I used to get the headache whenever I went to prayer-meeting.

   A prayer-meeting is a place where you can substitute words for feelings without fear of detection.

   Naturally I got the headache. Religion doesn't belong in the brain--it belongs in the heart. Starve your heart and stuff your brain--and you may expect moral vertigo. Even a doctor could prognosticate that much.

   A sermon is mostly a dissection of Deity. And you can't dissect a thing till it's dead. Theology as a whole, is a postmortem examination on God. The form is all there, but somehow the soul is gone. A church is too musty for God to live in-- God's very breath is freedom, God's life is sunlight. God is more animal than man. Whereas theologians are skimped as animals, and skewed even as men. God never taught in a theological seminary--God was always too heterodox. The only place God teaches is in the School of Nature. It is a boarding-school, and Nature provides most liberally for her wards. But the children prefer that hokey-pokey vendor named Orthodoxy. That's why they aren't hungry for their meals. It's why they're sallow, too-- you can't make red blood out of any sort of sop.

   I do not condemn a church service unqualifiedly. I have only three objections to it--the prayers, the hymns and the sermon. I believe in the kind of prayer that says nothing, feels everything--then acts. I believe in the song that thrills of itself from the throat of the lark, or the lover, or the woman just glorified by motherhood as she watches with the angels over her first babe. I believe in the sermon that a silent life makes most eloquent.

   I do not believe in formal prayers.

   I do not believe in paid choirs.

   I do not believe in professional sermonizers. The world at large though needs these things--else it wouldn't tolerate them. It needs Sunday observance--I need it myself. It needs the calm, the music, the flowers, the holy awe, the reflection and aspiration that distinguish the Day of Rest from the days and nights of turmoil. Sunday should be a synonym for saneness. Physically and psychologically we need just the change we get. Spiritually we need a change we do not get. If a man must sermonize, let him put on the overalls during the week. Let him toil and plan, and fail and starve, and sin and suffer and weep--with Humanity. Then let him tell how his faith has delivered him; and the people will throng the outer doors to hear him--he is now one of them. He has certified his message.

   It is the Christlessness of the church that makes men irreligious.

   Jesus the Nazarene was the sweetest, sanest, dearest soul that has yet come and gone on this planet. Jesus the Christ was, and is, the fullest embodiment of Deity yet revealed to men. But should he appear in the flesh to us, the church of to-day would brand Jesus the Nazarene a sinner and scout Jesus the Christ for an anarchist.

   We none of us mean to crucify Truth--we are only beside ourselves with the fever of externalism. The same things that make us unnatural make us undivine. In the beginning, God resided happily in every human heart. But while Humanity was passing through the blind trance of Civilization, God grew weary waiting for something to do. So God stole away. When Humanity awoke, there was only God's outer garment left. And they call that religion--a form and a name. No man who calls himself theologian or metaphysician can truly heal the human soul. Only Silence heals--silent sympathy and silent knowledge.

   Now we come to Spirituality--a possession almost as little understood and as much misunderstood as Love. Which is as strong as words can make it. Spirituality is seldom found inside the church and never recognised outside. Pseudo-spirituality is the curse of all organized religion. Let me mention a few brands--imitations very widely and successfully passed off as genuine.

   Spirituality is not Piety.

   They never go together, even. Spirit is Infinite Energy. Whereas the "pious" are confessedly impotent. Many a pious man is good--in spite of his religion. Good, but not spiritual. A corpse is always good.

   Spirituality is not Solemnity.

   Life is too serious to be solemn over. Even in a graveyard you may smell the flowers instead of reading the tombstones. Those on whom God smiles never frown back at God. Any god you can frown at is an idol. And idols are always sorrowful things.

   Spirituality is not Credulity.

   When you know, how can you cherish a blind belief ? Spirituality is an all-pervading consciousness, that penetrates the unseen and assures the uncertain. A man may be religious--and ignorant. He cannot be spiritual--and ignorant.

   Spirituality is not Regularity.

   To pray regularly is to pray never. The security of small souls lies in regularity, that of great souls in spontaneity. Only a great soul can be spiritual--or spontaneous. Many a man who "hasn't missed church a single Sunday for twenty years" has missed God every Sunday for twenty years.

   Spirituality is not Loquacity.

   All the inspiration of Heaven you can put into three little words--"I love you." You don't even need words--just radiate it. When I meet people, I do not murmur "Pleased to know you." But I give them a smile and a handclasp that speak volumes--if they have learned the language of the heart; if they haven't, we must remain strangers anyway. Talk is the dissipation of the idle--work is the conservation of the spiritual. And they seldom unite.

   Spirituality is not Loyalty.

