Our first two lectures dealt with sources of religious insight well
known to all of you, however unsatisfactory you may have found them.
Our third and fourth lectures have led us into philosophical
discussions which many of you will have found neither satisfactory nor
familiar. And so, in imagination, I can hear you declaring that, if
the foregoing sources of insight are indeed all that we have,
religious truth seems still very far away. "The saints," I hear you
saying, "may comfort us when they tell us of their personal and
private intuitions; but they perplex us with the conflicting variety
of their experiences. The social enthusiasts undertake to show us the
way to salvation through love; but the world of men in which they bid
us seek the divine is a world that is by nature as much in need of
salvation as we ourselves are. The sages point to the starry heaven of
reason which, as they insist, overarches us; but this heaven seems
cold; and its stars appear far away from our needy life. And if,
replying to this very objection, and, incidentally, replying also to
the doctrine of the pragmatists, {166} somebody insists that this
heavenly world of the reason is also an expression of the living
divine will, we still remember that our deepest need is to see how the
divine will may be done on earth as it is in heaven. And this is what
we have not yet learned to see. The foregoing sources then appear to
leave us, after all, with no vital and positive religion."
I
Thus some of you may at this point express your discontent. If you do,
I find this discontent justified. If the foregoing lectures had indeed
exhausted the account of the accessible sources of religious insight,
we should be hopeless of finding any religion that could satisfy at
once the individual need for salvation, the social requirement that we
should seek for salvation through union with our brethren, the
rational demand for a coherent view of truth, and the aim of the will
to conform itself to the laws of the master of life with whom we need
to be united. In other words, all of the foregoing sources of insight,
considered as separate sources, present to us problems which they do
not solve, and leave the real nature of the saving process clouded by
mists of ignorance. What we most need at this point is some source of
insight which shall show how to unite the lessons that the preceding
sources have furnished. The present lecture must be devoted to an
account of such a source. I should be quite {167} helpless to engage
in this new undertaking were it not for the fact that the spiritual
life of humanity's best servants and friends has long since shown us
how to overcome the difficulties by which our present inquiry is, at
this point, beset. These friends and servants of mankind have used, in
fact, that source of insight which I mentioned in the closing words of
the last lecture, a source by means of which the results and the
moving principles of individual experience, of social experience, of
reason, and of will are brought into a certain creative unity to which
the noblest spiritual attainments of our world are due. We shall
return, therefore, in this lecture, from speculation to life; and our
guides will be, not the philosophers, nor yet the geniuses of the
inarticulate religious intuitions, but those who, while they indeed
possess intuitions and thoughts, also actually live in the spirit.
Nevertheless, for our purpose, the foregoing method of approaching our
topic has been, I hope, justified. We wish to know the sources and to
see what each is worth. We must therefore consider each source in its
distinction from the others. Then only can we see what brings them
together in the higher religious life. We must reflect where religion
itself wins its way without reflection. Had we begun our study where
this lecture begins, with the effort to understand at once this new
source of insight, we should have been less able than we now are to
discern the motives that enter into its {168} constitution and to
appreciate its accomplishments. We have had to emphasise difficulties
in order to prepare the way for our study of that source of insight
which, in the history of humanity's struggles toward the light, has
best enabled men to triumph over these difficulties.
This new source has come into the lives of men in intimate connection
with their efforts to solve the problem not merely of religion, in our
present sense of the word, but also of duty. I shall therefore first
have to tell you how the problem of duty is distinguished from the
problem of religion. Then I shall show you how the effort to solve
each of these problems has thrown light upon the other.
Duty and religion have, in the minds of all of you, close relations.
Both have to do with our ideals, with our needs, with the conforming
of our lives to our ideals, and with the attainment of some sort of
good. Yet you also well know that these relations of duty and of
morality on the one hand, of religion and of salvation on the other,
are not relations easy to define with entire clearness. Some men in
our age, as you know, tell you that they are unable, in their present
state of mind, to get much help from religion. And some men who insist
that the religious problems have for them no solution whatever, are
ardently and sincerely dutiful in spirit. On the other hand, there are
those who, in their own minds, are so sure of salvation that they
actually make light of the call of duty, or at least {169} see little
that is saving in the thought of duty. In the opinion of very many, no
effort to lead a dutiful life can lead to salvation unless some sort
of divine grace, which is a free gift from above, intervenes to
accomplish the saving process. Meanwhile, there are those who declare
not only that the dutiful life tends of itself to lead to salvation,
but that the persistent doing of our duty is precisely the whole of
what constitutes salvation.
You will readily see that the plan of these lectures forbids any
direct study of the Pauline doctrine regarding the relation of faith
to works, of divine grace to human dutifulness. The mere mention of
St. Paul, however, side by side with the reminder that, at many times
in history, and especially to-day, there are those for whom, despite
Paul's teaching as to the vanity of mere works, there is no religion
but the religion of duty, will serve to show that serious questions
are here involved, and that the true relations between religion and
morality are by no means self-evident.
Let me briefly distinguish between the religious interest and the
moral interest. Then we may be able to recognise how closely they are
related, and yet how far, under certain conditions, they may drift
apart, and how sharply they may sometimes come to be opposed.
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