The Christian has not escaped the dangers of the common lot. He too, despite his own contrary principles, has, from the beginning of the Christian Church, been tempted as we all are to trust to mechanism and even to sacrifice in its favour the powers of life. We ought not to be surprised; what else can reasonably be expected? A good machine, whether it be made of steel and brass, or of language, or of settled formulae and plans, or of any other product of life, is an admirable servant. It is convenient; it brings satisfaction to widespread and deeply-rooted needs of life itself. Moreover there is nothing mysterious (so it seems), or even problematic, about it. The plain man is not called upon to question or wonder or speculate in regard to anything behind it, any powers or vague connexions with powers, not understood. The good machine does what it has to do and there's an end of it. A man knows where he is when he has such a thing—or when it has him. There is even a sense of comfort and security in being ruled and cared for by it, as, for example, in the case of the machinery of a State.

In this difficult world there seems, indeed there is, need for something of the kind to supply a considerable part of our religious demand. We are social beings; we are, as we are beginning to see more plainly, brothers in a community; we must organize our religion as we organize everything else in which the community of persons has its common interest. And God, the Christian may say, and has said, would not leave us, has not left us, to uncertainty and to our questioning and wondering and speculative adventure. He has provided answers to our questions, facts in response to our wondering, an open view for our speculation. Or, to put it in another way, he has given us a 'plan' or 'scheme,' or an ecclesiastical apparatus, of salvation; he has revealed religious truth to us and marked out an established method of approaching him and securing our own safety in respect of his judgement and our destiny at his hands. Nothing of so great importance has been left, could have been left, in the hands of men, to find out or not find out—poor creatures that we are.

Now, there is truth behind this, both as to the part of God and as to the part of man in the matter. We are social, we are brethren, we must organize. God, so all Christians say and many philosophers, no more leaves us to ourselves than he leaves to itself any part of his worlds. But Christians formally declare in their Creed that he is no machine-maker; he is Lord and Giver of Life. They complain, too, against science on the ground that (as they have come to believe) it must of its constant character set material mechanism above life in the order of the world. They are pledged to oppose this; and when they complain against science for a fault and failure which is soon—so many biologists and philosophers declare—to be a fault and a failure of the past, they are faithful to their pledge. But they are men, with the faults and failures of men. Habit has its snares for them; the complication of needs that meets them in their effort to maintain themselves, body, mind and spirit, in the world, entangles them. The short cut, the provided means, everything and anything that seems to make matters easy or safe—in short, the logical or legalistic or institutional machine—is attractive. And for most men this machine in any of its protean forms, is perhaps only the more attractive the more valued is the treasure it seems to ensure or to protect. The faith once for all delivered—how precious that is! Salvation in this world and the next—can anything be of greater import for man? Let us make these things secure, whatever else we risk. Only fools or the reckless would embrace chances of adventure where so much is at stake.

So, in spite of the Christian avowal of the superiority and the supremacy of life over its instruments, Christianity has everywhere given disastrous place to the letter and the tool.

Against this the first prophet and the last, in every religion, must always protest. It is the enemy of enemies for all prophets. You can see war waged against it in the Old Testament; you can see that war carried to the utmost in the Gospel of the New. Now the challenge rings among us more clearly than it has rung for this long time. And, as ever, it has new notes and a new phrasing of its music.... That, perhaps, is why so many of us fail to recognize it for what it is. That, certainly, is why the due honour paid to prophets of the past does not prevent men from stoning or neglecting those of the present. The voice is always different, because it is the voice of life.

The use and need for the prophet is a fact not only in religion but in all the arts and in philosophy. He alone keeps any one of these in touch with life, or rather recalls it to life when it has been encumbered or perhaps even arrested by that which life has made. He is, in very deed, the voice of the encumbered spirit making itself heard, proclaiming in one fashion or another that the pursuit of beauty and truth as well as of holiness is of the spirit, and must have the spirit's liberty or it will altogether fail. In the arts and in philosophy we do not call him a prophet, but often, in the arts, we speak of him (when we have recovered from the shock he gives) as 'inspired,' and in philosophy we call him 'great.' Great he is and inspired—we could hardly choose better and more deeply significant words. He is the enlarger of life and the bearer of the spirit, whether he uses the language of philosophy, of poetry, painting or music, or of religion. But always he comes waging war upon our superstitious devotion to the things that have once been made, proclaiming either divine truth or divine beauty or divine holiness (according to his mission), as that for the sake of which they must ever be remade.

We who have learnt our lesson from science as well as from philosophy should be sure friends to the prophet. We have learnt enough of the story of life to see that from its beginning on the earth it strove towards liberty, towards the indetermination by circumstance and the freedom of choice that man has reached. We have seen life lost in mere material size and crushed by the weight of material protective armour; and we know what these things mean. We know, too, what entanglement in habit means for our own selves. We are good and sure friends of the prophet. Or we may be, if we will.

It is high time that he should find such friends—men ready to meet him with that in their minds which prepares his way before him. He has too long been the voice driven to cry in the wilderness. Too long and too often he has found men opposing him with a settled prejudice in favour of the vested interests—the sanctified, it may be, and glorified vested interests—of law and order and creed, of institution and crystallized opinion. It is time that a new atmosphere should be made about him and that these things should be visibly set in their right place and held at their right value. When this is done the secret materialism of his opponents will be brought to light. For, however it may be disguised, all overvaluing of the instrumental product of life's activity comes of the undue depreciation of living spirit and the undue appreciation of its means. Science and philosophy, in teaching us now to seek for the true relation of matter and spirit, are also teaching us to lend a willing ear to the prophet. When we have learnt to see in man the beginning of a synthesis of order and freedom in a vital harmony not manifest in those starry heavens to which men point as the standing witness of God against prophets of new freedom, we are ready to confess, if we have found our God, that in him that perfect synthesis is declared and in man it is foreshadowed and to be pursued.