simple economic problem, one among the other problems involving an exchange of services. It is because the relation draws into itself so much of ourselves that there is a special "problem"; it is because marriage embodies so much of personal aspiration that we discuss its "failure". But this failure of marriage-so often precisely where marriage means most-may then be viewed as simply a crucial illustration of a universal spiritual problem; the problem, namely, of satisfying our imagination in intercourse with our fellows-even such a problem as the common sense of social life betrays by substituting the game of bridge for the inadequacies of conversation. The more intensive selfconsciousness (always abnormal from any common-sense point of view) serves only to suggest a certain inevitable inadequacy in every form of social intercourse. The final result of the culture of the spirit is then what a recent writer describes as "the awful incommunicability of souls", expressed in a mutual recognition of the loneliness of any more thoughtful form of life.

And therefore, as I have suggested, the quest of the unsatisfied imagination for communion with God. But here once more we are confronted with doubts and questions regarding the nature of the motive. Since God is so often the refuge of broken lives, of disappointed love or personal bereavement, we face the suggestions of a theory of "compensation"; or once more the suggestion that any intense desire for communion with God, such as marks the mystic or the devotee, is the fruit of a morbid imagination. Yet I wonder why the idea of God should not be a "compensation". This would mean only that the thought of God is suggested like any other thought, by the presence of a need. How should men think of God as long as human intimacies satisfy? And then I need only repeat what was said above, that a morbid imagination may be (even must be, I should rather say) a special source of insight. When I hear men speak of the religion of a sane and normal mind I am tempted always to ask why a sane and normal mind should be interested in religion; or in anything beyond the foot

ball games and the market reports. Thoughts of religion are suggested commonly-one might almost say, normally -by the presence of death. Thought itself in any graver sense comes from the tragedy of life. One may conceivably deny (as I suppose Professor Dewey would deny) that there is any "tragedy of life." But this is only to say that when we speak of the "tragedy" of life we locate the quality of "life" in the poignantly personal-not in the impersonally rational and practical. There is nothing properly tragic in losses by fire and flood considered in themselves, or in any losses of a merely "worldly" kind. The tragic loss is the personal loss, typified by personal bereavement, and the tragic unfulfilment is the unfulfilment of those deeper personal longings of which the sex-longing is illustrativebut only illustrative.

Illustrative, however, of any of the deeper, i.e. of the religious stirrings of life, whether in the form of personal love or of reflective thought or of aesthetic taste. Let us recall the faith which for Burnet satisfied "the religious instinct"; "the faith", namely, "that reality is divine, and that the one thing needful is for the soul, which is akin to the divine, to enter into communion with it". It has been my purpose here to suggest that every impulse of the mind is an attempt to "enter into communion"—with a reality such as to respond. "For at the bottom of much of our desire for great poetry," writes Vernon Lee, "is our desire for the greater life, the deeper temperament, for the more powerful mind, the great man"-and there is something similar, I suspect, at the bottom of our desire for scientific knowledge. But the desire for the great man inevitably leads the imagination beyond man. The conception of the divine will then be as variously personal, the person of God will be (and in logic must be) as variously temperamental as the many who seek him; but for each the search for the divine will be a desire for personal communion. "Thou hast made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they find rest in thee." This classical expression of Christian piety is, it seems to me, a true revelation of the religious motive. We

find the same personal motive, however, in a total difference of tone, in the hymn of praise to Zeus of the Stoic Cleanthes, beginning with "O God most glorious":

"We are thy children, we alone, of all

On earth's broad ways that wander to and fro,
Bearing thine image wheresoe'er we go."

And again the same motive, strange to say, now clearly unsatisfied and defeated, in Bertrand Russell's picture, in the peroration of his essay on "A Free Man's Worship", of the free man hurling defiance at an insensitive universe. The significant revelation of this striking passage,1 it seems to me, is "the heart of man"-for there is surely no logic in defying an insensitive universe. Russell's free man, supposed to represent the ultra-sophisticated man, may then be regarded as almost a perfect expression of the unsatisfied imagination, an eloquent testimony to the loneliness of a universe in which there is no divine presence, and once more an evidence that God-the divine—is the inevitable imagination of the human consciousness of self.

