e have skimmed from life its incidental successes, when we have
harvested the moments in which existence justifies itself, its profound
depths remain below in their obscure commotion, depths that breed indeed
a rational efflorescence, but which are far from exhausted in producing
it, and continually threaten, on the contrary, to engulf it.

[Sidenote: For these the religious imagination must supply an ideal
standard.]

The spiritual man needs, therefore, something more than a cultivated
sympathy with the brighter scintillation of things. He needs to refer
that scintillation to some essential light, so that in reviewing the
motley aspects of experience he may not be reduced to culling
superciliously the flowers that please him, but may view in them all
only images and varied symbols of some eternal good. Spirituality has
never flourished apart from religion, except momentarily, perhaps, in
some master-mind, whose original intuitions at once became a religion to
his followers. For it is religion that knows how to interpret the casual
rationalities in the world and isolate their principle, setting this
principle up in the face of nature as nature's standard and model. This
ideal synthesis of all that is good, this consciousness that over earth
floats its congenial heaven, this vision of perfection which gilds
beauty and sanctifies grief, has taken form, for the most part, in such
grossly material images, in a mythology so opaque and pseudo-physical,
that its ideal and moral essence has been sadly obscured; nevertheless,
every religion worthy of the name has put into its gods some element of
real goodness, something by which they become representative of those
scattered excellences and self-justifying bits of experience in which
the Life of Reason consists.

That happy constitution which human life has at its best moments--that,
says Aristotle, the divine life has continually. The philosopher thus
expressed with absolute clearness the principle which the poets had been
clumsily trying to embody from the beginning. Burdened as traditional
faiths might be with cosmological and fanciful matter, they still
presented in a conspicuous and permanent image that which made all good
things good, the ideal and standard of all excellence. By the help of
such symbols the spiritual man could steer and steady his judgment; he
could say, according to the form religion had taken in his country, that
the truly good was what God commanded,