In spite of the enormous improvement which would certainly be visible, were we to compare the average ecclesiastical attitude and average Church service in this country with those of a hundred years ago, the sense that religion involves submission to the rules and discipline of a closed society--that definite spiritual gains are attached to spiritual incorporation--that church-going, formal and corporate worship, is a normal and necessary part of the routine of a good life: all this has certainly ceased to be general amongst us.

If we include the whole population, and not the pious fraction in our view, this is true both of so-called Catholic and so-called Protestant countries.

Professor Pratt has lately described 80 per cent.

of the population of the United States as being "unchurched"; and all who worked among our soldiers at the front were struck by the paradox of the immense amount of natural religion existing among them, combined with almost total alienation from religious institutions.

Those, too, who study and care for the spiritual life seem most often to conceive it in the terms of William James's well-known definition of religion as "the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the Divine."[119] Such a life of the Spirit--and the majority of educated men would probably accept this description of it--seems little if at all conditioned by Church membership.