rthodox judgment--is adverse
to institutionalism; at least as it now exists. In spite of the enormous
improvement which would certainly be visible, were we to compare the
average ecclesiastical attitude and average Church service in this
country with those of a hundred years ago, the sense that religion
involves submission to the rules and discipline of a closed
society--that definite spiritual gains are attached to spiritual
incorporation--that church-going, formal and corporate worship, is a
normal and necessary part of the routine of a good life: all this has
certainly ceased to be general amongst us. If we include the whole
population, and not the pious fraction in our view, this is true both of
so-called Catholic and so-called Protestant countries. Professor Pratt
has lately described 80 per cent. of the population of the United States
as being "unchurched"; and all who worked among our soldiers at the
front were struck by the paradox of the immense amount of natural
religion existing among them, combined with almost total alienation from
religious institutions. Those, too, who study and care for the spiritual
life seem most often to conceive it in the terms of William James's
well-known definition of religion as "the feelings, acts and experiences
of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves
to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the Divine."[119]

Such a life of the Spirit--and the majority of educated men would
probably accept this description of it--seems little if at all
conditioned by Church membership. It speaks in secret to its Father in
secret; and private devotion and self-discipline seem to be all it
needs. Yet looking at history, we see that this conception, this
completeness of emphasis on first-hand solitary seeking, this one-by-one
achievement of Eternity, has not in fact proved truly fruitful in the
past. Where it seems so to be fruitful, the solitude is illusory. Each
great regenerator and revealer of Reality, each God-intoxicated soul
achieving transcendence, owes something to its predecessors and
contemporaries.[120] All great spiritual achievement, like all great
artistic achievement, however spontaneous it may seem to be, however
much the fruit of a personal love and vision, is firmly rooted in the
racial past. If fulfills rather than destroys; and unless its free
movement towards novelty, fresh levels of pure experience, be thus
balanced by the stability