sing, falling in upon itself, its
apparent permanence nothing but a rapid and glittering succession of
impermanences. The dread of growing old is chiefly that, as years
come on, life changes more and faster, becomes a continual process of
readjustment. Therefore we want something fixed; like the sailor with
his compass, we must have some needle, even if a tremulous one, always
pointing toward a changeless star. Yet this is but one half of the
picture. Does man desire continuity?--quite as much does he wish for
variety, cessation of old ways, change and fresh beginnings. The
most terrible figure which the subtle imagination of the Middle Ages
conjured up was that of the Wandering Jew, the man who could not die!
Here, then, we arrive at knowledge, the genuine values of experience,
by this same balancing of opposites. Continuity alone kills; perpetual
change strips life of significance; man must have both.

Now, it is in the religious field that this interests us most. We have
seen that what we have been doing there of late has been to ignore the
fact that reality is found only through this balancing of the law of
difference and identity, contrast and likeness. We have been absorbed
in one half of reality, identifying man with nature, prating of his
self-sufficiency, seeing divinity almost exclusively as immanent in
the phenomenal world. Thus we have not merely been dealing with only
one half of the truth, but that, to use a solecism, the lesser half.

For doubtless men do desire in religion a recognition of the real
values of their physical nature. And they want rules of conduct, a
guide for practical affairs, a scale of values for this world. This
satisfies the craving for temporal adjustment, the sense of the
goodness and worth of what our instinct transmits to us. But it does
nothing to meet that profound dissatisfaction with this world and that
sense of the encumbrances of the flesh which is also a part of reality
and, to the religious man, perhaps the greater part. He wants to turn
away from all these present things and be kept secretly in a pavilion
from the strife of tongues. Here he has no continuing city. Always
while we dwell here we have a dim and restless sense that we are in an
unreal country and we know, in our still moments, that we shall only
come to ourselves when we return to the house of our Father. Hence
men have never been satisfied with religious leaders who chiefly
interpreted this world to them.