d moralist, as unaware of
the graver moral problems as he is cheerfully indifferent to the hard
case in which most of his brethren live. But whoever sees the deep
need of human salvation, as the various cynics and rebels and sages
and prophets whom we cited in our first lecture have seen it, has
begun by recognising the bitterness of human loss and defeat--the
gravity of the evil case of the natural man. Were not the world as it
now is very evil, what, then, were the call for religion? Religion
takes its origin in our sense of deep need--in other words, in our
recognition that evil has a very real place in life. _"Tempora
pessima"_--"The times are very evil"--is thus no phrase of a merely
mediaeval type of world-hatred. The woes of man are the presupposed
basis of fact upon which the search for salvation rests.

And the further one goes in the pursuit of the sources of religious
insight, the more, as we have ourselves found, does one's original
recognition of the ill of the human world become both deepened and
varied. From the solitude of one's individual {226} sorrows one goes
out to seek for religious relief in the social world, only to find how
much more manifold the chaos of ordinary social life is than is the
conflict of one's private passions. If one asks guidance from reason,
reason appears at first as a sort of spirit brooding upon the face of
the depths of unreason. When loyalty itself is created, it finds
itself beset by adversities. If evil drives us to seek relief in
religion, religion thus teaches us to know, better and better, the
tragedy of life. Its first word is, thus, about evil and about the
escape from evil. But its later words appear to have been a persistent
discourse upon our tribulations.

But how can religion, thus presupposing the presence of evil in our
life, and illustrating this presence anew at every step, undertake to
lead us to any assurance of the triumph of a good principle in the
real world, in case, as seems so far obvious, such a triumph of a good
principle would mean that all evil is to be simply destroyed and wiped
out of existence?

Briefly restating the situation, it is this: If the evils of human
life are indeed but transient and superficial incidents, or if--to use
a well-known extreme form of statement--evil is an "unreality"
altogether--then religion is superfluous. For there is no need of
salvation unless man's ordinary case is, indeed, very really a hard
case, that is,