pplement. Unless you have inwardly felt
the need of salvation, and have learned to hunger and thirst after
spiritual unity and self-possession, all the rest of religious insight
is to you a sealed book. And unless, in moments of peace, of
illumination, of hope, of devotion, of inward vision, you have seemed
to feel the presence of your Deliverer, unless it has sometimes
_seemed_ to you as if the way to the home land of the spirit were
opened to your sight by a revelation as from the divine, unless this
{34} privilege has been yours, the way to a higher growth in insight
will be slow and uncertain to you. But, on the other hand, no one who
remains content with his merely individual experience of the presence
of the divine and of his deliverer, has won the whole of any true
insight. For, as a fact, we are all members one of another; and I can
have no insight into the way of my salvation unless I thereby learn of
the way of salvation for all my brethren. And there is no unity of the
spirit unless all men are privileged to enter it whenever they see it
and know it and love it.

Individual Experience, therefore, must abide with us to the very end
of our quest, as one principal and fundamental source of insight. But
it is one aspect only of Religious Experience. We shall learn to
understand and to estimate it properly only when we have found its
deeper relations with our Social Experience. In passing to our social
experience, however, we shall not leave our individual experience
behind. On the contrary, through thus passing to our social experience
as a source of religious insight, we shall for the first time begin to
see what our individual experience means.

{35}

II

INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

{36}

{37}
II

INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

The results of our first lecture appear to have brought the religious
problems, so far as we shall attempt to consider them, into a position
which in one respect simplifies, in another respect greatly
complicates our undertaking.

I

In one way, I say, our undertaking is simplified. For, as we have
defined religion, the main concern of any religion that we are to
recognise is with the salvation of man, and with whatever objects or
truths it is important to know if we are to find the way of salvation.
Now the experiences which teach u