   How many a complaisant mortal has tried to excuse his inertness with some such sentiment as this "I never bother with these new-fangled religions--my father's God is good enough for me." Was your father's life good enough for you? For his life was but a miniature copy of his God. You may inherit your theology--it's mostly a matter of heirlooms. But you can't get spirituality that way--it's "made fresh every hour." No, I am not irreverent--spirituality is sweeter than any confection and more strengthening than the "staff of life."

   Spirituality is not Charity.

   Spirituality gives,--gives without stint. But of itself--not of its possessions. Moreover it never announces or recalls the fact. Can the river stop at any one point and say to the shore "I give you a pint to-day; be good and you may get a pint and a drop tomorrow"? The subtlest satisfaction in giving conies to him who leaves his name off the gift. The "anonymous" giver is surest of having his name recorded in Heaven.

   Spirituality is not Subtlety.

   There's nothing occult about it, nothing esoteric, theological, or even ethical. A bird can't flutter and fly at the same time; the occultist flutters since too feeble yet to fly. You can hear the flop of his wings and see the roll of his eyes--but you can't discern him getting anywhere. I call to mind a lecture given in New York not long since by a Theosophist of international fame. He was discoursing beautifully on the subject of "Auras"--pink, blue, red, white and yellow--with generous advice on how to dye our own the proper hue. Suddenly the stereopticon sputtered, gasped, flickered and gave up the ghost. Then you should have seen the aura of that venerable lecturer--it looked like a London fog hung up to dry in a Pittsburg smoke-house! After that I lost interest in his dyeing recipes.

   Nor does Spirituality attend seances for the purpose of materializing itself to order. Spiritists cling pitifully to the personal, the tangible, the form of earth rather than the essence of the Eternal. Whether or not they prove their friends' immortality, they prove their own mortality. One example of the unsaneness of the occult. A certain well-known physician, deeply versed in eerie lore, asked me to come and see him shortly after my first book of poems appeared. He turned to the poem called "The Kiss," gave me a shocked and sorrowing look, and de-

   livered himself somewhat in this wise--"Do you not fear, you will be haunted forever by ten thousand evil spirits, each leering to see how you have glorified passion?" There was no answer-- I only smiled. And yet my heart sank--how could he so misunderstand ?

   Spirituality is not Fixity.

   The spiritual man is anchored to nothing save his own soul. Which makes him seem at times like a leaf tossed by the wind. Then the world decides he has "unsafe religious views." To be everything religiously is to seem nothing to your friends in the church. They have just so many labels stowed away by Custom in the pigeon-holes of their brain. And their only hope of understanding you is to make one of these price-tags fit. But Truth can't be ticketed--it grows more valuable every minute. So by the time the world has arrived at the symbol which appraises you--only your memory survives to be identified. The heretics of to-day are the martyrs of to-morrow and saints of the day after. Know then that to be termed heretic by the world, is to be foretold benefactor to the world.

   Spirituality is not Authority.

   It resides in no book, is limited by no creed, asks no church's support, and cares for no man's opinion. Spirituality is its own sanction. You cannot add to it by any revelation given another, you cannot take from it by any revelation denied another. It in itself is final--nothing without can make it more so.

   Spirituality is not Morality.

   People who don't dare be spiritual call themselves moral. Morality is the human criterion of character, spirituality is the divine. They may coincide--they oftener conflict. That is, morality does the conflicting--God can't conflict with anybody or anything. To obey the moral law may be more immoral than to transgress it--if we obey it, as most people do, under protest or external pressure. Electricity kills a good many people, but you don't blame the current. Spirituality nullifies a good many laws--when they get where they don't belong.

   Spirituality is not Paucity.

   To be "poor in spirit" is not necessarily to be poor in pocket-book or in human tendencies. To be anywhere scant is to be somewhere soulless. The pauper and the ascetic have for ages been taken as the types of spiritual men. Spiritual--or just lazy and anaemic? No pauper can be spiritual who did not first have wealth to relinquish; no ascetic who did not first have passion to sublimize. The Oriental doctrine of Renunciation is responsible for much pseudo-spirituality. Renounce and relinquish are two different words. The true mystic often relinquishes, never renounces. No authentic Messiah ever renounced the world--he only relinquished it on visioning the Infinite. But his devotees, seeing the bare act and blind to the incentive, have renounced for the mere sake of renouncing. A very crude illustration here. Suppose two little brothers have a Noah's Ark between them, with a fine menagerie of wooden animals carefully painted and varnished. One little brother gets mad some clay and smashes his collection of animals; he renounces. The other little brother is presented the same day with a live dog or pony; he relinquishes. You see it's all in the motive, don't you? Besides, the second little brother has left his wooden animals for some other little boy to play with for awhile--a little boy that hasn't any live dog or pony. So many little boys there are like that--little boys, and big boys--and little boys who call themselves big boys.

   All these things Spirituality is not; what then is it?

