June 10

THE aspect of God is different in the measure of each man's individuality, and the intimate thing of religion must therefore exist in human solitude, between man and God alone. Religion in its quintessence is a relation between God and man; it is a perversion to make it a relation between man and man. . . . The point of motive lies in the individual life, it lies in silent and deliberate reflections, and, at this, the most striking of all the rules of the [Order] aims. For seven consecutive days in the year, at least, each man or woman under the Rule must go right out of all the life of man into some wild and solitary place, must speak to no man or woman, and have no sort of intercourse with mankind. It came to me suddenly as very strange that, even as we sat and talked, across deserted seas, on burning sands, through the still aisles of forests, and in all the high and lonely places of the world, beyond the margin where the ways and houses go, solitary men and women sailed alone, or marched alone, or clambered—quiet, resolute exiles; they stood alone amidst wildernesses of ice, on the precipitous banks of roaring torrents, in monstrous caverns, or steering a tossing boat in the little circle of the horizon amidst the tumbled incessant sea, all in their several ways communing with the emptiness, the enigmatic spaces and silences, the winds and torrents and soulless forces that lie about the lit and ordered life of men. I saw more clearly now something I had seen dimly already, in the bearing and faces of this Utopian chivalry, a faint persistent tinge of detachment from the immediate heats and hurries, the little graces and delights, the tensions and stimulations of the daily world. It pleased me strangely to think of this steadfast yearly pilgrimage of solitude, and how near men might come then to the high Distances of God.

WELLS

THE SPIRIT'S GROWTH