A forecast of the course this process will take cannot be made, nor is one needed. The spirit and temper of reverence for life is a force which works effectively in every direction. The important thing is that it shall be present with a strength and a steadiness which will suffice to bring about the transformation. The moralizing of the religious and political community If the Church is to accomplish its task, it must unite men in elementary, thoughtful, ethical religiousness. This [pg 281] it has done hitherto very imperfectly. How far it is from being what it ought to be, its absolute failure in the war revealed. There devolved on it the duty of summoning men out of the struggle of national passions to reflexion, and to keep them in the spirit and temper of the highest ideals. It was not able to do this, and indeed did not seriously attempt to. Only too completely historical, and too well organized, and too little a directly religious association, itself succumbed to the spirit of the time and mixed up with religion the dogmas of nationalism and pragmatism. There was only one tiny church, the community of the Quakers, which attempted to defend the unconditional validity of reverence for life, as it is contained in the religion of Jesus. The spirit and temper of reverence for life is able to work for the transformation of the Church to the ideal of a religious association, because it is itself deeply religious. In all historically formulated belief it seeks to bring into general acceptance as the elemental and essential thing in piety the ethical mysticism of oneness with the infinite Will, which experiences itself in us as the will to love. By putting in the very centre of things the most living and universal element of piety, it leads the different religious associations out of the narrowness of their historical past, and paves the way for understanding and union between them. But this spirit and temper does even more than that. Besides bringing the existing historical religious associations out of their historical existence into a development towards the ideal of a religious association, it works also where they can do nothing, in the sphere of non-religion. There are many non-religious people among us. They have become so partly through thoughtlessness and absence of any world-view, and partly because as a result of honest thinking they could no longer be content with a traditional religious world-view. The world- and life-view of reverence for life enables these non-religious minds to [pg 282] learn that every world- and life-view which begins to think honestly necessarily becomes religious. Ethical mysticism reveals to them the necessity to thought of the religion of love, and leads them back to paths which they believed they had abandoned for ever. Just as the transformation of the religious association must be the result primarily of an inward change, so must that of the social and political community also.