spiritual life must, as soon as it passes beyond the level of mere
feeling and involves reflection, involve too some more or less
articulated conception of the spiritual universe, in harmony with which
that life is to be lived. This may be given to us by authority, in the
form of creed: but if we do not thus receive it, we are committed to the
building of our own City of God. And to-day, that world-view, that
spiritual landscape, must harmonize--if it is needed to help our
living--with the outlook, the cosmic map, of the ordinary man. If it be
adequate, it will inevitably transcend this; but must not be in hopeless
conflict with it. The stretched-out, graded, striving world of
biological evolution, the many-faced universe of the physical
relativist, the space-time manifold of realist philosophy--these great
constructions of human thought, so often ignored by the religious mind,
must on the contrary be grasped, and accommodated to the world-view
which centres on the God known in religious experience. They are true
within their own systems of reference; and the soul demands a synthesis
wide enough to contain them.

It is true that most religious systems, at least of the traditional
type, do purport to give us a world-view, a universe, in which
devotional experience is at home and finds an objective and an
explanation. They give us a self-consistent symbolic world in which to
live. But it is a world which is almost unrelated to the universe of
modern physics, and emerges in a very dishevelled state from the
explorations of history and of psychology. Even contrasted with our
every-day unresting strenuous life, it is rather like a conservatory in
a wilderness. Whilst we are inside everything seems all right.

Beauty and fragrance surround us. But emerging from its doors, we find
ourselves meeting the cold glances of those who deal in other kinds of