A brief summary of the contents of this chapter will prepare the way for the next. The movements of higher thought in the West have been dominated, nominally by the professional thinker, really by the average man. As a thinker, the average man is incurably dualistic. Enslaved as he is to the requirements of his instrument, language, he instinctively opposes mind to body, spirit to matter, good to evil, the Creator to the Creation, God to Man; and in each case he fixes a great gulf between the "mighty opposites" that constitute the given antithesis. Confronted by the mystery of existence, he has explained it by the story of Creation. Confronted by the twin mysteries of sin and sorrow, he has explained them by the story of the Fall. From the story of the Fall he has passed on to the doctrine of original sin, to the belief that Nature in general, and human nature in particular, is corrupt and ruined, and therefore intrinsically evil. Shrinking from the hopeless prospect which this belief opens up to him, he has found refuge in the conception of another world,--of a world above and beyond Nature, a world of Divine perfection from which information and guidance can at God's good pleasure be doled out to Man. For a "supernatural revelation" (as theologians call this sending of help from God to Man) special instruments are obviously needed,--a special People, a special Scripture, a special Lawgiver, a special Prophet, a special Church. Hence has arisen the idea that certain persons, certain castes, certain institutions have a monopoly of Divine truth and grace, and are therefore in a position to dictate to their fellow-men how they are to bear themselves if they wish to be "saved," what they are to believe, what they are to do. From this the transition has been easy to the further idea that salvation is to be achieved by blind and mechanical obedience,--by renouncing the right to follow one's own higher nature, to obey one's own conscience, to use one's own reason, to map out one's own life. In order to induce men to yield the obedience which is required of them, their lower instincts have had to be appealed to (for the higher, ruined by the Fall, have presumably ceased to operate),--their desire for pleasure by the promise of Heaven, their fear of pain by the threat of Hell. And in order that their lives may be kept under close supervision and their merits accurately appraised, an ever-increasing stress has had to be laid on what is outward, visible, and measurable in human life, as distinguished from what is inward and occult,--on correctness in the details of prescribed conduct, or again in the details of formulated belief. As the idea of salvation through mechanical obedience develops into a systematised scheme of life, the higher and more spiritual faculties of Man's nature become gradually atrophied by disuse. In other words, the channel of soul growth--the only channel that leads to spiritual