l relations between religion
and morality, our earlier analysis of the religious need, have shown
us that unless you are able to make some sort of effective appeal to
principles that link you with the whole nature of things, your
religious need must remain unsatisfied, and your last word will have
to take, at best, the form of a moral, not a religious doctrine.
Religion does not require us to solve all mysteries; but it does
require for its stability some assurance that, so far as concerns our
need of salvation, and despite the dangers that imperil our salvation,
those that are with us, when we are rightly enlightened, are more than
those that are against us.

In order to make this fact yet clearer, let us suppose that all such
assurance is taken away from us. Review the result. Let it be supposed
that we need salvation. Let it be granted that, as we naturally {221}
are, In our blindness and narrowness, and in the caprices of our
passions, we cannot find the way out unless we can get into touch with
some spiritual unity and reasonable life such as the loyal man's cause
seems to reveal to him. Let it be further supposed, however, that all
human causes are, in their way and time, as much subject to chance and
to the capricious blows of fortune as we ourselves individually are.
Let it be imagined that the cause of causes, the unity of the whole
spiritual world, is, in fact, a mere dream. Let the insight of the
reason and of the will, which, when taken in their unity, have been
said by me to reveal to us that the universe is in its essence Spirit,
and that the cause of the loyal is not only a reality, but _the_
reality--let this insight, I say, be regarded as an illusion. Let no
other spiritual view of reality prove probable. Then, indeed, we shall
be left merely with ideals of life in our hands, but with no assurance
that real life, in its wholeness, approves or furthers these ideals.
Our need of salvation will then, to be sure, still remain. Our
definition of what salvation would be if it should become ours will be
unchanged. But, having thus abandoned as illusory or as uncertain all
the sources of insight which I have so far been defending, we shall
have upon our hands only the moral struggle for the good as our best
resource. We shall then hope for no assurance of salvation. We shall
abandon religion to the realm of mythical consolations, and shall face
a grim world with only {222} such moral courage as we can muster fo