Our present lecture will be devoted to three tasks. First, we shall
try to show that the religious consciousness of mankind, when it is
concerned with the need and with the way of salvation, must needs
appear in many various and apparently conflicting forms, but that,
nevertheless, these conflicts need not discourage us. For, as we shall
attempt still further to explain, the underlying motives of the higher
religions are, after all, much more in agreement than the diversities
of creeds and the apparent chaos of religious experiences would lead
us to imagine. In order to make this deeper unity of the higher
religious life of mankind plain, we shall try to show, more fully than
we did in the last lecture, how the consciousness of the ideal of
life, and of the need of salvation, naturally arises in the experience
of the individual man. The religious paradox, as, in our former
lecture, we defined that paradox, depends upon the fact that the
principal religious motives are indeed perfectly natural and {42}
human motives, which need no mysterious movings from another world to
explain their presence in our lives; while, on the other hand, these
very motives, when once they appear, force us to seek for relief from
spiritual sources that cannot satisfy unless they are far above our
natural human level of life--that is, unless they are in some
definable sense superhuman. But about superhuman matters it is not
surprising that ignorant mortals should widely differ, despite the
deeper unity that underlies all our nobler religious needs.
Thus the unity of the religious concerns of mankind is perfectly
compatible with the fact that men differ so widely in faith. The
mysteries of religion belong to our natural failure to conceive
readily and to grasp adequately the religious objects. But our
religious need is not a mystery; and our religious interests are as
natural as is our ignorance. The higher forms of the religious
consciousness are due to perfectly human motives but lead to a
stubborn quest for the superhuman. To understand whence the higher
religions get their moving principle, you have only to survey our
natural life as it is, in all its pathetic and needy fallibility. But
if the higher religions are to find what they seek, they call for
sources of insight which you cannot define, unless we are able to know
a reality that transcends human nature as it is--unless we can come
into genuine intercourse with a spiritual realm that is above man.
This naturalness of the religious {43} motives, this supernatural and
naturally baffling character of the religious objects, I am, then,
first to illustrate still further than I at the last time was able to
do.
I shall thus be led, in the second place, to the mention of that
source of religious insight to which, at the close of the former
lecture, I directed your attention, namely, to our social experience.
Society, in a certain sense, both includes and transcends the
individual man. Perhaps, then, something can be done toward solving
the problem of the religious paradox, and toward harmonising the
varieties of religious opinion, by considering the religious meaning
of our social consciousness. The religious paradox is that the needy
and ignorant natural man must somehow obtain the spiritual power to
get into a genuine touch with a real life that is above his own level.
If he is to be saved, something that is divine must come to be born in
the humble manger of his poor natural lie. How is this apparition of
the divine in the human, of the supernatural in the natural,
conceivable? It is that question which most of all divides men into
various religious sects. Perhaps a study of our social experience,
which, indeed, often tends to mould our naturally narrow selfishness
into nobler spiritual forms, may throw light upon this problem. And so
I shall, in this second part of the present discourse, state the case
for our social experience as a source of religious insight.
{44}
We shall, however, no sooner state this case than we shall begin to
see how inadequate our ordinary social experience is to give us full
religious insight. Therefore, in the third place, I shall try to
estimate more critically both the merits and the imperfections of this
second source of religious light, and thus I shall be led, as I close,
to the mention of a third source, from which, as I hold, we can learn
what neither our unaided private experience nor our ordinary social
experience ever adequately shows.