n6 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



devotion to a child, through the stress of danger, or of 

 temptation, or more calmly and equably in the communion 

 with nature, or in the clear-sighted vision of large human 

 issues and the ordered movement of the world. What we 

 actually experience in such cases takes shape in our ideas 

 and still more in the language in which we seek to describe 

 it in accordance with the traditional religion of our time. 

 If we could get the experience c pure,' i.e. stripped of 

 all the inferential implications which description involves, 

 we should have a core of reality as sound and solid as our 

 experience of space or of motion. But the case of religion 

 is one in which it is more than usually difficult to get our 

 experience 'pure' and unmixed with extraneous elements, 

 and the movements of the religious consciousness are 

 subjected throughout to the great driving force of the 

 demand of feeling, in the widest sense of that term, for 

 satisfaction. Man requires to be in some sort reconciled 

 with his place in nature. He asks for consolation in grief, 

 redemption from sin and disgrace, stimulus in practice, 

 the guidance and encouragement of an ideal of character 

 and a rule of life. For these emotional needs, bound up 

 with much that is strong and good as well as with much 

 that is weak and poor in our nature, he looks to* religion 

 for satisfaction. The religious doctrine that is to prevail 

 must answer to these needs, and thus it will embody 

 elements responding not only to our personal and self- 

 centred cravings, but to our ethical and social feelings and 

 ideas, to our sense of justice and mercy, possibly also to 

 our lust for battle, domination and cruelty. The ethics 

 of an age or a people will be reflected in its religion, though, 

 let us note, they will also be reflected back by its religion, 

 modified in character, intensity or direction. The causa- 

 tion is not one-sided, but reciprocal, and so far as religion 

 can take up a new demand, absorb it into its system and 

 find a vent for it in some new form, it may survive change 

 and preserve itself by adaptation. The plasticity of 

 Christianity and more particularly of Romanism in this 

 regard has been a main condition of its prolonged hold on 

 vastly divergent masses of men. But this does not affect 

 the main point. Religion cannot be imposed as a rigid 



