according to his own level of realization, is bound to oppose without
compromise. Most of us have enough widespreading love to be--for
instance--quite free from temptation to be cruel, at any rate directly,
to children or to animals. I say nothing about the indirect tortures
which our sloth and insensitiveness still permit. Were these first
flickers made ardent, and did they control all our reactions to
life--and there is nothing abnormal, no break in continuity involved in
this, only a reasonable growth--then, new paths of social discharge
would have been made for-our chief desires and impulses; and along these
they would tend more and more to flow freely and easily, establishing
new social-habits, unhampered by solicitations from our savage past. To
us already, on the whole, these solicitations are less insistent than
they were to the men of earlier centuries. We see their gradual defeat
in slave emancipation, factory acts, increased religious tolerance,
every movement towards social justice, every increase of the arc over
which our obligations to other men obtain. They must now disguise
themselves as patriotic or economic necessities, if we are to listen to
them: as, in the Freudian dream, our hidden unworthy wishes slip through
into consciousness in a symbolic form. But when their energy has been
fully sublimated, the social action will no longer be a conflict but a
harmony. Then we shall live the life of Spirit; and from this life will
flow all love-inspired reform.

Yet we are, above all, to avoid the conclusion that the spiritual life,
in its social expression, shall necessarily push us towards mere change;
that novelty contains everything, and stability nothing, of the will of
the Spirit for the race. Surely our aim shall be this: that religious
sensitiveness shall spread, as our discovery of religion in the universe
spreads, so that at last every man's reaction to the whole of experience
shall be entinctured with Reality, coloured by this dominant