_Per aspera ad astra:_ there is no easy road or short cut to collective, spiritual progress. I am not arguing against possible "acts of grace" working on individuals, but the uplift of a race, a class or even a congregation cannot be done by a sort of spiritual legerdemain based on hypnotic suggestion. Individuals may be so swayed for the time being, and, in a few favourable cases, the initial impetus will be carried on, but most human souls are like locusts and flutter earthward when the wind drops. They may have advanced more or less, but are just as likely to be deflected or even swept back again by a change in the wind. Revivalist campaigns and salvation by a _coup de théâtre_ do not encourage consecutive religious thought, which is the only stable foundation of religious belief; second-hand convictions do not wear well in the storm and sunshine of unsheltered lives, and a creed that has to be treated like an orchid is no use to anybody. If the same amount of earnest, consecutive effort and clear thinking had been applied to religion as has gone to build up civilisation we should all be leading harmonious spiritual lives to-day and sin and sorrow would probably have been banished from the earth, but few people think of applying their mental faculties to religion, and its exploitation by modern mercantile methods is not the same thing at all. Civilisation is an accretion of countless efforts and ceaseless striving to ameliorate existing conditions, whereas religion started as a perfect thesis and has since got overgrown with human bigotry and fantasies while absorbing very little of the vast, increasing store of human knowledge. That is why civilisation has got so much in advance of religion that the latter cannot lead or guide the former, but only lags behind, like a horse hitched to a cart-tail. Missionary writers are rather apt to confuse the gifts of civilisation with the thing itself. A savage can be taught to use a rifle or an electric switch or even a flame-projecter, but this is no proof that he is really civilised. On the other hand, the scholarly recluse and philosopher whose works uplift and refine humanity may bungle even with the "fool-proof" lift which takes him up to his own eyrie in Flat-land, but he is none the less civilised.