Those who teach truth in its mere abstractness can never take much hold of the general mind, and success awaits a teaching which is intellectually sound (that is, consistent with the clearer thought of the day), and at the same time able, by a wealth of fit symbols, to make itself at home in all sorts of plain minds. And it is just this that is apt to be destructively wanting in a time of intellectual and social change. Why is it that the symbol encroaches and persists beyond its function? Evidently just because it is external, capable of imitation and repetition without fresh thought and life, so that all that is inert and mechanical clings to it. All dull and sensual persons, all dull and sensual moods in any person, see the form and not the substance. The spirit, the idea, the sentiment, is plainly enough the reality _when one is awake to see it_, but how easily we lose our hold upon it and come to think that the real is the tangible. The symbol is always at command: we can always attend church, go to mass, recite prayers, contribute money, and the like; but kindness, hope, reverence, humility, courage, have no string attached to them; they come and go as the spirit moves; there is no insurance on them. Just as in the schools we teach facts and formulas rather than meanings, because the former can be received by all and readily tested, so religion becomes external in seeking to become universal. It is perhaps hardly necessary to recall the application of this to Christianity. Jesus himself had no system: he felt and taught the human sentiments that underly religion and the conduct that expresses them. The Sermon on the Mount appears paradoxical only to sluggish, sensual, formal states of mind and the institutions that embody them. In our times of clearer insight it is good sense and good psychology, expressing that enlargement of the individual to embrace the life of others which takes place at such times. This natural Christianity, however, is insecure in the best people, and most of us have only a fleeting experience of it; so the teachers who wished to make a popular system, valid for all sorts of persons and moods, were led to vulgarize it by grounding it on miracles and mystic authority and enforcing it by sensual rewards and punishments. The perennial truth of what Christ taught comes precisely from the fact that it was not a system, but an intuition and expression of higher sentiments the need of which is a central and enduring element in our best experience. It is this that has made it possible, in every age, to go back to his life and words and find them still alive and potent, fit to vitalize renewed systems. The system makers did well, too, but their work was transient. A good system of symbols is one which, on the whole, stands to the group or to the individual for a higher life: merit in this matter being relative to the particular state of mind that the symbol is to serve. It is quite true that—