but all the while the soul pursues her real track unseen and
unsuspected, as the gliding sea-beast cuts the green ocean twilight, or
wanders among rocks and hidden slopes fringed with the branching
ribbons, the delicate tangles of brine-fed groves.




VIII


Religion, as it is often taught and practised, has a dangerous tendency
to become a merely mechanical and conventional thing. Worse still, it
may even become a delusion, either when it is made an end in itself, or
when it is regarded as a solution of all mysteries. The religious life
is a vocation for some, just as the artistic life is a vocation for
others, but it is not to be hoped or even desired that all should
embrace and follow the religious vocation; it is just one of the paths
to God, neither more nor less; and the mistake that the technically
religious make is to regard it as a kind of life that is or ought to be
universal. One who has the vocation is right to follow it, but he is
not right to force it upon others, any more than an artist would be
right in forcing the artistic life on others. It is too commonly held
by the religious that formal worship is a necessity for all; they
compare the relation of worship to the spiritual life to the relation
of eating and drinking to the physical life. But this is not true of
all human beings. Public liturgical worship is a kind of art, a very
delicate and beautiful art; and just as the appeal of what is spiritual
comes to some through worship, it comes to others through art, or
poetry, or affection, or even through some kinds of action. There is no