The gnawing pride of religious individualism cloaks itself in the assumption that the individual has transferred his reverence _entire_ from the traditional deity to “the present; God” as Emerson called Him, or to the present Reality as successors of Emerson often prefer to call It. But actually that transfer is never accomplished. The reverence never arrives entire. Always some of it, often most of it, leaks away unnoticed during the transshipment. Therefore this exchange is never attempted by the greatest men of religion, nor advocated by the truest realists or humanists. Jesus and Socrates both found the “Father’s business” in the Temple, in the moral and imaginative organism of orthodox religion, and never more so than when they were doing their best to cleanse it of thieves. They were wrongly accused of an intention for which some of our modern spiritual leaders have been wrongly praised, the intention of destroying the Temple in order to rebuild it on their own insights, as it were in three days. No doubt all men of deepest insight are strongly tempted, in their first maturity, by this pseudo-divine impatience with tradition. They yearn to show immediately that the Power within them is more reliable than the “pinnacle of the Temple.”[26] But they perceive the spiritual pride of this yearning, its tempting of God, and they forthwith school themselves to the divine patience. They recognise that the Temple is essential for _their own_ fullest development. They do not patronise it diplomatically for the public welfare while deprecating it for themselves. They see that the fullest type of spiritual life is attainable only through the unbroken “tension,”[27] the constant critical interaction, between personal and institutional religion, between individual inspiration and a rich tradition. They know that their own humility, like that of the multitudes whom they influence, must grow and bear fruit in the kind of temple that George Herbert saw, the temple which is at once, and mysteriously, within and without. In short, the greatest leaders of the spirit faced the pride of spiritual immediacy and subdued it. But Emerson did not. He only partly faced it, and he very considerably succumbed to it.[28] He fell, and modern spirituality fell with him. The greatness of this default in so great a man is admitted very reluctantly by those of us who have loved him from youth. When they were beginning life, he told them what a happy day it was for the youth when he discovered that “the above” was the same as “the within.” He did not tell them that “the within,” on the same happy day, begins to leak down through an unseen pride to “the below.” He told them that “I the imperfect adore my own Perfect.” He was not careful to explain to them how very imperfect is this Perfect--or else, how scantily It is my own.