RELIGION AND SCIENCE 277 



because through it no spiritual energy is wasted, 

 and the age-long path of progress towards ever higher 

 levels of complexity in organization is still continued. 

 Among religious teachers, both Jesus and Paul laid 

 great stress on this — on the freedom, the emancipa- 

 tion from the shackles of an external law made 

 possible by the apprehension of some highest har- 

 monizing principle and the subordination of all other 

 ideas and desires to it. Once one can see and learn 

 to follow such a principle, whatever one does is in a 

 sense right, because one's desires are all subordinate 

 to a desire for right, and to something which is right. 

 Perhaps it would be better to say that they appear right 

 to oneself, that the haunting, terrible sense of sin is 

 laid to rest, and one's life liberated into free activity, 

 one's energy made all available for achievement. 



The sense of sin, if not universal at one or other 

 period of life, is almost so, and comes from an appre- 

 hension of inner disharmony. As one would expect, 

 selfishness and sex are its most common roots ; and 

 whenever it exists, then the necessary preliminary 

 to any further progress of one's being is that it should 

 be made to disappear. It can disappear, as in St. Paul's 

 natural man, by a suppression of part of the mind or 

 of the connection between parts, or by a failure to 

 make certain connections, or it can be eradicated 

 by a growth of callousness 5 or — and I take it that 

 this is the proper religious solution — by discovering 

 a clue which will harmonize the two apparently 



