the goal, the entering into rest, the fruition, is, for
the saints or for the enlightened, an actual experience. There is,
then, such a thing as a complete winning of the highest good. So the
faithful may teach. Hereupon the moralists may adopt the phrase which
James frequently used in opposing those who seemed to themselves to be
in actual touch with some absolute Being. The only use of the opinion
of such people, James in substance said, is that it gives them a sort
of "moral holiday." For James, quite erroneously, as I think, supposed
that whoever believed the highest good to be in any way realised in
the actual world, was thereby consciously released from the call of
duty, and need only say:

"God's in his heaven,
All's right with the world."

In such a world, namely, there would be, as James supposed, nothing
for a righteous man to do. The alternative that perhaps the only way
whereby God can be in his heaven, or all right with the world, is the
way that essentially includes the doing of strenuous deeds by
righteous men, James persistently ignored, near as such an alternative
was to the spirit of his own pragmatism.

Nevertheless, it is true that there have indeed {178} been, amongst
the religiously minded, many who have conceived the highest good
merely in the form of some restful communion with the master of life,
merely as tranquillity in the presence of God, or merely as a
contemplative delight in some sort of beauty. And it is true that some
of these have said: "The saints, or at all events the enlightened,
even in the present life, do enter into this rest. And for them there
is indeed nothing left to do." To such, of course, the moralists may
reply: "You enlightened ones seem to think yourselves entitled to a
'moral holiday.' We strenuous souls reject your idleness as unworthy
of a man. Your religion is a barren aestheticism, and is so whether it
takes the outward form of an ascetic and unworldly contemplation or
assumes the behaviour of a company of highly cultivated
pleasure-seekers who delight in art merely for art's sake and know
nothing of duty." To such believers in salvation through mere
attainment of peace, James's criticism rightly applies. In these
lectures, as I ask you to note, I have never defined salvation in such
terms. Salvation includes triumph and peace, but peace only in and
through the power of the spirit and the life of strenuous activity.

But such partisans of the religion of s