The religious crises which take place in the great world, in the conditions of the age and so forth, are only the enlarged reflections of personal crises constantly occurring to ourselves, which, even if they were absent from the general conditions of the age, would still present themselves, in our private experience, so long as suffering and death were elements in life. The existence of a crisis is not unnatural to religion, but perfectly natural, the atmosphere in which it breathes most freely, the soil in which it strikes its deepest root. We are wholly mistaking what religion is when we think of it as some secret or power which is going to banish the great crises of our experience and leave us with none to face. The truth is the very opposite. The penalty--no, not the penalty but the high reward--of having any religion that is worth the name, is that it will conduct us into critical situations, that it will reveal perplexities where without it none would exist. From some perplexities religion does indeed give release. It gives release from those that are not worthy of us, that belittle us when we indulge them, that make us selfish, timid and unloving--the care for self, the fear that something dreadful may happen to us, either in this world or in the next, unless we take immense precautions against its happening. But in releasing from these perplexities, which are not worthy of us, it confronts us with others on a higher level, where our finer essence finds the employment for which it was made. Instead of hiding the great crises, instead of banishing them, or giving us anæsthetics to make us unconscious of their presence, religion reveals them, makes us aware of them, sharpens our consciousness of their presence; but at the same time reveals us to ourselves as beings who are capable of overcoming them. If on the one hand it uncovers the pain of life and makes us feel it with a new intensity, on the other it liberates the love that conquers pain, a power mightier than death and sharper than agony. One might almost define religion in these terms. That in each of us, and in all of us which faces the crisis, which rises to meet it, which feels, when confronted by it, that its hour is come and for this cause it came into the world.