But if you grant the general principle thus stated, the presence of
evil in this world, in the forms that we all recognise, and in the
degree of importance that it attains in all our lives, seems, indeed,
a very serious hindrance in the way of religious insight. {220} And
the reason is plain. Religion, as we have said, in seeking salvation,
seeks some form of communion with the master of life. That is, it
seeks to come into touch with a power, a principle, or a mind, or a
heart, that, on the one hand, possesses, or, with approval, surveys or
controls the real nature of things, and that, on the other hand,
welcomes us in our conflicts with evil, supports our efforts, and
secures our success. I have made no effort, in these lectures, to
define a theological creed. Such a creed forms a topic in which I take
great interest but which lies beyond the limitations of this
discourse. Yet our study of the historical relations between religion
and morality, our earlier analysis of the religious need, have shown
us that unless you are able to make some sort of effective appeal to
principles that link you with the whole nature of things, your
religious need must remain unsatisfied, and your last word will have
to take, at best, the form of a moral, not a religious doctrine.
Religion does not require us to solve all mysteries; but it does
require for its stability some assurance that, so far as concerns our
need of salvation, and despite the dangers that imperil our salvation,
those that are with us, when we are rightly enlightened, are more than
those that are against us.
In order to make this fact yet clearer, let us suppose that all such
assurance is taken away from us. Review the result. Let it be supposed
that we need salvation. Let it be granted that, as we naturally {221}
are, In our blindness and narrowness, and in the caprices of our
passions, we cannot find the way out unless we can get into touch with
some spiritual unity and reasonable life such as the loyal man's cause
seems to reveal to him. Let it be further supposed, however, that all
human causes are, in their way and time, as much subject to chance and
to the capricious blows of fortune as we ourselves individually are.
Let it be imagined that the cause of causes, the unity of the whole
spiritual world, is, in fact, a mere dream. Let the insight of the
reason and of the will, which, when taken in their unity, have been
said by me to reveal to us that the universe is in its essence Spirit,
and that the cause of the loyal is not only a reality, but _the_
reality--let this insight, I say, be regarded as an illusion. Let no
other spiritual view of reality prove probable. Then, indeed, we shall
be left merely with ideals of life in our hands, but with no assurance
that real life, in its wholeness, approves or furthers these ideals.
Our need of salvation will then, to be sure, still remain. Our
definition of what salvation would be if it should become ours will be
unchanged. But, having thus abandoned as illusory or as uncertain all
the sources of insight which I have so far been defending, we shall
have upon our hands only the moral struggle for the good as our best
resource. We shall then hope for no assurance of salvation. We shall
abandon religion to the realm of mythical consolations, and shall face
a grim world with only {222} such moral courage as we can muster for
the uncertain conflict. Our loyalty itself will lose its religious
aspect. For the objective goodness of our cause--the divine grace
which its presence seems to offer to our life--will no longer mean
anything but a faint and uncertain hope, which we shall keep or not
according to the caprices of our personal resolutions. Such, I say,
would be the outcome of rejecting all sources of religious insight
into the real nature of things.
The result, in the case now supposed, will be one which any honest man
will indeed accept if he must, but which no one can regard as
including any satisfactory religious insight whatever. I certainly do
not here present these considerations as in themselves any arguments
for religion, or as in themselves furnishing support for our previous
arguments regarding the nature and the merits of the sources of
insight which we have been reviewing. The case for which I have argued
in the foregoing lectures must indeed stand or fall solely upon its
own merits. And if the reason and the will, as the spirit of loyalty
interprets and unifies their teachings, do _not_ really show us any
truth about the whole nature of things, I would not for a moment ask
to have their teachings tolerated merely because, without such
teachings, we should lose our grounds for holding to a religious
interpretation of life. If we _must_ fall back upon mere moral
resoluteness, and abandon any assurance as to the religious objects,
and as to {223} the way and the attainment of salvation, I, for one,
am quite ready to accept the call of life, and to fight on for a good
end so long as I can, without seeking for religious consolations that
have once been shown to be mythical. But I have indicated to you, in
general, my grounds for holding that our previous sources actually do
give us an insight which is not only moral but religious, and do throw
light upon our relations to a reason which moves in all things, to a
divine will which expresses itself in all the universe, and to a
genuine revelation of its purposes which this makes of itself when it
inspires our loyalty. My present purpose is, not to reinforce these
grounds by the mere threat that their rejection would involve an
abandonment of any well-grounded religious assurance, but to present
to you the fact that religion is, indeed, a search for a really divine
foundation for the saving process.
Religion differs from morality in looking beyond our own active
resoluteness for something--not ourselves--that gives a warrant,
founded in the whole nature of things--a warrant for holding that this
resoluteness will succeed and will bring us into union with that which
saves.
