The word salvation naturally first suggests to your own mind certain
familiar traditions which have played a great part in the history of
Christianity. I do not mean to make light of those traditions nor yet
of the significance of the historical Christianity to which they
belong. Yet, as I have already told you, these lectures will have no
dogmatic religious system to expound, and, for that very reason, will
not attempt the grave task of any extended discussion of Christianity.
I propose at {10} some future time, not in these lectures, but upon a
wholly different occasion, to attempt an application of some of the
principles that underlie the present lectures to the special problems
which Christianity offers to the student of religion. But these
lectures are not to be directly concerned with this special task of
expounding or interpreting or estimating Christian doctrines. I
repeat: My limited undertaking is to consider in company with you the
sources of religious insight, not the contents of any one religion.
You will understand, therefore, that when I define religious insight
as insight into the way of salvation, I use the word salvation in a
sense that I wish you to conceive in terms much more general than
those which certain Christian traditions have made familiar to you.
I have already said that both Buddhism and Christianity are interested
in the problem of the salvation of mankind, and share in common the
postulate that man needs saving. I could have named still other of the
world's higher religions which are characterised by the same great
interest. Had I the time and the technical knowledge, I could show you
how far backward in time, how deep down into the very essence of some
of the religions that seem to us extremely primitive, this concern for
man's salvation, and for a knowledge of the way of salvation, extends.
But the history of religion does not fall within my present scope. And
to the varieties of religious doctrine I can only allude by {11} way
of illustration. Yet the mere mention of such varieties may serve, I
hope, to show you that whole nations and races, and that countless
millions of men, have conceived of their need for salvation, and have
sought the way thereto, while they have known nothing of Christian
doctrine, and while they have not in the least been influenced by
those dogmas regarding the fall of man, the process of redemption, or
the future destiny of the soul of man which are brought to your minds
when you hear the word salvation.
Be willing, then, to generalise our term and to dissociate the idea of
salvation from some of the settings in which you usually have
conceived it. Since there is thus far in our discussion no question as
to whose view of the way of salvation is the true view, you can only
gain by such a dissociation, even if it be but a temporary effort at
generalisation. The cry of humanity for salvation is not a matter of
any one time or faith. The pathos of that cry will become only the
deeper when you learn to see why it is so universal a cry. The truth,
if there be any accessible truth, regarding the genuine way of
salvation will become only the more precious to you when you know by
how widely sundered paths the wanderers in the darkness of this world
have sought for the saving light.
So let me next attempt to define salvation in a sufficiently general
sense. Man is an infinitely needy creature. He wants endlessly
numerous {12} special things--food, sleep, pleasure, fellowship, power
in all its Protean shapes, peace in all its elusive forms, love in its
countless disguises--in brief, all the objects of desire. But amongst
these infinitely manifold needs, the need for salvation stands out, in
the minds of those who feel it, as a need that is peculiarly
paramount, so that, according to their view of life, to desire
salvation is to long for some pearl of great price, for the sake of
which one would be ready to sell all that one has. The idea that man
needs salvation depends, in fact, upon two simpler ideas whereof the
main idea is constituted. _The first is the idea that there is some
end or aim of human life which is more important than all other aims,
so that, by comparison with this aim all else is secondary and
subsidiary, and perhaps relatively unimportant, or even vain and
empty. The other idea is this: That man as he now is, or as he
naturally is, is in great danger of so missing this highest aim as to
render his whole life a senseless failure by virtue of thus coming
short of his true goal_. Whoever has been led to conceive human life
in these terms, namely, to think that there is for man some sort of
highest good, by contrast with which all other goods are relatively
trivial, and that man, as he is, is in great danger of losing this
highest good, so that his greatest need is of escape from this
danger--whoever, I say, thus views our life, holds that man needs
salvation.
Now, I beg you to observe that such a view of {13} life as this is in
no wise dependent upon any one dogma as to a future state of reward
and punishment, as to heaven and hell, as to the fall of man, or as to
any point of the traditional doctrine of this or of that special
religion. Philosophers and prophets, and even cynics, learned and
unlearned men, saints and sinners, sages and fanatics, Christians and
non-Christians, believers in immortality and believers that death ends
all, may agree, yes, have agreed, in viewing human life in the general
spirit just characterised. A very few examples may serve to show how
wide-spread this longing for salvation has been and how manifold have
also been its guises.
