them; and, after all, the body is more apt to rebel in carrying out the duties we dislike than in enjoying the pleasures on which we have set our mind.  The real reason of our faithlessness is that we are so apt to look upon the one life in which we find ourselves as our only chance of expression and effectuation.  If it were so, it would matter little what we did or said, if the soul is to be extinguished as a blown-out flame when the body is mingled with the dust.

I stood once upon the deck of a ship watching a shoal of porpoises following us and racing round us:  every now and then the brown, sleek, shining bodies of the great creatures rose from the blue waves and entered them again with a soft plunge.  Our life is like that:  we rise for an instant into the light of life, we fall again beneath the waves; but all the while the soul pursues her real track unseen and unsuspected, as the gliding sea-beast cuts the green ocean twilight, or wanders among rocks and hidden slopes fringed with the branching ribbons, the delicate tangles of brine-fed groves.

VIII

Religion, as it is often taught and practised, has a dangerous tendency to become a merely mechanical and conventional thing.  Worse still, it may even become a delusion, either when it is made an end in itself, or when it is regarded as a solution of all mysteries.  The religious life is a vocation for some, just as the artistic life is a vocation for others, but it is not to be hoped or even desired that all should embrace and follow the religious vocation; it is just one of the paths to God, neither more nor less; and the mistake that the technically religious make is to regard it as a kind of life that is or ought to be universal.  One who has the vocation is right to follow it, but he is not right to force it upon others, any more than an artist would be right in forcing the artistic life on others.  It is too commonly held by the religious that formal worship is a necessity for all; they compare the relation of worship to the spiritual life to the relation of eating and drinking to the physical life.  But this is not true of all human beings.  Public liturgical worship is a kind of art, a very delicate and beautiful art; and just as the appeal of what is spiritual comes to some through worship, it comes to others through art, or poetry, or affection, or even through some kinds of action.  There is no hint that Christ laid any stress on liturgical or public worship at all; he attended the synagogue, and went up to Jerusalem to the sacrifices; but he nowhere laid it down as a duty, or reproached those who did not practise it.  He spoke vehemently of the practice of prayer, but recommended that it should be made as secret as possible; he chose a social meal for his chief rite, and the act of washing as his secondary rite.  He did indeed warn his followers very sternly against the dangers of formalism; he never warned