transfer of our interest and energy to new objectives, the giving of our
old vigour to new longings and new loves. It appears that the invitation
of religion to a change of heart, rather than a change of belief, is
founded on solid psychological laws. I need not dwell on the way in
which Divine love, as the saints have understood it, answers to the
complete sublimation of our strongest natural passion; or the extent in
which the highest experiences of the religious life satisfy man's
instinctive craving for self-realization within a greater Reality, how
he feels himself to be fed with a mysterious food, quickened by a fresh
dower of life, assured of his own safety within a friendly universe,
given a new objective for his energy. It is notorious that one of the
most striking things about a truly spiritual man is, that he has
achieved a certain stability which others lack. In him, the central
craving of the psyche for more life and more love has reached its
bourne; instead of feeding upon those secondary objects of desire which
may lull our restlessness but cannot heal it He loves the thing which he
ought to love, wants to do the deeds which he ought to do, and finds all
aspects of his personality satisfied in one objective. Every one has
really a forced option between the costly effort to achieve this
sublimation of impulse, this unification of the self on spiritual
levels, and the quiet evasion of it which is really a capitulation to
the animal instincts and unordered cravings of our many-levelled being.
We cannot stand still; and this steady downward pull keeps us ever in
mind of all the backward-tending possibilities collectively to be
thought of as sin, and explains to us why sloth, lack of spiritual
energy, is held by religion to be one of the capital forms of human
wrongness.

I go on to another point, which I regard as of special importance.