central things of all--the nature of God, the relation of good and evil, life after death, human psychology. We have not reached the point of being able definitely to identify the moral force of the world with the forces which do not appear to be moral, but are undoubtedly, active--with realities, that is, as we come into contact with them. There are no scientific certainties on these points--we simply have not reached that stage. My friend's view is that out of a certain number of denominations, one is undoubtedly right. My view is that all are necessarily incomplete. But the moment I say this, he says that my religion is so vague as not to be a religion at all. "Now my own position is this, that I think religion, by which I mean our relation to the Power behind the world, is the most important fact in the world, as well as the most absorbingly interesting. Whatever form of religion I study, I seem to see the same thing going on. The saints, however much they differ in dogma, seem to me to have a strong family likeness. Mysticism is a very definite thing indeed, and I have never any doubt that all mystics have the same or a very similar experience, namely, the perception of some perfectly definite force--as real a force as electricity, for instance--with which they are in touch. Something, which is quite clearly there, is affecting them in a particular way. "If you ask me what that something is, I don't know. I believe it to be a sort of life-force, which can and does mingle itself with our own life; and I believe that we are all affected by it, just as every drop of water on the earth is affected by the moon's attraction--though we can measure that effect in an ocean by observing the tides, when we can't measure it in a basin of water. We are not all equally conscious of it, and I don't know why that is. Sometimes I am aware of it myself, and sometimes not. But I have had enough experience of it to feel that something is making signals to me, affecting me, attracting me. And the reason why I am a Christian is because in Christianity and in the teaching of Christ I feel the influence of it in a way that I feel it nowhere else in the same degree. I feel that Christ was closer to what I recognise as God; knew God better than anyone that ever lived, and in a different kind of way--from inside, so to speak. But it's a _life_ that I find in the Gospel, and not a _creed_: and I believe that this is religion, to be somehow in touch with a higher life and a higher sort of beauty.