414 RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE: PERSONAL 



secular or religious. To grow spasmodic or monotonous or unreal or 

 dogmatic, is not that the death of any vital religious influence? 



The method of religious nurture through moral experience takes 

 then the imperfect, unformed, elementary facts of the spiritual life, 

 and draws out their significance. It does not bid men bury their 

 heads in the sands of tradition or lead them to suppose that they 

 can escape from the restlessness of the modern world by the cobweb 

 ladders of metaphysical subtleties or by the shallow creeks of pietistic 

 sentimentalism. It takes men just where they are. It pleads with 

 Robertson: " If there be no God and no future life, yet even then it 

 is better to be generous than selfish, better to be chaste than licen- 

 tious, better to be true than false, better to be brave than to be a 

 coward." It lays on the soul no conventional consents, no formal 

 initiations. It asks no abrupt acceptance, no ascetic devotion. It 

 says to each individual: " Here is your life with its perplexities, 

 its doubts and fears, its ambitions and regrets, its obligations and 

 opportunities. Take hold of the problems of life at the small end. 

 Do the duty that lies nearest you. It is by doing the will that we 

 learn of the doctrine. Pursue the best you can perceive, and by 

 degrees, unconsciously perhaps, your true spiritual nurture will 

 proceed, from criticism, through obedience, into reverence; from 

 neutrality, through service, into sonship." 



Let us have done with the idea that religious experience is some- 

 thing different from ordinary human experience. A genuine religious 

 influence is that which bids man put the undeveloped power for 

 unselfish action into situations where it must act and speak. It 

 bids men use for their delight and upbuilding the common things 

 of earth and air, the universal things of human experience, the mul- 

 titudinous interchanges of work and sympathy and helpfulness. 

 These are opportunities which all men and women possess, but too 

 often they are thought to be so common that they are not recognized 

 as the natural and inevitable teachers of faith. When a mother is 

 faithfully tending her children, keeping her hearthstone clean, and 

 making her fire burn bright, we seldom think of her as religiously 

 employed. When a man works hard all day and comes home to 

 make his family happy with cheerful voice and tender helpfulness, 

 the world does not think that there is religion in anything so common 

 as that. Religion is supposed to stand aloof from such familiar 

 scenes. It is something reserved for the serious moments of life, 

 for the great disasters, for the approach of death, or it is something 

 connected with certain sacraments, certain beliefs, or with church- 

 going. God help the weary world if that separation between reli- 

 gious experience and every-day experience is to be long continued. 

 I plead not indeed for the secularizing of religion, but for the sancti- 

 fying of the things too generally regarded as secular. Through use 