Hence it is, indeed, true that if there is _no_ master of life with
whom we can come into touch, _no_ triumph of the good in the universe,
_no_ real source of salvation--religion must result in disappointment.
And then our only recourse must, indeed, be the moral will. This
recourse is one that, as we have seen, {224} many in our time are
quite ready to accept. And such, in my own opinion, are for reasons
that they do not themselves admit actually well on their way toward
real salvation. Only it is useless to attribute to them, in their
present stage of conviction, any conscious and assured possession of
religious insight. To sum up, then, religion demands the presence of
the master of life as a real being, and depends upon holding that the
good triumphs.
But if we attempt to combine the two assertions, "All evil ought to be
destroyed" and "In the universe as a whole the good triumphs," and
hereupon to face the facts of human life as religion finds them, we
are at once involved in familiar perplexities. With many of these
perplexities the limitations of the present discussion, as already
explained, forbid us to deal. I am merely trying to show, for the
moment, why the presence of evil in our lives seems to be a hindrance
in the way of religious insight. And it is enough if I emphasise at
this point what must readily come to the consciousness of all of you
when you consider the situation in which our whole argument seems now
to have placed us.
The very existence of the religious need itself presupposes not only
the presence, but the usual prevalence of very great evils in human
life. For unless man is in great danger of missing the pearl of great
price, he stands in no need of a saving process. A religious man may
come to possess an acquired optimism--the hard-won result of the
religious {225} process which seems to him to have pointed out the way
of salvation. But a man who begins with the assurance that all is
ordinarily well with human nature is precluded from religion, in our
sense of the word religion, by his very type of optimism. Such an
optimist of the "first intention," such a believer that in the main it
is well with human nature, can be, as we have seen, a moralist,
although he is usually a very simple-minded moralist, as unaware of
the graver moral problems as he is cheerfully indifferent to the hard
case in which most of his brethren live. But whoever sees the deep
need of human salvation, as the various cynics and rebels and sages
and prophets whom we cited in our first lecture have seen it, has
begun by recognising the bitterness of human loss and defeat--the
gravity of the evil case of the natural man. Were not the world as it
now is very evil, what, then, were the call for religion? Religion
takes its origin in our sense of deep need--in other words, in our
recognition that evil has a very real place in life. _"Tempora
pessima"_--"The times are very evil"--is thus no phrase of a merely
mediaeval type of world-hatred. The woes of man are the presupposed
basis of fact upon which the search for salvation rests.
And the further one goes in the pursuit of the sources of religious
insight, the more, as we have ourselves found, does one's original
recognition of the ill of the human world become both deepened and
varied. From the solitude of one's individual {226} sorrows one goes
out to seek for religious relief in the social world, only to find how
much more manifold the chaos of ordinary social life is than is the
conflict of one's private passions. If one asks guidance from reason,
reason appears at first as a sort of spirit brooding upon the face of
the depths of unreason. When loyalty itself is created, it finds
itself beset by adversities. If evil drives us to seek relief in
religion, religion thus teaches us to know, better and better, the
tragedy of life. Its first word is, thus, about evil and about the
escape from evil. But its later words appear to have been a persistent
discourse upon our tribulations.
But how can religion, thus presupposing the presence of evil in our
life, and illustrating this presence anew at every step, undertake to
lead us to any assurance of the triumph of a good principle in the
real world, in case, as seems so far obvious, such a triumph of a good
principle would mean that all evil is to be simply destroyed and wiped
out of existence?
Briefly restating the situation, it is this: If the evils of human
life are indeed but transient and superficial incidents, or if--to use
a well-known extreme form of statement--evil is an "unreality"
altogether--then religion is superfluous. For there is no need of
salvation unless man's ordinary case is, indeed, very really a hard
case, that is, unless evil is a reality, and a deep-rooted one. But,
on the other hand, if evil is thus deep-rooted in the very {227}
conditions of human life as they are, and if it persists upon higher
levels even of the religious life, religion seems in danger of total
failure. For unless goodness is somehow at the real heart of
things--is, so to speak, the core of reality--the hope of salvation is
a dream, and religion deceives us. But goodness, by the hypothesis
that we are just now considering, requires that evil should be wholly
abolished. How can that which should not exist at all, namely, evil,
be in such wise the expression of the real nature of things that on
the one hand religion is needed to save us from evil, and yet is able
to do so only by bringing us to know that the real nature of things is
good? Here is our problem. And it is a hard one.
In brief, as you may say, religion must take its choice. Either the
evil in the world is of no great importance, and then religion is
useless; or the need of salvation is great, and the way is straight
and narrow; and then evil is deeply rooted in the very nature of
reality, and religion seems a failure.