The form is literary and the outcome in a sense negative; there is no attempt to put new wine into old bottles, no apologetic tone, no unction. Experience is consulted afresh, without preoccupation as to the results of reflection; and if these results are religious, it is because any reasoned appreciation of life is bound to be a religion, even if no conventionally religious elements are imported into the problem. In fact, those prophets who have said that the Sabbath was made for man and who have given moral functions to historical religion, as well as those philosophers who have best understood its nature, have seemed irreligious to their contemporaries, because they have looked upon religion as an interpretation of reality, not as a quasi-reality existing by itself and vouched for merely by tradition and miracle. Religion is an imaginative echo of things natural and moral: and if this echo is to be well attuned, our ear must first be attentive to the natural sounds of which, in religion, we are to develop the harmony. It is, therefore, not an objection to Jean Lahor's competence to gather for us the elements of a religion that he is a poet rather than a theologian and an observer rather than a philosopher, or that he presents his intuitions without technical apparatus in a series of highly coloured epigrams and little pictures. On the contrary such simplicity and directness are an advantage when, as in this case, the guiding inspiration is religious. It is religious because, on the one hand, it is imaginative; we are asking ourselves everywhere what Nature says to us and what we are to say in reply; and on the other hand, because it is rational, and these messages and reactions are to be unified into a single science and a single morality. The logical scheme of the system is not made explicit: there is no argumentation and no answers are offered to the objections that might naturally suggest themselves. But the sayings are so arranged and made so to progress in tone and subject that a system of philosophy is clearly implied in them; and the essence of this system is at times briefly expressed.