   Spirituality is a man's permeability with the inflow and outflow of the Deific. It is the capacity of an incarnate soul to do two things; first to isolate itself from sense-elements and become stored with the primal pulse of Omnipotence; then to infuse itself thus charged into whatever or whomever it touches. Not theological at all, you see--not necessarily human. Any being is spiritual whose perceptions are all open heavenward and whose faculties are equally open earthward. Brain and body must be still while soul receives its enduement; then must brain and body rouse every atom for the materializing of the message. A dormant faculty in the brain; a dead fibre in the body; a thought of failure in the mind; a feeling of constraint in the heart; a stoppage anywhere, however slight, will make a man less spiritual by so much. It is a moral impossibility for a lazy man to be spiritual. Perhaps this explains why so few clergymen are spiritual.

   One point in particular would I dwell on.

   It is this: sense and soul are inseparable.

   Read the studies of Havelock Ellis in Sex; truths gleaned the world over by a man absolutely unprejudiced and strictly scientific. Learn how religious exaltation is but a finer form of sex-transport. The trances of adepts are attained through the sublimizing of sex-power. The visions of seers pass down the same way that visions of sex-imagination pass up. The rhapsodies of poets quiver with Truth the Eternal Feminine like as their bodies thrill with the touch of the Woman they love. Spirituality is surcharged with sex. And the sexless are invariably the soulless.

   You quote the advice of great religious teachers who had renounced the delights of sense ? Yes--but their souls never told them to. Only another case of brain interfering between soul and body. The brain of a man unduly objectifies the sex of a man; the brain of a woman unduly subjectifies the sex of a woman. Indeed all sensual excess inculpates the brain--not the body. Since it arises from the mental habit of coaxing sense instead of heeding soul.

   Next to the human tongue, is the human brain the greatest mischief-maker on earth. We can't abolish it just at present--we need it in our business. But we've yet to learn to keep it in its place; with soul overseeing and body working right alongside.

   "How to become spiritual?" has been the perennial problem of the church authorities.

   And their usual answer? "By Fasting and Prayer." Let me echo that answer, affirming it absolutely correct. Only they didn't know how to fast--nor how to pray. God gave them the idea, so it was good. But they asked men instead of

   Nature to help them work it out; and that was bad. Here is a typical case. The Church of Scotland appointed July 23, 1835 as a "Day of Humiliation," to be observed as a General Fast Day everywhere. But they were scared into it--they'd been raising trouble with their neighbors and were getting the worst of the scuffle. So it appeared about time to purloin some of the panoply of God. They evidently thought God would be so tickled to see them starving themselves He would forget to watch the clerical vassals deputed to steal His armor. We observe this attitude of expectation in a certain famous sermon delivered apropos to the Day; the preacher recurring constantly to the "vengeance of Heaven" and the "forgiveness of sins." Also he declares they undertook the Fast from a "sense of duty" and to honor the "spirit of the forefathers." I hope the forefathers felt better after the Fast--the record forgot to say.

   Now of course we don't believe in the "mortification and self-denial" theory, or its consequent sack-cloth-and-ashes practice. Yet the General Fast Day has its advantages--as those sects that still observe it will bear witness. It obviates adverse suggestion--nobody is constantly urging you to eat and prophesying starvation if you don't. It also ensures physiological benefit in the guise of religious blessing. Which will be needed so long as men depend on a blind faith, being ignorant equally of body and soul. Moreover it gives you something better than your symptoms to think about. A point overlooked by some of our professional Fasters. Never mind if your worship be superstition--a man-made God is better than a Devil-made man.

   What is the "Conquest Fast?"

   It is a combination of the early Church Fast with the modern Therapeutic Fast. It attempts to avoid the errors of each yet retain the benefits of both. However more or less it avails thus for you, the Conquest Fast has done this for me; it has spiritualised Spirituality. I never knew before what the word meant. I could accept neither the austerities of the church's theory nor the carnalities of the world's practice. I am now assured, through the visions of the Conquest Fast, that the church must find its own body while the world must find its own soul. Separated, neither the world nor the church can be truly spiritual. United, they may express Deity sublimely and inaugurate Heaven on earth.

   A spiritual man is all of this--and a good deal more.

1. He is natural.
2. He is original.
3. He is energetic.
4. He is magnetic.
5. He is enthusiastic.
6. He is forceful.
7. He is tender.
8. He is liberal.
9. He is worldly-wise.
10. He is self-contained.
11. He is loving.
12. He is womanly.

   I am not yet worldly-wise enough to be spiritual. That's why I'm leaving Naturism and going into business. When this deficiency is supplied, I shall take up the next that needs looking after. Perhaps in fifty or a hundred years I shall be somewhere near spiritual. Even if not--it's a comfort to know what the word means; and to be satisfied with nothing less than the genuine.