delights, and reflection scarcely
begins. But soon questions of right and wrong spring up; a world of
ideas and imaginations opens before you; you are led by your teachers
and your books into the presence of great thoughts, the inspirations
that come from beauty in all forms, from nature, from art, from
literature, and especially from poets; you come under the influence of
friends--fathers, mothers, or other elders--who evidently have springs
of conduct and aspirations you as yet only dimly recognize; and mixed
with all these influences there is that influence on us from childhood
upward of our prayers that we have been taught, our religious services,
our Bibles, and most of all the Sacred Figure, dimly seen, but never
long absent from our thoughts, enveloped in a sort of sacred and
mysterious halo--the figure of our Lord Jesus Christ enshrined in our
hearts, and that Father in Heaven of Whom He spoke. All these are among
the religious influences; and what is their aim and object? What is it
that we should try and extract from them for ourselves? How should we
use them in our turn to better those who come after us?

Well, I reply, they should all be regarded as the avenues by which our
human nature as a whole ought to rise, and the only avenues by which it
can rise, to its rightful and splendid heritage and its true
development. We cannot be all that we might be without straining our
efforts in this direction of aspiration towards God, towards all that
is ideal, spiritual and divine.

We are often inert, effortless, and then the religion I have spoken of
repels us because it demands an effort; we are often selfish, and it
repels us because it calls us out of self; we are often absorbed in the
small and immediate aims for present enjoyment, interested in our own
small circles, and religion insists that these are not enough. It is for
ever calling us, as all true education calls us, as literature and
history call us, to rise higher, to see more, to widen our sympathies,
to enlarge our hearts, to open the doors of feeling and emotion.
Religion therefore may make great demands on us; it may disturb our
repose; it may shake us, and say, look, look; look up, look round; it
may be importunate, insistent, omnipresent, but it is not dull.

There is a sham semblance of religion which you are right in regarding
as dull, for it is dull. When it is unreal and insincere it is deadly
dull; when phrases are repeated, parrotwise, by p