or what made man akin to the
divine, or what led the soul to heaven. Such expressions, though taken
more or less literally by a metaphysical intellect, did not wholly
forfeit their practical and moral meaning. God, for a long time, was
understood to command what in fact was truly important, the divine was
long the truly noble and beautiful, heaven hardly ever ceased to respond
to impersonal and ideal aspirations. Under those figures, therefore, the
ideals of life could confront life with clearness and authority. The
spiritual man, fixing his eyes on them, could live in the presence of
ultimate purposes and ideal issues. Before each immediate task, each
incidental pleasure, each casual success, he could retain his sweetness
and constancy, accepting what good these moments brought and laying it
on the altar of what they ought to bring.

CHAPTER XII

CHARITY

[Sidenote: Possible tyranny of reason.]

Those whom a genuine spirituality has freed from the foolish enchantment
of words and conventions and brought back to a natural ideal, have still
another illusion to vanquish, one into which the very concentration and
deepening of their life might lead them. This illusion is that they and
their chosen interests alone are important or have a legitimate place in
the moral world. Having discovered what is really good for themselves,
they assume that the like is good for everybody. Having made a tolerable
synthesis and purification of their own natures, they require every
other nature to be composed of the same elements similarly combined.
What they have vanquished in themselves they disregard in others; and
the consequence sometimes is that an impossibly simplified and
inconsiderate regimen is proposed to mankind, altogether
unrepresentative of their total interests. Spiritual men, in a word, may
fall into the aristocrat's fallacy; they may forget the infinite animal
and vulgar life which remains quite disjointed, impulsive, and
short-winded, but which nevertheless palpitates with joys and sorrows,
and makes after all the bulk of moral values in this democratic world.

[Sidenote: Everything has its rights.]

After adopting an ideal it is necessary, therefore, without abandoning
it, to recognise its relativity. The right path is in such a matter
rather difficult to keep to. On the one hand lies fanatical insistence
on an ideal once arrived at, no matter how many instincts and interests
(the basis of all ideals) are t