passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath.
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death."

Surely one could not better express, than this sonnet does, the
naturalness of the religious motive--the mystery of the religious
object.

And finally, turning from these cases to those which are social in the
larger sense, every patriotic song which deifies one's country, every
other form of the religion of patriotism, exemplifies the experience
of the devoted lover of his country by teaching that it is "man's
perdition to be safe" in case his social world calls for the sacrifice
of his life, and that salvation comes through service.

{74}

James is indeed wrong then to neglect the social roads that lead
toward the experience of what one takes to be divine. There is no love
so simple-minded that, if it be true love, the way of salvation may
not seem to be opened through it to the lover.

But observe that, as we review these instances, they show us how the
social world wherein they bid us seek our salvation is a world whose
very essence is transformed by love and by its vision into something
that seems to the lover mystical, superhuman, and more than our
literal and commonplace social life directly exemplifies. Those who
have failed to find in their actual social life such inspirations may,
indeed, have to look, as the typical mystics have generally done,
elsewhere, for their vision of the divine, than in so much of the
social world as they know. And such will, indeed, seek their vision of
salvation in solitude. When they tell us of their experience, they may
well remind the social enthusiast, as well as the lover, that the
religion of love is no religion at all, unless it conceives its human
object not only as this creature, or as this collection of needy men
and women, but as a hint, or revelation, or incarnation of a divine
process--of a process which is not only human but superhuman, and
which can never be comprehended in the "mart and the crowded street"
unless by the soul that is either mystical enough to meet God also "in
the bush," or rationally enlightened enough to know that human {75}
life is indeed a revelation of something that is also superhuman.

I conclude, then, for the moment, thus: Social experience seems to lie
on the way to