Put to the test
by my own Samurai for example by a particularly urgent and enthusiastic
discipline, I found I did not in the least want to be one of that
organization, that it only expressed one side of a much more complex
self than its disciplines permitted. And still less do I want to hamper
the play of my thoughts and motives by going apart into the
particularism of a new religion. Such refuges are well enough when the
times threaten to overwhelm one. The point about the present age, so far
as I am able to judge the world, is that it does not threaten to
overwhelm; that at the worst, by my standards, it maintains its way of
thinking instead of assimilating mine.
3.13. THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH.
Now all this leads very directly to a discussion of the relations of a
person of my way of thinking to the Church and religious institutions
generally. I have already discussed my relation to commonly accepted
beliefs, but the question of institutions is, it seems to me, a
different one altogether. Not to realize that, to confuse a church with
its creed, is to prepare the ground for a mass of disastrous and
life-wasting errors.
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