er religion.

I

In these lectures I have repeatedly called the religious objects, that
is, the objects whereof the knowledge tends to the salvation of man,
"superhuman" and "supernatural" objects. I have more or less fully
explained, as I went, the sense in which {258} I hold these objects to
be both superhuman and supernatural. But every use of familiar
traditional terms is likely to arouse misunderstandings. I have
perfectly definite reasons for my choice of the traditional words in
question as adjectives wherewith to characterise the religious
objects. But I do not want to leave in your minds any doubts as to
what my usage is deliberately intended to imply. I do not want to seem
to make any wrong use of the vaguer associations which will be in your
minds when something human is compared with something superhuman, and
when the natural and the supernatural are contrasted. This closing
lecture, in which I am to deal with an aspect of spiritual life which
we have everywhere in our discourse tacitly presupposed, but which now
is to take its definitive place on our list of sources of religious
insight, gives me my best opportunity to forestall useless
misunderstandings by putting myself upon record as to the precise
sense in which both the new source itself and everything else
superhuman and supernatural to which religion has a rational right to
appeal is, to my mind, a reality, and is a source or an object of
human insight. I shall therefore explain the two adjectives just
emphasised by giving you a somewhat fuller account of their sense than
I have heretofore stated. If the new account touches upon technical
matters, I hope that, by our long list of illustrations of the
superhuman and of the supernatural, we have now sufficiently prepared
the way.

{259}

In my general sketch of the characteristics of human nature which
awaken in us the sense of our need for salvation, I laid stress, both
in our first and in our second lectures, upon our narrowness of
outlook as one principal and pervasive defect of man as he naturally
is constituted. I illustrated this narrowness by some of its most
practically noteworthy instances. Repeatedly I returned, in later
discussions, to this same feature of our life. Now man's narrowness of
natural outlook upon life is first of all due to something which I
have to call the "form" of human consciousness. What I mean by this
form, I have already illustrated