an essentially religious act. And for that youth it was also a
very practical act.

Let me turn to another case. Many years ago I well knew a man, much
older than myself, who has long since died. A highly intelligent man,
ambitious for the things of the spirit, he was also beset with some
defects of health and with many worldly {134} cares. His defects of
health made him sensitive to the sort of observation that his physical
weaknesses often attracted. In addition, he had enemies, and once had
to endure the long-continued trial of a public attack upon his
reputation--an attack from which he at length came forth triumphant,
but not without long suffering. Once I heard him telling about his own
religion, which was the faith of a highly independent mind. "What I
most value about my thought of God," he in effect said, "is that I
conceive God as the one who knows us through and through, and who
estimates us not as we seem, but as we are, and who is absolutely fair
in his judgment of us." My friend had no concern for future rewards
and punishments. The judgment of God to which he appealed, and in
which, without any vanity, he delighted, was simply the fair and true
judgment, the divine knowing of us all just as we are.

Now do you not know people whose religion is of this sort? And are not
all such forms of religion, as far as they go, practical? Is the
recognition of an all-seeing insight, as something real, not in itself
calming, sustaining, rationalising? Does it not at the very least
awaken in us the ideal which I repeatedly mentioned in our last
lecture, the ideal of knowing ourselves even as we are known, and of
guiding our lives in the light of such a view of ourselves? Can such
an ideal remain wholly a matter of theory? Is it not from its very
essence an appeal to the will? {135} Was not my elder friend finding a
guiding principle of action in a world where he was often
misunderstood? Could one steadily conceive God in these terms without
constantly renewing one's power to face the world with courage?

Surely you all know many people who value the divine as they define
the divine, mainly because they conceive God as what they call the
Great Companion. And, for many such, it is the intimately perfect
insight of this companion that they seem to themselves most to value.
The ways of this companion are to them mysterious. But he knows them.
They repeat the word: "He knoweth the way that I take." He sees them.
He is clo