A religion that is not founded in nature is all fiction and falsity, and as mere a nothing as an idol. _William Law._
The gain or the loss of life—this is what the Christian religion calls us to face. Will you be a slave to the life you have and in the end lose it, or at least all that makes it worth living? Or will you, in the liberty wherewith Christ makes you free, take up your heritage of more life in union with him?
There is a good deal in our experience that may be read with advantage as commentary on this challenge of religion. There are men (we have known them) who grow smaller before our eyes. We say that they are wrapped up in themselves. There are others who as plainly grow larger. Their interests expand; they take in more of the concerns of other men and, as we put it, make them their own. These, obviously, far from being wrapped up in themselves, are for ever breaking down barriers and passing beyond them. If we do not see them for some time we find them happily different. They are caring about ideas and aims and persons they were not interested in before; they have been learning; they have, in one word, grown. And those others will have shrunk. A man grows by the spiritual food on which he feeds. And if such a statement sounds remote from ordinary experience (which it is not), let us say that the more he really has the more he really is.
Now religion acknowledges this and interprets it. In the eyes of a religious man such growth means a growth in God. And he points out that it happens only where a man has sought for its own sake, not for his, what he has won. He says that the way of life is a way of disinterestedness in regard to self and interestedness in all else. And, as usual, he sends us to the Gospel for the fundamental principle underlying what experience shows. 'Whosoever will save his life shall lose it.' That is the kernel of the matter. Because love is the secret of growth in spiritual life, whether intellectual, moral or aesthetic, greed shall not procure its fruits. In the nature of things it cannot. That is why growth in 'spirit and life' seems so paradoxical. When I want food to eat I may be as greedy as I please. This will not prevent me from having it. When I want food of the spirit greed will only take me out of my true path and I shall find husks that the swine eat and Dead Sea fruit.