so-called Catholic and so-called Protestant countries. Professor Pratt
has lately described 80 per cent. of the population of the United States
as being "unchurched"; and all who worked among our soldiers at the
front were struck by the paradox of the immense amount of natural
religion existing among them, combined with almost total alienation from
religious institutions. Those, too, who study and care for the spiritual
life seem most often to conceive it in the terms of William James's
well-known definition of religion as "the feelings, acts and experiences
of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves
to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the Divine."[119]

Such a life of the Spirit--and the majority of educated men would
probably accept this description of it--seems little if at all
conditioned by Church membership. It speaks in secret to its Father in
secret; and private devotion and self-discipline seem to be all it
needs. Yet looking at history, we see that this conception, this
completeness of emphasis on first-hand solitary seeking, this one-by-one
achievement of Eternity, has not in fact proved truly fruitful in the
past. Where it seems so to be fruitful, the solitude is illusory. Each
great regenerator and revealer of Reality, each God-intoxicated soul
achieving transcendence, owes something to its predecessors and
contemporaries.[120] All great spiritual achievement, like all great
artistic achievement, however spontaneous it may seem to be, however
much the fruit of a personal love and vision, is firmly rooted in the
racial past. If fulfills rather than destroys; and unless its free
movement towards novelty, fresh levels of pure experience, be thus
balanced by the stability which is given us by our hoarded traditions
and formed habits, it will degenerate into eccentricity and fail of its
full effect. Although nothing but first-hand discovery of and response
to spiritual values is in the end of any use to us, that discovery and