"Religion," said Bacon, "is the
spice which is meant to keep life from corruption," and this is
especially true to-day of religion taken in the Platonist and oriental
sense. A capacity for self-recollection--for withdrawal from the outward
to the inward--is in fact the condition of all noble and useful
activity.
This return, indeed, to what is serious, divine, and sacred, is becoming
more and more difficult, because of the growth of critical anxiety
within the church itself, the increasing worldliness of religious
preaching, and the universal agitation and disquiet of society. But such
a return is more and more necessary. Without it there is no inner life,
and the inner life is the only means whereby we may oppose a profitable
resistance to circumstance. If the sailor did not carry with him his own
temperature he could not go from the pole to the equator, and remain
himself in spite of all. The man who has no refuge in himself, who
lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things
and opinions, is not properly a personality at all; he is not distinct,
free, original, a cause--in a word, _some one_. He is one of a crowd, a
taxpayer, an elector, an anonymity, but not a man. He helps to make up
the mass--to fill up the number of human consumers or producers; but he
interests nobody but the economist and the statistician, who take the
heap of sand as a whole into consideration, without troubling themselves
about the uninteresting uniformity of the individual grains.
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