the general issues. Religious and moral
teachers are apt to make this part of life either too detached or too
insignificant. They teach it either as if it did not matter or as if
it ought not to matter. Indeed our individual friends and enemies stand
between us and hide or interpret for us all the larger things. Few of
us can even worship alone. We must feel others, and those not strangers,
kneeling beside us.

I have already spoken under the heading of Beliefs of the part that the
idea of a Mediator has played and can play in the religious life. I have
pointed out how the imagination of men has sought and found in certain
personalities, historical or fictitious, a bridge between the blood-warm
private life and the intolerable spaciousness of right and wrong. The
world is full of such figures and their images, Christ and Mary and the
Saints and all the lesser, dearer gods of heathendom. These things
and the human passion for living leaders and heroes and leagues and
brotherhoods all confess the mediatory role, the mediatory possibilities
of personal love between the individual and the great synthesis of which
he is a part and agent. The great synthesis may become incarnate in
personal love, and personal love lead us directly to universal service.

I write "may" and temper that sentence to the quality of a possibility
alone. This is only true for those who believe, for those who have
faith, whose lives have been unified, who have found Salvation. For
those whose lives are chaotic, personal loves must also be chaotic; this
or that passion, malice, a jesting humour, some physical lust, gratified
vanity, egotistical pride, will rule and limit the relationship and
colour its ultimate futility. But the Believer uses personal love and
sustains himself by personal love. It is his provender, the meat and
drink of his campaign.

4.2. THE NATURE OF LOVE.

It is well perhaps to look a little into the factors that make up Love.

Love does not seem to me to be a simple elemental thing. It is, as I
have already said, one of the vicious tendencies of the human mind to
think that whatever can be given a simple name can be abstracted as a
single something in a state of quintessential purity. I have pointed out
that this is not true of Harmony or Beauty, and that these are synthetic
things. You bring together this which is not beautiful and that which is
not beautiful, and behold! Beauty! So also Love is, I think, a synthetic