short, stuck in the second stage. Jesus emphasized the unconscious and
subjective factor. He denounced the considerate conduct of the
Pharisees as not righteousness at all. It was mere will-worship. Jesus
preached a religion of the heart, and taught that righteousness must
become an individual passion, similar to the passions of hunger and
thirst, if it would attain to any worth. So long as evil is easy and
natural for us, and good difficult, we are evil. We must be born
again. We must attain a new nature. Our right hand must not know what
our left hand does. We must become as little children, if we would
enter into the kingdom of heaven.

The chief difficulty in comprehending this doctrine of the three
stages lies in the easy confusion of the first and the third. Jesus
guards against this, not bidding us to be or to remain children, but
to become such. The unconsciousness and simplicity of childhood is the
goal, not the starting-point. The unconsciousness aimed at is not of
the same kind as that with which we set out. In early life we catch
the habits of our home or even derive our conduct from hereditary
bias. We begin, therefore, as purely natural creatures, not asking
whether the ways we use are the best. Those ways are already fixed in
the usages of speech, the etiquettes of society, the laws of our
country. These things make up the uncriticised warp and woof of our
lives, often admirably beautiful lives. When speaking in my last
chapter of the way in which our age has come to eulogize guidance by
natural conditions, I might have cited as a striking illustration the
prevalent worship of childhood. Only within the last century has the
child cut much of a figure in literature. He is an important enough
figure to-day, both in and out of books. In him nature is displayed
within the spiritual field, nature with the possibilities of spirit,
but those possibilities not yet realized. We accordingly reverence the