Had they known any way of curing the fever of human [p207] passion except by attempting to excise it, the insight of high religion would have had some practicable meaning for those who did not withdraw from the world. But no way was known, and therefore the practice of high religion had to mean separation from human society and violence to human nature. But why was there no other way known of overcoming the chaos of the passions? Was it because there is no other way? If that were so then the world is as hopeless as the early Christians thought it was; indeed it is more hopeless because it does not show any signs, as they believed, of coming to an end. Was it because the early Christian Fathers were not wise enough to discover a way? It is always a good rule, I think, to discard any idea based on the premise that the best minds of another age were congenitally inferior to our own. My conviction is that necessity is the mother of discovery and invention, and that the reason why the insight of high religion and the methods of practicing it were so imperfectly developed, is that there was no practical necessity for developing them. The mass of men lived in an ancestral order which was regulated by custom and authority, and made endurable by usage and compensatory consolations. The organic quality of that society into which they fitted took care of their passions; those who had outgrown such a society, or were so constituted that they did not fit it, were the exceptions. From them came the insight of high religion; for them a separated life was a possible solution of their personal problems. There was nothing in the nature of things to compel men to work out a way of life, I won’t say for all men, but at least for many men, by which [p208] they could govern their own natures. Behind any such effort there would almost certainly have to be an urgent need. For the inertia of the human race is immense.