I am satisfied that these
personal urgencies are neither to be suppressed nor crudely nor
ruthlessly subordinated to the general issues. Religious and moral
teachers are apt to make this part of life either too detached or too
insignificant. They teach it either as if it did not matter or as if it
ought not to matter. Indeed our individual friends and enemies stand
between us and hide or interpret for us all the larger things. Few of us
can even worship alone. We must feel others, and those not strangers,
kneeling beside us.
I have already spoken under the heading of Beliefs of the part that the
idea of a Mediator has played and can play in the religious life. I have
pointed out how the imagination of men has sought and found in certain
personalities, historical or fictitious, a bridge between the blood-warm
private life and the intolerable spaciousness of right and wrong. The
world is full of such figures and their images, Christ and Mary and the
Saints and all the lesser, dearer gods of heathendom. These things and
the human passion for living leaders and heroes and leagues and
brotherhoods all confess the mediatory role, the mediatory possibilities
of personal love between the individual and the great synthesis of which
he is a part and agent.
Pages:
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277