Religious Insight means then, for my present purposes, _insight into
the need and into the way of salvation_. If the problem of human
salvation has never come home to your mind, as a genuine problem of
life and of experience, you will feel no interest in religion in the
sense to which the present lectures will arbitrarily confine the term.
If, on the other hand, your live personal experience has made you
intimate with any form or phase of this problem of the pathetic need
and cry of man for salvation, then I care not, at least at the outset
of these discourses, whether you have thought of this problem in
theological or in secular, in reverent or in rebellious, or in cynical
terms, whether you have tried to solve it by scientific or by
sentimental or by traditional means, or whether the problem now takes
shape in your mind as a problem to be dealt with in a spirit of revolt
or of conformity, of sceptical criticism or of intuitive faith, of
hope or of despair. What we want is insight, if insight be possible,
into the way of salvation. The problem with which these lectures are
to deal is: What are the sources of such insight?
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At the outset of our effort to deal with this problem, I shall try to
show how the experience of the individual human being is related to
the issues that are before us. That is, in this and in part of our
next lecture, I shall discuss the sense in which the individual
experience of any one of us is a source of insight into the need and
the way of salvation. Hereby we shall erelong be led to our social
experience as a source of still richer religious insight. And from
these beginnings we shall go on to a study of sources which are at
once developments from these first mentioned sources, and sources that
are much more significant than these first ones would be if they could
be isolated from such developments. I ask you to follow my discourse
in the same spirit of tolerance for various opinions and with the same
effort to understand the great common features and origins of the
religious consciousness--with the same spirit and effort, I say, by
which I have tried to be guided in what I have already said to you in
this introduction. It is always easy to see that, in religion, one man
thinks thus and another man thinks otherwise, and that no man knows as
much as we all wish to know. But I want to lay stress upon those
perennial sources from which human insight has flowed and for ages in
the future will continue to flow. To understand what these sources are
will help us, I believe, toward unity of spirit, toward co-operation
in the midst of all our varieties of faith, and toward insight itself
and the fruits of insight.
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