“Everyday” has many ways of justifying the return of the believer to its sceptical casualness. It is easy to persuade oneself that one is taking life or oneself “too seriously.” The mind is very self-protective; it has a disposition to abandon too great or too far-reaching an effort and return to things indisputably within its scope. We have an instinctive preference for thinking things are “all right”; we economise anxiety; we defend the delusions that we can work with, even though we half realise they are no more than delusions. We resent the warning voice, the critical question that robs our activities of assurance. Our everyday moods are not only the antagonists of our religious moods, but they resent all outward appeals to our religious moods and they welcome every help against religious appeals. We pass very readily from the merely defensive to the defensive-aggressive, and from refusing to hear the word that might stir our consciences to a vigorous effort to suppress its utterance. Churches, religious organisations, try to keep the revivifying phase and usage, where it may strike upon the waning or slumbering faith of the convert, but modern religion as yet has no such organised reminders. They cannot be improvised. Crude attempts to supply the needed corrective of conduct may do less good than harm. Each one of us for himself must do what he can to keep his high resolve in mind and protect himself from the snare of his own moods of fatigue or inadvertency. But these passive and active defences of current things which operate in and through ourselves, and find such ready sympathy and assistance in the world about us, these massive resistance systems, are only the beginning of our tale of the forces antagonistic to the Open Conspiracy that lurk in our complexities. Men are creatures with other faults quite beyond and outside our common disposition to be stupid, indolent, habitual and defensive. Not only have we active creative impulses but also acute destructive ones. Man is a jealous animal. In our youth and adolescence our egotism is extravagant. A great number of us at that stage would rather not see a beautiful or wonderful thing come into existence than have it come into existence disregarding us. Something of that jealous malice, self-assertive ruthlessness, there is in all of us. At his worst man can be an exceedingly combative, malignant, mischievous and cruel animal. And few of us--none of us--are altogether above the possibility of such phases. When we consider the oppositions to the Open Conspiracy that operate in the normal personality, we appreciate the soundness of the catechism which instructs us to renounce not only the trivial world and the heavy flesh, but the active and militant devil.