religion. Power and perfection united, or such perfection as must, we are convinced beyond contradiction, be in the end a clue to power, as in the beautiful weak,[1] or in the lost cause with whose flag we are content to go down, are that to which in religion we have given our heart away.
And now we can see from what we are saved, and how. We are saved, if we must have a word, from isolation; we are saved by giving ourselves to something which we cannot help holding supreme.
You can trace this structure, I have said, throughout human life, for no man is really isolated. Every man, we must hope and believe, has somewhere an allegiance that binds him, some disloyalty which he would rather die than commit. And if you know what this is, then you know where his religion
- ↑ Compare, e.g., Rossetti’s “Staff and Scrip.”
