; and so
long as this athletic attitude is possible all goes well--morality
suffices. But the athletic attitude tends ever to break down, and it
inevitably does break down even in the most stalwart when the organism
begins to decay, or when morbid fears invade the mind. To suggest
personal will and effort to one all sicklied o'er with the sense of
irremediable impotence is to suggest the most impossible of things.
What he craves is to be consoled in his very powerlessness, to feel
that the spirit of the universe {47} recognizes and secures him, all
decaying and failing as he is. Well, we are all such helpless failures
in the last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with
lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us
down. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity and
provisionality of our voluntary career comes over us that all our
morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and
all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-BEING that
our lives ought to be grounded in, but, alas! are not.

And here religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her
hands. There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no
others, in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been
displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the
floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind, what we most
dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our
moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for
tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep
breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be
anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by
mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away.

We shall see abundant examples of this happy state of mind in later
lectures of this course. We shall see how infinitely passionate a
thing religion at its highest flights can be. Like love, like wrath,
like hope, ambition, jealousy, like every other instinctive eagerness
and impulse, it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or
logically deducible from anything else. This enchantment, coming as a
gift when it does come--a gift of our organism, the physiologists will
tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say --is either there
or not there for us, and there are persons who can no mor