w religion is a social activity, and service is its proper
expression: that all valid knowledge of God is social, and He is chiefly
known in mankind: that the use of prayer is mainly social, in that it
improves us for service, otherwise it must be condemned as a merely
selfish activity: finally, that the true meaning and value of suffering
are social too. A visitor to a recent Swanwick Conference of the Student
Christian Movement has publicly expressed his regret that some students
still seemed to be concerned with the problems of their own spiritual
life; and were not prepared to let that look after itself, whilst they
started straight off to work for the social realization of the Kingdom
of God. When a great truth becomes exaggerated to this extent, and is
held to the exclusion of its compensating opposite, it is in a fair way
to becoming a lie. And we have here, I think, a real confusion of ideas
which will, if allowed to continue, react unfavourably upon the religion
of the future; because it gives away the most sacred conviction of the
idealist, the belief in the absolute character of spiritual values, and
in the effort to win them as the great activity of man. Social service,
since it is one form of such an effort, a bringing in of more order,
beauty, joy, is a fundamental duty--the fundamental duty--of the active
life. Man does not truly love the Perfect until he is driven thus to
seek its incarnation in the world of time. No one doubts this. All
spiritual teachers have said it, in one way or another, for centuries.
The mere fact that they feel impelled to teach at all, instead of saying
"My secret to myself"--which is so much easier and pleasanter to the
natural contemplative--is a guarantee of the claim to service which they
feel that love lays upon them. But this does not make such service of
man, however devoted, either the same thing as the search for, response
to, intercourse with God; or, a sufficient substitute for these
specifically spiritual acts.

Plainly, we are called upon to strive with all our power to bring in the
Kingdom; that is, to incarnate in the time world the highest spiritual
values which we have known. But our ability to do this is strictly
dependent on those values being known, at least by some of us, at
first-hand; and for this first-hand perception, as we have seen, the
soul must have a measure of solitude and silence. Therefore, if the
swing-over to a purely social interpretation of re