To be sure, it makes our task difficult to have to deal so muck
with eccentricities and extremes. "How CAN religion on the whole
be the most important of all human functions," you may ask, "if
every several manifestation of it in turn have to be corrected
and sobered down and pruned away?"

Such a thesis seems a paradox impossible to sustain
reasonably--yet I believe that something like it will have to be
our final contention. That personal attitude which the
individual finds himself impelled to take up towards what he
apprehends to be the divine--and you will remember that this was
our definition--will prove to be both a helpless and a
sacrificial attitude. That is, we shall have to confess to at
least some amount of dependence on sheer mercy, and to practice
some amount of renunciation, great or small, to save our souls
alive. The constitution of the world we live in requires it:--

"Entbehren sollst du! sollst entbehren!
Das ist der ewige Gesang
Der jedem an die Ohren klingt,
Den, unser ganzes Leben lang
Uns heiser jede Stunde singt."

For when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely
dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of
some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and
pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in
those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender
is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice