man; and the religious interests, which appear to fix the
attention upon remote and hopeless mysteries, may seem to him
hindrances to the devoted moral life. Against all dangers and doubts
he hurls his "everlasting No." His only solution lies in
strenuousness. He is far from the Father's house. He knows not even
whether there is any father or any home of the spirit. But he proposes
to face the truth as it is, and to die as a warrior dies, fighting for
duty.

But of course quite a different outcome is, for many minds, the true
lesson of life. The religious man may come to feel sure that the way
of salvation is indeed known to him; but it may seem to him a way that
is opened not through the efforts of moral individuals, but only
through the workings {176} of some divine power that, of its own
moving, elects to save mankind. In this case the classic doctrine that
grace alone saves, and that, without such grace, works are but vanity,
is, in one form or another, emphasised by religious teachers in their
controversies with the moralists. The history of Christianity
illustrates several types of doctrine according to which divine grace
is necessary to salvation, so that mere morality not only cannot save,
but of itself even tends to insure perdition. And in the history of
Northern Buddhism there appear teachings closely analogous to these
evangelical forms of Christianity. So the religious interests here in
question are very human and wide-spread. Whoever thus views the way of
salvation can in fact appeal to vast bodies of religious experience,
both individual and social, to support his opposition against those
who see in the strenuous life the only honest mode of dealing with our
problem. Whoever has once felt, under any circumstances, his
helplessness to do right knows what such religious experience of the
need of grace means. Hence it is easy to see how the earnest followers
of a religion may condemn those moralists who agree with them both as
to the need and as to the dangers of the natural man. In fact the two
parties may condemn each other all the more because both accept the
two postulates upon which the quest for salvation is based.

Yet even these are not the only forms in which this tragic conflict
amongst brethren often appears. {177} I must mention still another
form. Suppose that, in the opinion of the followers of some religion,
not only the knowledge of the way of salvation is open, but also the
attainment of