a good trick or test for separating the wrong idealism from the right,
I will give him one on the spot. It is a mark of false religion
that it is always trying to express concrete facts as abstract;
it calls sex affinity; it calls wine alcohol; it calls brute starvation
the economic problem. The test of true religion is that its energy
drives exactly the other way; it is always trying to make men feel
truths as facts; always trying to make abstract things as plain
and solid as concrete things; always trying to make men, not merely
admit the truth, but see, smell, handle, hear, and devour the truth.
All great spiritual scriptures are full of the invitation not to test,
but to taste; not to examine, but to eat. Their phrases are full
of living water and heavenly bread, mysterious manna and dreadful wine.
Worldliness, and the polite society of the world, has despised
this instinct of eating; but religion has never despised it.
When we look at a firm, fat, white cliff of chalk at Dover, I do not
suggest that we should desire to eat it; that would be highly abnormal.
But I really mean that we should think it good to eat; good for
some one else to eat. For, indeed, some one else is eating it;
the grass that grows upon its top is devouring it silently,
but, doubtless, with an uproarious appetite.




Simmons and the Social Tie

It is a platitude, and none the less true for that, that we need
to have an ideal in our minds with which to test all realities.
But it is equally true, and less noted, that we need a reality
with which to test ideals. Thus I have selected Mrs. Buttons,