e to do, but simply to
undertake what seems our plain duty; and then we shall find that the
body can often do more than we could have imagined, and especially if
it be directed by a tranquil mind; and if it fails us, that very
failure is but the pressure of God's hand upon our shoulder, saying,
"Continue in weakness and be not dismayed." If it is an error to
increase our own limitations, it is equally an error not to give heed
to them and to profit by them; and, after all, the body is more apt to
rebel in carrying out the duties we dislike than in enjoying the
pleasures on which we have set our mind. The real reason of our
faithlessness is that we are so apt to look upon the one life in which
we find ourselves as our only chance of expression and effectuation. If
it were so, it would matter little what we did or said, if the soul is
to be extinguished as a blown-out flame when the body is mingled with
the dust.

I stood once upon the deck of a ship watching a shoal of porpoises
following us and racing round us: every now and then the brown, sleek,
shining bodies of the great creatures rose from the blue waves and
entered them again with a soft plunge. Our life is like that: we rise
for an instant into the light of life, we fall again beneath the waves;
but all the while the soul pursues her real track unseen and
unsuspected, as the gliding sea-beast cuts the green ocean twilight, or
wanders among rocks and hidden slopes fringed with the branching
ribbons, the delicate tangles of brine-fed groves.

VIII

Religion, as it is often taught and practised, has a dangerous tendency
to become a merely mechanical and conventional thing. Worse still, it
may even become a delusion, either when it is made an end in itself, or
when it is regarded as a solution of all mysteries. The religious life
is a vocation for some, just as the artistic life is a vocation for
others, but it is not to be hoped or even desired that all should
embrace and follow the religious vocation; it is just one of the paths
to God, neither more nor less; and the mistake that the technically
religious make is to regard it as a kind of life that is or ought to be
universal. One who has the vocation is right to follow it, but he is
not right to force it upon others, any more than an artist would be
right in forcing the artistic life on others. It is too commonly held
by the religious that formal worship is a necessity for all; they
compare the relatio