eciation; we have to ask whether the fruits
in question can help us to judge the absolute value of what religion
adds to human life. Were I to parody Kant, I should say that a
"Critique of pure Saintliness" must be our theme.

If, in turning to this theme, we could descend upon our subject from
above like Catholic theologians, with our fixed definitions of man and
man's perfection and our positive dogmas about God, we should have an
easy time of it. Man's perfection would be the fulfillment of his end;
and his end would be union with his Maker. That union could be pursued
by him along three paths, active, purgative, and contemplative,
respectively; and progress along either path would be a simple matter
to measure by the application of a limited number of theological and
moral conceptions and definitions. The absolute significance and value
of any bit of religious experience we might hear of would thus be given
almost mathematically into our hands.

If convenience were everything, we ought now to grieve at finding
ourselves cut off from so admirably convenient a method as this. But
we did cut ourselves off from it deliberately in those remarks which
you remember we made, in our first lecture, about the empirical method;
and it must be {321} confessed that after that act of renunciation we
can never hope for clean-cut and scholastic results. WE cannot divide
man sharply into an animal and a rational part. WE cannot distinguish
natural from supernatural effects; nor among the latter know which are
favors of God, and which are counterfeit operations of the demon. WE
have merely to collect things together without any special a priori
theological system, and out of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as
to the value of this and that experience--judgments in which our
general philosophic prejudices, our instincts, and our common sense are
our only guides--decide that ON THE WHOLE one type of religion is
approved by its fruits, and another type condemned. "On the whole"--I
fear we shall never escape complicity with that qualification, so dear
to your practical man, so repugnant to your systematizer!

I also fear that as I make this frank confession, I may seem to some of
you to throw our compass overboard, and to adopt caprice as our pilot.
Skepticism or wayward choice, you may think, can be the only results of
such a formless method as I have taken up. A few remarks in
deprecation of such an opinion, and in farthe