order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it
alike impressive. If we dramatise its life and conceive its spirit, we
are filled with wonder, terror, and amusement, so magnificent is that
spirit, so prolific, inexorable, grammatical, and dull. Like all animals
and plants, the cosmos has its own way of doing things, not wholly
rational nor ideally best, but patient, fatal, and fruitful. Great is
this organism of mud and fire, terrible this vast, painful, glorious
experiment. Why should we not look on the universe with piety? Is it not
our substance? Are we made of other clay? All our possibilities lie from
eternity hidden in its bosom. It is the dispenser of all our joys. We
may address it without superstitious terrors; it is not wicked. It
follows its own habits abstractedly; it can be trusted to be true to its
word. Society is not impossible between it and us, and since it is the
source of all our energies, the home of all our happiness, shall we not
cling to it and praise it, seeing that it vegetates so grandly and so
sadly, and that it is not for us to blame it for what, doubtless, it
never knew that it did? Where there is such infinite and laborious
potency there is room for every hope. If we should abstain from judging
a father's errors or a mother's foibles, why should we pronounce
sentence on the ignorant crimes of the universe, which have passed into
our own blood? The universe is the true Adam, the creation the true
fall; and as we have never blamed our mythical first parent very much,
in spite of the disproportionate consequences of his sin, because we
felt that he was but human and that we, in his place, might have sinned
too, so we may easily forgive our real ancestor, whose connatural sin we
are from moment to moment committing, since it is only the necessary
rashness of venturing to be without fore-knowing the price or the fruits
of existence.

CHAPTER XI

SPIRITUALITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS

[Sidenote: To be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal.]

In honouring the sources of life, piety is retrospective. It collects,
as it were, food for morality, and fortifies it with natural and
historic nutriment. But a digestive and formative principle must exist
to assimilate this nutriment; a direction and an ideal have to be
imposed on these gathered forces. So that religion has a second and a
higher side, which looks to the end toward which we move as piety looks
to the conditions of progress and to the s