I have already mentioned Buddhism as a religion that seeks the
salvation of man. The central idea of the original southern Buddhism,
as you know, is pessimistic. Man, so the Buddha and his earlier
followers taught, is naturally doomed to misery. This doom is so
pervasive and so fatal that you in vain would seek to escape from it
through any luxuries, or, so to speak, excesses, of good fortune. On
the throne or in the dungeon, wealthy or a beggar, man is always (so
the Buddhist insists) the prisoner of desire, a creature of longing,
consumed by the fires of passion--and therefore miserable. For man's
will is insatiable, and hence always disappointed. Now we are here not
in the least concerned with estimating this pessimism. This gloomy
ancient Indian view of existence may be as false as {14} you please.
Enough--millions of men have held it, and therefore have longed for
salvation. For if, as the early Buddhists held, the evil of human life
is thus pervasive and paramount, then the aim of escaping from such
fatal ill must be deeper and more important than any economic aim or
than any intent to satisfy this or that special desire. If man is
naturally doomed to misery, the escape from this natural doom must be
at once the hardest and the highest of human tasks. The older Buddhism
undertakes to accomplish this task by teaching the way to "the
extinction of desire" and by thus striking at "the root of all
misery." In Nirvana, those who have attained the goal have won their
way beyond all desire. They return not. They are free from the burden
of human existence. Such is one view of the need and the way of
salvation.
If we turn in a wholly different direction, we find Plato, in the
great myth of the "Phaedrus," in the arguments and myths of the
"Republic," and in various other famous passages, defining what he
regards as the true goal of the human soul, portraying how far we have
naturally come short of that goal, and pointing out a way of
salvation. And, in another age, Marcus Aurelius writes his "Thoughts"
in the interest of defining the end for which it is worth while to
live, the bondage and failure in which the foolish man actually lives,
and the way out of our foolishness.
But are the partisans of ways of salvation {15} confined to such
serious and unworldly souls as were the early Buddhists and the
ancient moralists? No; turn to modern times. Read the stanzas into
which Fitzgerald, in a highly modern spirit, very freely translated
the expressions of an old Persian poet--Omar Khayyam; or, again, read
the great programme of Nietzsche's ethical and religious revolt as set
forth only a few years since in his "Zarathustra"; or recall Goethe's
"Faust"; remember even Byron's "Manfred"; and these few instances from
amongst a vast wealth of more or less recent literary examples will
show you that the idea of salvation and the search for salvation are
matters that belong to no one type of piety or of poetry or of
philosophy. Cynics and rebels, ancient sages and men who are in our
foremost rank of time, can agree, and have agreed, in maintaining that
there is some goal of life, conceivable, or at least capable of being,
however dimly, appreciated--some goal that, if accessible, would
fulfil and surpass our lesser desires, or would save us from our
bondage to lesser ills, while this goal is something that we naturally
miss, or that we are in great danger of missing--so that, whatever
else we need, we need to be saved from this pervasive and
overmastering danger of failure.
"Oh love, could thou and I with fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits and then,
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?"
{16} Thus Fitzgerald's Omar expresses, in rebellious speech, the need
of salvation. "What is your greatest hour?"--so begins Nietzsche's
Zarathustra in his opening address to the people. And he replies: "It
is the hour of your great contempt"--the hour, so he goes on to
explain, when you despise all the conventional values and trivial
maxims of a morality and a religion that have become for you merely
traditional, conventional, respectable, but infinitely petty. Now, if
you observe that St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, despite its utterly
different religious ideas, begins with an analogous condemnation of
the social world as it was, or as it always naturally is, you may
learn to appreciate the universal forms in which the need for
salvation comes to men's consciousness, however various their creed.
Swinburne's well-known chorus sums up man's life as it is, thus:
"He weaves and is clothed with derision,
Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep."
Such, then, is man's need. "Here we have no continuing city, we seek a
city out of sight"--such is another expression of this same need. What
I ask you to do, just here, is to catch a glimpse of this universal
form of the need for salvation. As you see, there is always a certain
element of gloom and tragedy involved in the first conception of this
need. {17} All depends, for the further fortunes of one's religious
consciousness, upon whether or not one can get insight into the true
nature of this need and into the way toward the needed salvation.