Aylmer Maude

then I only dimly sus­pec­ted this, and like all lun­at­ics, simply called all men lun­at­ics ex­cept my­self.

In some of its de­vel­op­ments pro­gress has pro­ceeded wrongly, and with prim­it­ive peas­ant chil­dren one must deal in a spirit of per­fect free­dom, let­ting them choose what path of pro­gress they please.”

Then these mo­ments of per­plex­ity began to re­cur of­tener and of­tener, and al­ways in the same form. They were al­ways ex­pressed by the ques­tions: What is it for? What does it lead to?

As long as I did not know why, I could do noth­ing and could not live.

Today or to­mor­row sick­ness and death will come (they had come already) to those I love or to me; noth­ing will re­main but stench and worms.

All hu­man­ity lives and de­vel­ops on the basis of spir­itual prin­ciples and ideals which guide it. Those ideals are ex­pressed in re­li­gions, in sci­ences, in arts, in forms of gov­ern­ment. Those ideals be­come more and more el­ev­ated, and hu­man­ity ad­vances to its highest wel­fare. I am part of hu­man­ity, and there­fore my vo­ca­tion is to for­ward the re­cog­ni­tion and the real­iz­a­tion of the ideals of hu­man­ity.

He reaches a glade, climbs a tree, and clearly sees the lim­it­less dis­tance, but sees that his home is not and can­not be there; then he goes into the dark wood and sees the dark­ness, but there also his home is not.

Then as now, it was and is quite im­possible to judge by a man’s life and con­duct whether he is a be­liever or not. If there be a dif­fer­ence between a man who pub­licly pro­fesses or­tho­doxy and one who denies it, the dif­fer­ence is not in fa­vor of the former. Then as now, the pub­lic pro­fes­sion and con­fes­sion

So that, now as formerly, re­li­gious doc­trine, ac­cep­ted on trust and sup­por­ted by ex­ternal pres­sure, thaws away gradu­ally un­der the in­flu­ence of know­ledge and ex­per­i­ence of life which con­flict with it, and a man very of­ten lives on, ima­gin­ing that he still holds in­tact the re­li­gious doc­trine im­par­ted to him in child­hood whereas in fact not a trace of it re­mains.

word only showed that where he thought there was faith, in real­ity there had long been an empty space