x THE WILL IN DEVELOPMENT 201 



with all the ardour, devotion and self-sacrifice that that may 

 entail becomes the supreme religious duty. The sense of 

 that life as something exceedingly simple and very close to 

 us in its essence and yet remote and vast in the sweep of 

 its all-embracing order and movement becomes the con- 

 tent of the religious thought. It is indeed impossible to 

 speak of modern religion with the detachment of the 

 historical spirit, for it is all in the making, and it is rather 

 propounding a question than laying down a solution. But 

 certain points appear distinctive. In the first place, the 

 religious order must make its account with experience. 

 In spite of all efforts to escape, in spite of a hundred abor- 

 tive flights through loopholes of irrationalism and mysti- 

 cism, religious thought is in its inner consciousness aware 

 that in the end it must abide by reason or perish. In the 

 last resort accordingly it falls back from mythology, from 

 faith, and from intuition on experience. But that is at 

 once to place the actual spiritual experience of mankind in 

 the foreground of religion. The historical forms become 

 secondary. They are reduced to so many incarnations, 

 each infected with the spirit of its day, of the substance 

 which is just all that is noblest in the life of mind. The 

 problem of religion then comes to be to determine what is 

 noblest, and to ask how it has come to be and what it has 

 in it to be. The old order is inverted. What is good and 

 worthy and worshipful, instead of being derivative from an 

 assumed law of creation, become data from which the mean- 

 ing of life can be inferred and the content of a religious 

 order filled in. If in an earlier phase the moral law was 

 derived from and based on religion, it would be truer now 

 to say that the moral consciousness is one of the starting- 

 points and strongholds of religious belief. Whereas afore- 

 time ethics had to conform to religious prescriptions, it 

 would now be widely felt that religious conceptions must 

 conform to ethical requirements as verified in human 

 experience. As a consequence the whole ethico-religious 

 sphere is enlarged. It does not become less personal. 

 Indeed its hold on personality deepens in proportion as it 

 is realised that for each man its value depends on the 

 spontaneous response of his whole nature. But it recog- 



