Now although the great teachers saw clearly enough the difference between the popular religion and their own insight, they were under no great compulsion to try and overcome it. They accepted the fact that the true religion was esoteric and for the few. They saw that it demanded the re-education of desire, but they had no systematic and tested knowledge of how new habits can be formed. Invincible as was their insight into the principle of happiness, they were compelled to depend upon introspection, and to generalize from a limited observation. They understood that the good life was in some degree an acquired disposition; they were aware that it is not easily or naively acquired. For those who somehow had the disposition, the teachers instituted stern disciplines which were really primitive experiments in the re-education of desire. But there was no very urgent practical need which impelled them to search for ways of making disciplines more [p203] widely available. Those who submitted to them were in general individuals who were already out of the ordinary. The mass of mankind lived solidly within the framework of custom and the psychological compulsions of theocracy. There was no pressing reason, as there is to-day, now that this ancestral order is dissolved, why anyone should seek to formulate a mode of life by which ordinary men, thrown upon their own resources, can find their way without supernatural rules, commands, punishments, and compensations. In the past there were a few men here and there who had somehow, for reasons which we do not understand, outgrown the ancestral society in which they lived. But the society itself remained. It sheltered them. And it ruled the many. The peculiarity of our modern situation is that multitudes, instead of a few, are compelled to make radical and original adjustments. These multitudes, though they have lost the ancient certainties, have not outgrown the needs to which they ministered. They need to believe, but they cannot. They need to be commanded, but they cannot find a commander. They need support, and there is none. Their situation is adult, but their dispositions are not. The religion of the spirit would suit their needs, but it would seem to be beyond their powers. 4. _The Stone Which the Builders Rejected_ The way of life which I have called high religion has in all ages seemed so unapproachably high that it has been reserved for a voluntary aristocracy of the spirit. It has, in fact, been looked upon not only as a kind of splendid idiosyncrasy of a few men here and there, but [p204] as incompatible, in essence, with the practical conditions under which life is lived. It is for these reasons, no doubt, that the practice of high religion has almost invariably been associated either with a solitary asceticism or with a specially organized life in monastic establishments. High religion has been regarded as something separate from the main concerns of mankind.