inian as I am
temperamentally Nominalist. I feel that it must be in the nature of God
to attempt all souls. There must be accessibilities I can only suspect,
and accessibilities of which I know nothing.

Yet here is a consideration pointing rather the other way. If you think,
as you must think, that you yourself can be lost to God and damned, then
I cannot see how you can avoid thinking that other people can be damned.
But that is not to believe that there are people damned at the outset by
their moral and intellectual insufficiency; that is not to make out that
there is a class of essential and incurable spiritual defectives. The
religious life preceded clear religious understanding and extends far
beyond its range.

In my own case I perceive that in spite of the value I attach to true
belief, the reality of religion is not an intellectual thing. The
essential religious fact is in another than the mental sphere. I am
passionately anxious to have the idea of God clear in my own mind, and
to make my beliefs plain and clear to other people, and particularly
to other people who may seem to be feeling with me; I do perceive that
error is evil if only because a faith based on confused conceptions
and partial understandings may suffer irreparable injury through the
collapse of its substratum of ideas. I doubt if faith can be complete
and enduring if it is not secured by the definite knowledge of the true
God. Yet I have also to admit that I find the form of my own religious
emotion paralleled by people with whom I have no intellectual sympathy
and no agreement in phrase or formula at all.

There is for example this practical identity of religious feeling and
this discrepancy of interpretation between such an inquirer as myself
and a convert of the Salvation Army. Here, clothing itself in phrases
and images of barbaric sacrifice, of slaughtered lambs and fountains of
precious blood, a most repulsive and incomprehensible idiom to me, and
expressing itself by shouts, clangour, trumpeting, gesticulations, and
rhythmic pacings that stun and dismay my nerves, I find, the same object
sought, release from self, and the same end, the end of identification
with the immortal, successfully if perhaps rather insecurely achieved.
I see God indubitably present in these excitements, and I see
personalities I could easily have misjudged as too base or too dense for
spiritual understandings, lit by the manifest reflection of divinity.
One m