H In religion there is, there ever must be, an emotional element. Noble emotion, lofty and purified feeling, is ever the homage paid by human nature to the beauty of Goodness, and the attraction and even entrancing loveliness of Truth. Nature, in her tender and majestic moods of softness or of storm ; human nature, in its external fairness of form or of expression, more still in its interior attractiveness of purity or of self-forgetting — these have a power unrivalled in force and persistence of awakening and stimulating the nobler and loftier feelings of the human heart. Sweet to the soul at eventide is the voice of the sweet singer; sweet to a generous heart and an earnest mind the burning word of encouragement, or the supporting glance of affection from a fair
* F. Grierson, The Invincible Alliance (1913), 49.
ST. LUKE XXIV. 32 481
face speaking the thought of a soul beautiful and loved and strong. Human nature — human nature, so sad, so wrecked, so erring, yet so beautiful, with the likeness of a Divine life, and the air of a better country still upon it, despite the Fall, — this, above all, will waken the human soul, and send the heart throbbing in waves of noble, therefore of bravely controlled, emotion.
What else is the meaning of the high office of poetry, of painting, of music ? By what else do you thrill in romantic literature under the touch of the master's hand ? How otherwise, but through this response of feeling, come many of those re- awakings of nobler thoughts and intentions which often fill us with shame at shortcoming, and through sorrow and pity undoubtedly do us good ? Naturally, then, when the better vision of a heavenly country, when the fairer vision of Him who is "chief est among ten thousand and altogether lovely," are presented to the human mind, these will kindle our enthusiasm and fire our feelings. This is not wrong — on the contrary, it is right and real, and it may be blessed. Only let us remember that such feelings, indeed, are religious, but they are not Eeligion ; if with them we allow ourselves to be content, we shall make a great mistake. They become dangerous if they are not — to borrow a phrase from chemistry — precipitated into conduct, if they do not leave behind them a deposit of more firmly fixed conviction, a residuum of unassailable principle, and a calmer depth of conscientious resolve.^
* W. J. Knox Little, The Light of Lift, 125.
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