th is nourished by
fellowship with the believing Church. It is increased by familiarity
with fuller and richer experiences of God; continuous study of the Bible
leads men into its varied and profound communion with the Most High. It
is enlarged by private and social worship; prayer and hymn and message
were born in vital experiences, and they reproduce the experience.
Browning, in characteristic verse, describes the effect of the service
upon the worshippers in Zion Chapel Meeting:

These people have really felt, no doubt,
A something, the motion they style the Call of them;
And this is their method of bringing about,
By a mechanism of words and tones,
(So many texts in so many groans)
A sort of reviving and reproducing,
More or less perfectly (who can tell?),
The mood itself, which strengthens by using.

An unexpressed faith dies of suffocation, while utterance intensifies
experience and leads to fresh expression; religion, like Shelley's
Skylark, "singing still doth soar, and soaring ever singeth." Above all,
the instinct for the Unseen is developed by exercise; obedience to our
heavenly visions sharpens the eyes of the heart. Charles Lamb pictures
his sister and himself "with a taste for religion rather than a strong
religious habit." Such people exclude themselves from the power and
peace, the limitless enrichment, of conscious friendship with the living
God.

Indeed it is not conceivable that a man can have really tasted
fellowship with the Most High without acquiring an appetite for more of
Him. The same psalmist who speaks of his soul as satisfied in God, at
once goes on, "My soul followeth hard after Thee." He who does not
become a confirmed seeker for God is not likely ever to have truly found
Him. There is something essentially irreligious in the attitude
portrayed in the biography of Horace Walpole, who, when Queen Caroline
tried to induce him to read Butler's _Analogy_, told her that his
religion was fixed, and that he had no desire either to change or to
improve it. A believer's heart is fixed; his soul is stayed on God; but
his experience is constantly expanding.

Constancy is perhaps an inaccurate word to employ of man's intercourse
with the Invisible. Even in the most stedfast and unwavering this
intercourse is characterized by

tidal movements of devoutest awe
Sinking anon to farthest ebb of doubt.

And in the world's life there are ages of faith and ages of criti