renews and fortifies, perhaps with the aid of sympathetic communion, the faith and will which is religion.
Every religion, I take it, intends to help its votaries in this way. It wishes to maintain and to reinforce in them the strictly religious spirit.
But here as elsewhere rationalism, curiosity, metaphor, and deduction from metaphor, operate by way of distortion. When faith weakens, the unity of the spirit tends to sever itself into ideas of persons in relation with each other, and the common conceptions of persons begin to react; the sides of the central experience, which prayer was to hold together, begin to fall apart, and the meditation and inspiration of unity cannot but be transformed accordingly. “Father,” “King,” “Lord,” “Creator,” all these words may help our sluggish imaginations in certain ways. But all of them offer by-paths for practical
