trespass. If there is chaos in the physical world, in the movement of particles in gases and liquids, you may be quite sure there is chaos in the spiritual world to correspond. The one world always mirrors the other.
Long ago, the seer claimed to be able to foretell the future up to a point. Men have always hungered for certainty in the seeming chaos of the spiritual world all around them; and the seer's services were much in demand in societies, which had lost the art of military science as the Greeks and Romans understood it so perfectly, even though most of their lives were spent fighting. Many chapters of this spiritual world have now been charted; although the price of doing so may have been a lessened understanding of what life is about. The professions, including a good part of medicine, are regarded as ordered disciplines; although I would say that a lively imagination can still produce results right outside the expectations of conventional lawyers. All social work is an attempt to make sense of and bring order to the fluid world of human relations, which was formerly governed by iron tradition. But there are still many areas which are uncharted, and which it is best not to try to chart.
However this has been a digression. There are large areas of the spiritual world which we know and regard as ordered. Going one step further, the sole question that religion is concerned with is whether the heart and centre of this spiritual world is personality; or whether the invisible world is a kind of spiritual ether or matrix, in which we live and move and have our being, but which is impersonal, and has the nature rather of an evolutionary or life force? This is what religion is about; it is as simple as that.
Logically this is a fact, the truth of which ought to be discoverable; not a fact whose truth could ever be proved by deductive reasoning, but a fact whose truth, one would have thought, could be verified by experience. The trouble is that this is made difficult by the absence of any criterion by which to…