There is a beautiful saying of Penn's which sets forth what many good men of very different creeds must have felt again and again before he gave the thought expression: "The humble, meek, merciful, just, pious, and devout souls are everywhere of one religion; and when death has taken off the mask they will know one another, though the divers liveries they wear here makes them strangers." May we not venture to carry further the thought and say, that this religion includes [p.6] every servant of truth, and every man who is recognizing in practice in his own life the need of his fellows, by subordinating his own happiness and interest to theirs? That there is in reality a religion which all good men share we do, indeed, recognise in practice in everyday life; how else can we explain the appeal to conscience, to the sense of duty, to the unselfish desire to benefit others, which is constantly made to men of the most divergent religious views, whose theories of life would not be accepted by each other for a moment? How is it then possible for us to make more clear to our eyes and to others this common basis of religion, and to build more securely upon it the structure of our lives? We must not be disappointed if it is difficult to give intellectual expression to this basis of life; at best such expression must be imperfect, and we can only hope to arrive at it very slowly. Perhaps some hint of the way in which one may look at the problem may be given by that strange poem of W. B. Yeats "The Indian upon God." The poet pictures the way in which the creatures of earth each frame their own idea of the Divine Creator after their own image; some vast Brocken spectre, perhaps, some may say, cast by the reflection of imagination upon the clouds of the world without. And yet the poem has surely within it another meaning. To each creature comes, coloured, it is true, by different visions, [p.7] some dim picture of the Maker, some sense of sustaining presence in the world and in their own lives: /I passed along the water's edge, below the humid trees,/ /My spirit rocked in evening light, the rushes round my knees,/ /My spirit rocked in sleep and sighs; and saw the moorfowl pace/ /All dripping on a grassy slope, and saw them cease to chase/ /Each other round in circles, and heard the eldest speak:/ /"Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong and weak,/ /Is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky./ /The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams from His eye."/ /I passed a little further on, and heard a lotus talk:/ /"Who made the world, and ruleth it, He hangeth on a stalk,/ /For I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide/ /Is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide."/ /A little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes/ /Brimful of starlight, and he said, "The stamper of the skies,/ /He is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could He/