can
quite certainly know who are the really loyal. We can be sure
regarding the nature of loyalty. That loyalty itself should come to
men's consciousness in the most various forms and degrees, and clouded
by the most tragic misunderstandings, the narrow form of human
consciousness, and the blindness and variety of human passion, make
necessary.

If one is loyal to a narrow and evil cause, as the robber or the
pirate may be loyal to his band or to his ship, a conscious effort to
serve the unity of the whole spiritual world may seem at first sight
to be excluded by the nature of the loyalty in question. But what
makes a cause evil, and unworthy of loyal {283} service, is the fact
that its service is destructive of the causes of other men, so that
the evil cause preys upon the loyalty of the spiritual brethren of
those who serve it, and so that thereby the servants of this cause do
actual wrong to mankind. But this very fact may not be understood by
the individual robber or pirate. He may be devoted with all his heart
and soul and mind and strength to the best cause that he knows. He may
therefore sincerely conceive that the master of life authorises his
cause. In that case, and so far as this belief is sincere, the robber
or pirate may be a genuinely religious man.

Does this statement seem to you an absurd quibble? Then look over the
past history of mankind. Some at least of the Crusaders were genuinely
religious. That we all readily admit. But they were obviously, for the
most part, robbers and murderers, and sometimes pirates, of what we
should now think the least religious type if they were to-day sailing
the Mediterranean or devastating the lands. Read in "Hakluyt's
Voyages" the accounts of the spirit in which the English explorers and
warriors of the Elizabethan age accomplished their great work. In
these accounts a genuinely religious type of patriotism and of
Christianity often expresses itself side by side with a reckless
hatred of the Spaniard and a ferocity which tolerates the most obvious
expressions of mere natural greed. These heroes of the beginnings of
the British Empire often hardly knew whether they were rather the
adventurous {284} merchants, or the loyal warriors for England, or the
defenders of the Christian faith, or simply pirates. In fact they were
all these things at once. Consider the Scottish clans as they were up
to the eighteenth century. The spirit that they fostered has since
found magnif