§ 69

And yet it may seem that all of this is only to demonstrate a difference between the imagination of the divine and any sense of the presence of the divine, between the idea of God and the presence of God. Hence I will carry the theme further by asking what it means to have an idea of God.

1 The passage is as follows: "Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power."

Here we are reminded of the traditional "ontological argument" for the existence of God, which, in substance, derives the existence of God from the existence of the idea: I have an idea of God, therefore God exists. Now the questionable feature of this argument, to my mind, is not the "logic" of it. Really to have an idea of God, I will suggest, is to know that God does exist. The question is what might roughly be called the question of fact: Have we an idea of God? And what does this mean?

Now in the traditionally "logical" sense of idea-as implying a consistently systematic view, complete and free from all internal contradiction-I should say that we have clearly no idea of God. The conception of God as one person, eternally living yet eternally satisfied, omnipotent yet permitting freedom, benevolent yet tolerating evil, beyond all moral weakness yet sympathetic with weakness— this if anything is a mass of problems and contradictions. And yet if this means that we have no idea of God it seems also to mean that we have no idea of our fellow-men. For any of them, subjected to a sufficiently careful scrutiny, appears to be similarly a mass of contradictions. Not only, then, have we no idea, say of Plato; we have possibly least of all an idea of those who are nearest to us. Yet of them it seems that we have certainly a personal experience, and an assurance of their presence.

But when I turn to the personal experience as constituting the idea, I am reminded of those words of Christ: "He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen ?" When we remember that "loveth" must include "knoweth" this seems to suggest that the experience of God may be for any human capacity of imagination almost impossibly difficult; and thus in the end any real belief in God. And this leads me to ask, What survives of belief in our human fellows (not to speak of love) when they have ceased to be present to the senseswhen they have been long absent? What remains of our belief in those who are long ago dead?

As I was pondering this question in the middle of a sum

mer vacation and seeking a way of stating what it means to me, I happened to be reading again George Eliot's "Scenes of Clerical Life" and it occurred to me that "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story" would help me to state the point.

The story begins with the death of Mr. Gilfil. Mr. Gilfil was an elderly Church of England clergyman of the kind that George Eliot loved to draw-"who smoked long pipes and preached short sermons"; a shrewd, matter-of-fact, and rather sceptical old gentleman, more distinctly "sound" than "spiritually-minded". Also a rather reserved man who lived much to himself, an aristocrat and a gentleman, yet popular in his parish because of a benevolence which duly respected the animal want; and welcome at every farmhouse because, himself a man of a little property and a breeder of cattle, he could discuss breeds of cattle and the like in the farmer's dialect as man to man. Mr. Gilfil, in short, was an unromantic old gentleman, and as a clergyman probably a fit subject for evangelical suspicion.

Forty years before, however, Mr. Gilfil had buried the wife who had been the pet and playmate of his boyhood and youth. She is pictured as a rarely lovely child (one thinks of her as a child), the orphaned daughter of a penniless Italian painter, bred from infancy in the quiet manners and sober traditions of an English country house, yet inheriting the dangerous southern passions which after an experience of treachery and deceit-when for the time her imagination had wandered from Maynard Gilfil-had all but issued in bloodshed. Mr. Gilfil's brief year of wedded happiness was the sadly peaceful end of a troubled story.

The memory of Caterina had then become Mr. Gilfil's religion. Her room, carefully preserved as she had left it, his sanctuary. Her name was rarely spoken. Few persons remembered her existence. This, however, was Mr. Gilfil's love story.

A very sentimental story, it will be said to-day—"very old-fashioned", was the comment of one of my friends, an anti-Victorian. But to suggest that the story is sentimental is precisely to put my question. For as one reads the story