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familiarity or otherwise with what they hear; the few have 
a receptiveness which, though it could not discover, can 
appreciate and accept the better things that are brought to 
their ears. Gradually the higher ideas prevail, leavening and 
elevating the masses by their own intrinsic force, till they 
become at last the common property of all. There is some- 
thing in all men’s minds which gives a purchase for higher 
truth to lift them to a higher spiritual level. 
24, But, as surely as the ideas put forth by the spiritual leaders 
are accepted by the multitude, so surely are they corrupted. 
Spiritual terms are taken perversely in a material meaning, 
and spiritual thoughts vanish away, leaving nothing but 
material and often unmeaning forms behind. ‘This process 
often amounts to a reversal of the doctrines propounded by 
the first teacher, whose name, nevertheless, continues to be 
venerated. Nay, he himself may be elevated into the place of 
the idols he had striven to abolish. Buddha, though he is 
supposed long since to have passed into Nirvana, has become 
an object of popular worship in most Buddhist countries. . 
Much more rapidly does this corruption take place when the 
new religion comes into contact with older and more material 
worships. You may see in Buddhist temples the image of 
Buddha seated in the same glass-case between Shiva and 
Vishnu. And Mohammedanism, with all its intolerance, is 
mingled, in most countries, with innumerable fragments of 
idolatry. The shrines of its saints are in many cases but the 
successors of heathen temples, and are often more assiduously 
visited than the Musjid itself. But this corruption of the 
higher religion by the lower is familiar to all. It is only one 
instance of that general tendency to deterioration which we 
have seen to affect all religions among men. 
25. The thoughts we have been passing in review are but 
fragmentary and tentative. But they seem ina general way to 
bear witness to the fact that the religious faculty in man is 
rather receptive of spiritual ideas than active in the formation 
of them. The tendency of the mind of the race is ever 
to the material, not to the spiritual. And yet the wants of 
man’s soul are not satisfied with the material in religion. 
Man seems to suffer from an inability to hold fast God as the 
environment to which his inward life corresponds. He is 
continually dropping the spiritual connexion, and taking up 
something material inits place. Nevertheless, he is not content. 
He demands a real spiritual environment, and without it sinks 
into ever deeper degradation. 
26. But, when spiritual ideas are set before him by those who 
form areligious aristocracy in the race, he can appreciate them, 
