d 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 fo