Terry does not like to use the word "religion." But he certainly belongs to the type of the religious man. One of the most marked characteristics of the religious temperament is this abandonment of personal and family ties, this indifference and often hostility to social law, "this emotional devotion to something intangible." All the anarchists and social rebels I have known have, more or less, the religious temperament, although a large part of their activity is employed in scoffing at and reviling religion--as they think the God of theology has been largely responsible for the organisation of social and political injustice. But the deeply religious spirits have often been hostile to theology, as well as to all other complicated forms of society. Here are some religious words: "There must be some meaning," wrote Terry, "for all this ancient agony. Oh, that I might expand my written words into an Epic of the Slums, into an Iliad of the Proletaire! If an oyster can turn its pain into a pearl, then, verily, when we have suffered enough, something must arise out of our torture--else the world has no meaning. On this theory, all my pangs are still to come. I too will arise out of my sacrificial self and look back on my former bondage in amaze, even as I now look down on the dizzy slums where I am and yet am not! It cannot be that I came up out of the depths for nothing. If I could pierce my heart and write red lines, I might perhaps tell the truth. But only a High Silence meets me, and I do not understand. In letting myself down to the bottomless, I discovered I could not stand it long enough. I am dumbly dissatisfied. I feel like a diver who has nigh strangled himself to bring up a handful of seaweed, and so feels he must down again--and again--until he attains somewhere the holy meaning of Life." Terry feels that somehow deep in his life he has been crucified, that society has nailed him to the cross: "I was alone on the cross and with bloodshot, beseeching eyes beheld the world objectively. Yet I was aware of a harmony beyond me, though not in me or around me." It is this "harmony beyond," this religious sense of "something far more deeply interfused" which, ever conscious in the idealist's mind, makes the concrete vision of everyday fact so ugly, leads to anarchism of feeling profound and constant. But in this world, which as a whole the heart rejects--"my heart," said Terry, "is the last analysis of all things"--the idealist sees things of beauty which constitute for him the elements of perfection, elements which in some future state he dreams may be fully realised in a social whole.