this goal--still any
effort to study the nature of religious insight seems to require us to
be somehow just to all the endless varieties of human opinion
regarding what the highest goal of human life is, and regarding the
way to attain that goal after we have once defined it. In some sense,
in our further inquiry, nothing human can be alien to us, in case it
involves any deep experience of man's purpose in living, or of man's
peril as a seeker after the attainment of his purpose; or any
assurance regarding the presence or the power which, entering into
some sort of union with any man's own spiritual life, seems to that
man an apt Deliverer from his evil plight, a genuinely saving
principle in his life.

How great the resulting complications that threaten our investigation
seem to be the conclusion of our former lecture showed us. Countless
{40} souls, trusting to their individual experience, have learned, is
we at the last time indicated, to define their ideal, and their need,
and, upon occasion, to discover the power that they took to be their
saving principle--their deliverer. Who amongst all these were right,
either in their judgment as to their need or in their consciousness
that they had found the way that leads to peace, to triumph, to union
with the goal of human life? Were all of them more or less right? Were
any of them wholly deluded? Are there as many supreme aims of life as
there are individuals? Are there as many ways of salvation as there
are religions that men follow? And by what means shall we decide such
questions? Grave and infinitely complicated seem the issues which
these queries arouse.

Upon one side, then, our problem is pathetically simple, human,
practical, even commonplace. Daily experience, in serious-minded
people, illustrates it. The plainest facts of our life exemplify it.
It concerns nothing more recondite than that tragedy of natural human
failure which you may constantly witness all about you, if not within
you. Upon the other side, no questions more bring you into contact
with the chaotic variety of human opinion, and with the complexities
of the whole universe, than do the religious questions, when thus
defined in terms of men's deepest needs and of men's hopes and faiths
regarding the possible escape from their most pressing peril of
failure.

{41}

Our first lecture gave us a glimpse of this simplicity of the main
definition of our problem and of this complication with regard