ch is not even communicated by a wider
experience of sin.

Perhaps there is nothing that reflects our anthropomorphic ideas of God
more strongly than the fact that no revelation of prophets has ever
conceived of the Supreme Deity as other than masculine; and no doubt
the Mariolatry of the Church of Rome is the reflection of the growing
influence in the world of the feminine element; and yet the conception
of God as masculine is in itself a limitation of His infinite
perfection. That we should carry our conception of sex into the
infinite is perhaps a mere failure of imagination, and if we could
divest ourselves of a thought which possibly has no reality in it, we
should perhaps grow to feel that the true priesthood of life could be
exercised as well by women as by men, or even better. The true
principle is that all those who are set free by a natural grace, a
divine instinct, from grosser temptations, and whose freedom leads them
not to a cold self-sufficiency, to a contempt for what is weaker, but
to an ardent desire to save, to renew, to upraise, are the natural
priests or priestesses of the world; for the only way in which the
priest can stand between man and God is, when smaller and more hampered
natures realize that he has a divine freedom and compassion conferred
upon him, which sets him above themselves; when they can feel that in
religion it is better to agree with the saints than to differ from
them; when they can see that there are certain people whose religious
intuitions can be trusted, because they are wider and deeper than the
narrower intuitions of more elementary natures.

The priest, then, that I would recognize is not the celebrator of
lonely and forlorn mysteries, the proprietor of divine blessings, the
posturer in solemn ceremonies, but the man or woman of candid gaze, of
fearless heart, of deep compassion, of infinite concern. It is these
qualities which, if they are there, lend to rite and solemnity a
holiness and a significance which they cannot win from antiquity or
tradition. Such priests as these are the interpreters of the Divine
will, the channels of Divine grace; and the hope of the race lies in
the fact that such men and women are sent into the world, and go in and
out among us, more than in all the stately organizations, the
mysterious secrets, the splendid shrines, devised by the art of man to
make fences about the healing spring; shrines where, though sound and
colour may lavish their