r
the uncertain conflict. Our loyalty itself will lose its religious
aspect. For the objective goodness of our cause--the divine grace
which its presence seems to offer to our life--will no longer mean
anything but a faint and uncertain hope, which we shall keep or not
according to the caprices of our personal resolutions. Such, I say,
would be the outcome of rejecting all sources of religious insight
into the real nature of things.

The result, in the case now supposed, will be one which any honest man
will indeed accept if he must, but which no one can regard as
including any satisfactory religious insight whatever. I certainly do
not here present these considerations as in themselves any arguments
for religion, or as in themselves furnishing support for our previous
arguments regarding the nature and the merits of the sources of
insight which we have been reviewing. The case for which I have argued
in the foregoing lectures must indeed stand or fall solely upon its
own merits. And if the reason and the will, as the spirit of loyalty
interprets and unifies their teachings, do _not_ really show us any
truth about the whole nature of things, I would not for a moment ask
to have their teachings tolerated merely because, without such
teachings, we should lose our grounds for holding to a religious
interpretation of life. If we _must_ fall back upon mere moral
resoluteness, and abandon any assurance as to the religious objects,
and as to {223} the way and the attainment of salvation, I, for one,
am quite ready to accept the call of life, and to fight on for a good
end so long as I can, without seeking for religious consolations that
have once been shown to be mythical. But I have indicated to you, in
general, my grounds for holding that our previous sources actually do
give us an insight which is not only moral but religious, and do throw
light upon our relations to a reason which moves in all things, to a
divine will which expresses itself in all the universe, and to a
genuine revelation of its purposes which this makes of itself when it
inspires our loyalty. My present purpose is, not to reinforce these
grounds by the mere threat that their rejection would involve an
abandonment of any well-grounded religious assurance, but to present
to you the fact that religion is, indeed, a search for a really divine
foundation for the saving process.

Religion differs from morality in looking beyond our own active
resoluteness fo