nintelligent, it is intolerably crude and jejune to the philosopher,
while that which redeems the criminal is utterly useless to the saint.
Yet all the types need religion, so that each may reach upward to a life
higher than that which he is leading, and no type or grade should be
sacrificed to any other. Religion must be as graduated as evolution,
else it fails in its object.

Next comes the question: In what way do religions seek to quicken human
evolution? Religions seek to evolve the moral and intellectual natures,
and to aid the spiritual nature to unfold itself. Regarding man as a
complex being, they seek to meet him at every point of his constitution,
and therefore to bring messages suitable for each, teachings adequate to
the most diverse human needs. Teachings must therefore be adapted to
each mind and heart to which they are addressed. If a religion does not
reach and master the intelligence, if it does not purify and inspire the
emotions, it has failed in its object, so far as the person addressed is
concerned.

Not only does it thus direct itself to the intelligence and the
emotions, but it seeks, as said, to stimulate the unfoldment of the
spiritual nature. It answers to that inner impulse which exists in
humanity, and which is ever pushing the race onwards. For deeply within
the heart of all--often overlaid by transitory conditions, often
submerged under pressing interests and anxieties--there exists a
continual seeking after God. "As the hart panteth after the
water-brooks, so panteth"[7] humanity after God. The search is sometimes
checked for a space, and the yearning seems to disappear. Phases recur
in civilisation and in thought, wherein this cry of the human Spirit for
the divine--seeking its source as water seeks its level, to borrow a
simile from Giordano Bruno--this yearning of the human Spirit for that
which is akin to it in the universe, of the part for the whole, seems to
be stilled, to have vanished; none the less does that yearning reappear,
and once more the same cry rings out from the Spirit. Trampled on for a
time, apparently destroyed, though the tendency may be, it rises again
and again with inextinguishable persistence, it repeats itself again
and again, no matter how often it is silenced; and it thus proves itself
to be an inherent tendency in human nature, an ineradicable constituent
thereof. Those who declare triumphantly, "Lo! it is dead!" find it
facing them again with undiminished