times, among all
races, under ten thousand divinities, have been the voices of the heart.
"There is a third mood of direct experience by which one approaches the
religious life. Surely no man in our civilization can grow far in years
without finding out that, in the effort to live a life obeying his
desires and worthy of his hopes, his will is made one with Christ's
commands; and he knows that the promises of Christ, so far as they
relate to the life that now is, are fulfilled in himself day by day; he
can escape neither the ideal that Christ was, nor the wisdom of Christ
in respect to the working of that ideal on others and within himself. He
perceives the evil of the world, and desires to share in its redemption;
its sufferings, and would remove them; its injustice, and would abolish
it. He is, by the mere force of his own heart in view of mankind, a
humanitarian. But he is more than this in such a life. If he be sincere,
he has not lived long before he knows in himself such default of duty
that he recognizes it as the soul's betrayal; its times and occasions,
its degrees of responsibility, its character whether of mere frailty or
of an evil will, its greater or less offence, are indifferent matters;
for, as it is the man of perfect honour who feels a stain as a wound,
and a shadow as a stain, so poignancy of repentance is keenest in the
purest souls.
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