the world strikes against the organism, and the resultant is not
discomfort or pain, not even the muscular contraction of
strenuous manhood, but a joyous expansion or aspiration of the
whole soul--there is religion. It is the infinite for which we
hunger, and we ride gladly on every little wave that promises to
bear us towards it."[19]

[19] The New Spirit, p. 232.



But such a straight identification of religion with any and every
form of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious
happiness out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are
"reliefs," occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either
experienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic
embodiments, religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape.
It cares no longer to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly
as a form of sacrifice--inwardly it knows it to be permanently
overcome. If you ask HOW religion thus falls on the thorns and
faces death, and in the very act annuls annihilation, I cannot
explain the matter, for it is religion's secret, and to
understand it you must yourself have been a religious man of the
extremer type. In our future examples, even of the simplest and
healthiest-minded type of religious consciousness, we shall find
this complex sacrificial constitution, in which a higher
happiness holds a lower unhappiness in check. In the Louvre
there is a picture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot
on Satan's neck. The richness of the picture is in large part
due to the fiend's figure being there. The richness of its