Nietzsche's ethical and religious revolt as set
forth only a few years since in his "Zarathustra"; or recall Goethe's
"Faust"; remember even Byron's "Manfred"; and these few instances from
amongst a vast wealth of more or less recent literary examples will
show you that the idea of salvation and the search for salvation are
matters that belong to no one type of piety or of poetry or of
philosophy. Cynics and rebels, ancient sages and men who are in our
foremost rank of time, can agree, and have agreed, in maintaining that
there is some goal of life, conceivable, or at least capable of being,
however dimly, appreciated--some goal that, if accessible, would
fulfil and surpass our lesser desires, or would save us from our
bondage to lesser ills, while this goal is something that we naturally
miss, or that we are in great danger of missing--so that, whatever
else we need, we need to be saved from this pervasive and
overmastering danger of failure.

"Oh love, could thou and I with fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits and then,
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?"

{16} Thus Fitzgerald's Omar expresses, in rebellious speech, the need
of salvation. "What is your greatest hour?"--so begins Nietzsche's
Zarathustra in his opening address to the people. And he replies: "It
is the hour of your great contempt"--the hour, so he goes on to
explain, when you despise all the conventional values and trivial
maxims of a morality and a religion that have become for you merely
traditional, conventional, respectable, but infinitely petty. Now, if
you observe that St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, despite its utterly
different religious ideas, begins with an analogous condemnation of
the social world as it was, or as it always naturally is, you may
learn to appreciate the universal forms in which the need for
salvation comes to men's consciousness, however various their creed.
Swinburne's well-known chorus sums up man's life as it is, thus:

"He weaves and is clothed with derision,
Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep."

Such, then, is man's need. "Here we have no continuing city, we seek a
city out of sight"--such is another expression of this same need. What
I ask you to do, just here, is to catch a glimpse of this universal
form of the need for salvation. As you see, there is always a certain
element o