r something--not ourselves--that gives a warrant,
founded in the whole nature of things--a warrant for holding that this
resoluteness will succeed and will bring us into union with that which
saves.

Hence it is, indeed, true that if there is _no_ master of life with
whom we can come into touch, _no_ triumph of the good in the universe,
_no_ real source of salvation--religion must result in disappointment.
And then our only recourse must, indeed, be the moral will. This
recourse is one that, as we have seen, {224} many in our time are
quite ready to accept. And such, in my own opinion, are for reasons
that they do not themselves admit actually well on their way toward
real salvation. Only it is useless to attribute to them, in their
present stage of conviction, any conscious and assured possession of
religious insight. To sum up, then, religion demands the presence of
the master of life as a real being, and depends upon holding that the
good triumphs.

But if we attempt to combine the two assertions, "All evil ought to be
destroyed" and "In the universe as a whole the good triumphs," and
hereupon to face the facts of human life as religion finds them, we
are at once involved in familiar perplexities. With many of these
perplexities the limitations of the present discussion, as already
explained, forbid us to deal. I am merely trying to show, for the
moment, why the presence of evil in our lives seems to be a hindrance
in the way of religious insight. And it is enough if I emphasise at
this point what must readily come to the consciousness of all of you
when you consider the situation in which our whole argument seems now
to have placed us.

The very existence of the religious need itself presupposes not only
the presence, but the usual prevalence of very great evils in human
life. For unless man is in great danger of missing the pearl of great
price, he stands in no need of a saving process. A religious man may
come to possess an acquired optimism--the hard-won result of the
religious {225} process which seems to him to have pointed out the way
of salvation. But a man who begins with the assurance that all is
ordinarily well with human nature is precluded from religion, in our
sense of the word religion, by his very type of optimism. Such an
optimist of the "first intention," such a believer that in the main it
is well with human nature, can be, as we have seen, a moralist,
although he is usually a very simple-minde