Nature, life, this is also _religion_, genuine, true religion at least. We have not created it in us yet—this overpowering longing and striving to surrender ourselves to another, a higher. To be sure, we have received it as a heritage from our mother. At first a flood of love and longing flowed through our souls from her eyes and heart. But her gift to us was in turn a gift to her. In that gift all love’s beams focused, gathered together, from all the ends of the earth and the eternities. In that gift all life was wedded to the waking spirit—all life, sleeping and dreaming, found its existence. And as this life awoke in us, we called it “inspiration,” we felt that a Stronger had come upon us, against which we could do nothing; we called it happiness, heart, love, God—the name was noise and sound—and yet it was all feeling, veiled in heavenly glow. Then the name became everything. On this name scribes exercised their wits. They wrote it in their books and taught it in their schools. Then the schoolmasters became the lords of faith. What was once original life was now to be taught and learned—forgetting that while the psychology, or history, or philosophy of religion can be taught, _religion_ cannot be, any more than you can teach grass to grow, or flowers to bloom, or birds to sing, or lovers to love. So, religion came to be a thing of grades, like the “grades” of a school—the more grades, the more religion! At last the scholar in turn becomes a master! Verily, nowhere in the world has schoolmasterism done so much harm as in religion. No scoff of the scoffer, and no sword of the executioner, has dealt so deep and deadly wounds upon the religious life, as has the folly of the wise and the understanding who press their school knowledge and their school system upon men as religious faith, and so overspin the entrance to the garden of the heart with their spider-webs that no one can find the path any more to its bloom and fragrance. To be sure, objections to all this bristle. Is not the blessing of the school—so this or that objector might urge—so manifest that, on account of the blessing, all its evils might be very well put up with? The school makes the unintelligible intelligible. The school widens the bed of the spiritual life, so that its stream no longer devastatingly overflows its banks. The school builds canals everywhere, that the watering of the land of the human may be as extensive as possible, and the spirit of life be universally fertilized with the achievements of civilization and culture. We may thank our schools that all the world today has learned to read and write. And, for him who can read and write, the way is open to all the treasures of the human spirit—and where is there a civilization that equals ours in the effort to provide schools corresponding to all the spheres of life? Ought we not to bless such effort, promote and support it, with all the means in our power?