Yet after all is said, we can hardly fail to see that out of the spoliation and scattering of the religious orders much good came. There was a danger that, like the older indigenous schools which they supplanted, these later foundations might divide the nation in two, all things within their consecrated walls being deemed holy, while all without was unregenerate, given up to wrath. A barrier of feelings and hopes thus springing up, tends to harden from year to year, till at last we have a religious caste grown proud and arrogant, and losing all trace of the spiritual fervor which is its sole reason for being. The evils which surround a wealthy church are great and easily to be understood, nor need we lay stress on them. There is, indeed, cause for wonder in the spectacle of the followers of him "who had not where to lay his head" become, in the Middle Ages, the greatest owners of land in Europe; and we can see how temptations and abuses without number might and did often arise from this very fact. Ambition, the desire of wealth, the mere love of ease, led many to profess a religious life who had never passed through that transformation of will and understanding which is the essence of religion. The very purpose of religion was forgotten, or allowed to be hidden away under things excellent in themselves, yet not essential; and difference of view about these unessential things led to fierce and bitter controversy, and later to open strife and war. We take religion, in its human aspect, to mean the growth of a new and wider consciousness above the keen, self-assertive consciousness of the individual; a superseding of the personal by the humane; a change from egotism to a more universal understanding; so that each shall act, not in order to gain an advantage over others, but rather to attain the greatest good for himself and others equally; that one shall not dominate another for his own profit, but shall rather seek to draw forth in that other whatever is best and truest, so that both may find their finest growth. Carried far enough, this principle, which makes one's neighbor a second self, will bring to light in us the common soul, the common life that has tacitly worked in all human intercourse from the beginning. Individual consciousness is in no way effaced; something new, wider and more humane, something universal, is added to it from above; something consciously common to all souls. And through the inspiration of that larger soul, the individual life for the first time comes to its true power--a power which is held by all pure souls in common.