The results of our first lecture appear to have brought the religious
problems, so far as we shall attempt to consider them, into a position
which in one respect simplifies, in another respect greatly
complicates our undertaking.
I
In one way, I say, our undertaking is simplified. For, as we have
defined religion, the main concern of any religion that we are to
recognise is with the salvation of man, and with whatever objects or
truths it is important to know if we are to find the way of salvation.
Now the experiences which teach us that we need what I have ventured
to call by the traditional name salvation, are, from my point of view,
experiences common to a very large portion of mankind. They are great
and, in certain respects at least, simple experiences. You can have
them and estimate them without being committed to any one form of
religious faith, without accepting any special creed about
supernatural {38} things, and even without hoping to find out any way
of salvation whatever. The essential conditions for discovering that
man needs salvation are these: You must find that human life has some
highest end; and you must also find that man, as he naturally is, is
in great danger of failing to attain this supreme goal. If you
discover these two facts (and I personally hold them to be facts whose
reality you can experience), then the quest for the salvation of man
interests you, and is defined for you in genuinely empirical terms.
Given the problem, you may or you may not see how to solve it. You may
or you may not appeal to what you suppose to be a revelation to guide
you on the way. But in any case, granted these conditions, granted
that your experience has shown you your need of salvation--then the
problem of religion is upon your hands. Soluble or insoluble, the
topic of a revelation from above, or of a scientific inquiry, or of a
philosophy, or of a haphazard series of efforts to better your
condition, this problem, if it once comes to hold your attention, will
make of you a religious inquirer. And so long as this is the case, no
degree of cynicism or of despair regarding the finding of the way to
salvation, will deprive you of genuinely religious interest. The issue
will be one regarding facts of live experience. The concerns that for
you will seem to be at stake will be perfectly human, and will be in
close touch with every interest of daily life.
{39}
To conceive the business of religion in this way simplifies our
undertaking, in so far as it connects religion not merely with
doubtful dogmas and recondite speculations, but rather with personal
and practical interests and with the spirit of all serious endeavour.
Upon the other hand, this way of defining religion does, indeed, also
complicate certain aspects of our present task. For if, from our point
of view, religion thus becomes, in one way or another, the concern of
everybody who has once seen that life has a highest goal, and that we
are all naturally in great danger of missing this goal--still any
effort to study the nature of religious insight seems to require us to
be somehow just to all the endless varieties of human opinion
regarding what the highest goal of human life is, and regarding the
way to attain that goal after we have once defined it. In some sense,
in our further inquiry, nothing human can be alien to us, in case it
involves any deep experience of man's purpose in living, or of man's
peril as a seeker after the attainment of his purpose; or any
assurance regarding the presence or the power which, entering into
some sort of union with any man's own spiritual life, seems to that
man an apt Deliverer from his evil plight, a genuinely saving
principle in his life.
How great the resulting complications that threaten our investigation
seem to be the conclusion of our former lecture showed us. Countless
{40} souls, trusting to their individual experience, have learned, as
we at the last time indicated, to define their ideal, and their need,
and, upon occasion, to discover the power that they took to be their
saving principle--their deliverer. Who amongst all these were right,
either in their judgment as to their need or in their consciousness
that they had found the way that leads to peace, to triumph, to union
with the goal of human life? Were all of them more or less right? Were
any of them wholly deluded? Are there as many supreme aims of life as
there are individuals? Are there as many ways of salvation as there
are religions that men follow? And by what means shall we decide such
questions? Grave and infinitely complicated seem the issues which
these queries arouse.
Upon one side, then, our problem is pathetically simple, human,
practical, even commonplace. Daily experience, in serious-minded
people, illustrates it. The plainest facts of our life exemplify it.
It concerns nothing more recondite than that tragedy of natural human
failure which you may constantly witness all about you, if not within
you. Upon the other side, no questions more bring you into contact
with the chaotic variety of human opinion, and with the complexities
of the whole universe, than do the religious questions, when thus
defined in terms of men's deepest needs and of men's hopes and faiths
regarding the possible escape from their most pressing peril of
failure.
{41}
Our first lecture gave us a glimpse of this simplicity of the main
definition of our problem and of this complication with regard to the
conflicting proposals that are made toward its special formulation and
toward its solution. We have now to study further the sources of
insight upon which every solution of our problem must depend.