[Sidenote: But the love of a personal God must be distinguished in all this from love of the ideal God.] And remark, also, that if the love of a personal God mystically conceived tends to become dim in modern societies, the same is not true of the love of an ideal God conceived as the practical type of conduct. The ideal God, in effect, in no sense exists in opposition to the world, He surpasses it simply; He is at bottom identical with the progress of human thought which, with its point of departure in brute fact, outstrips the actual and foresees and prepares the way for perpetual progress. In human life the real and the ideal are harmonized, for life as a whole both is and becomes. Whoever says life, says evolution; and evolution is the Jacob’s ladder resting both on heaven and on earth; at the base of it we are brutes, at the summit of it we are gods, so that religious sentiment cannot be said so much to be in opposition to science and philosophy as to complete them; or rather, it is at bottom identical with the spirit that animates them. We have spoken of religion as science,—in its beginnings as unconscious science; in the same way science may be called religion headed back toward reality; headed, that is to say in the normal direction. Religion says to the human race: Bind yourselves together into a single whole; science shows the human race that all mankind are inevitably parts of a single whole already, and the teaching of the two is practically one. [Sidenote: Summary.] In effect there is taking place a certain substitution in our affections; we are coming to love God in man, the future in the present, the ideal in the real. The man of evolution is precisely the man-God of Christianity. And this love of the ideal harmonized with the love of humanity, instead of finding its vent in vain contemplation and ecstasy, will fill the limbs with energy. We shall love God all the more that He will be, so to speak, the work of our own hands. And if there be really at the bottom of the human heart some indestructible element of mysticism, it will be employed as an important factor in the service of evolution; our heart will go out to our ideas, and we shall adore them in proportion as we shall realize them. Religion having become the purest of all things—pure love of the ideal—will at the same time have become the realest and in appearance the humblest of all things—labour. * * * * * [Sidenote: Mysticism and asceticism.] The natural and practical complement of mysticism is asceticism; and asceticism is another of the elements of religious morality that are becoming daily feebler in the presence of the modern spirit. [Sidenote: Asceticism in the good and the bad sense.]