The ordinary man, when he hears this doctrine expounded, is almost certain to say with the Indian sage: “the worship of the Impersonal laid no hold upon my heart.” His heart is set on the enjoyment of worldly goods, and the doctrine, for all but a few exceptional spirits, requires a radical change of heart. It is forbidding except to the few in whom “the intellect (is) passionate and the passions cold.” For it demands a conversion of their natural desire to possess tangible things into a passion to understand intangible and abstract things. This philosophy is ascetic, unworldly, and profoundly disinterested. Now it can be argued that this is precisely what the Gospels teach as to the meaning of salvation. Excellent authority can be cited from the Gospel of John and the Epistles of St. Paul to justify this form of the Christian tradition: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” ... “the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal” ... “I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind.” It can hardly be denied, as Dean Inge says, that “we are able to carry back to the fountain-head that Christian tradition” which may quite accurately be described as the religion of the spirit. But mixed with it in the Scripture, there is the other tradition, the popular tradition which may be called the religion of commonsense. Out of this latter have grown the institutions of the church and the faith of the mass of men. The religion of the spirit has been reserved for a few, “a succession [p045] of lives which have been sheltered rather than inspired by the machinery and statecraft of a mighty institution,” and while the few who lived the life of the spirit have undoubtedly done much to inspire the popular religion with new insight, they have been, on the whole, a group apart. Yet those who belonged to these two distinct traditions did use the same churches and the same symbolism. There was an even deeper bond of unity between them. Both believed that renunciation and self-discipline are the way of salvation—in the religion of the spirit as the way to enter now into love of eternal things; in the religion of commonsense as a rather heavy price paid to God in return for everlasting happiness after death. It may be argued, therefore, by churchmen like Dr. Fosdick, that the “abiding message” of the Bible about immortality is that men must renounce the world in order to win eternity. That some men mean by eternity a kind of perpetual motion and others a kind of abstraction is merely a difference in their habits of thought, and does not impair the validity or the importance of the central experience. If they will renounce their worldly passions, they will find what the idea of eternity has to give, no matter what they imagine it to mean.