to the
conflicting proposals that are made toward its special formulation and
toward its solution. We have now to study further the sources of
insight upon which every solution of our problem must depend.

II

Our present lecture will be devoted to three tasks. First, we shall
try to show that the religious consciousness of mankind, when it is
concerned with the need and with the way of salvation, must needs
appear in many various and apparently conflicting forms, but that,
nevertheless, these conflicts need not discourage us. For, as we shall
attempt still further to explain, the underlying motives of the higher
religions are, after all, much more in agreement than the diversities
of creeds and the apparent chaos of religious experiences would lead
us to imagine. In order to make this deeper unity of the higher
religious life of mankind plain, we shall try to show, more fully than
we did in the last lecture, how the consciousness of the ideal of
life, and of the need of salvation, naturally arises in the experience
of the individual man. The religious paradox, as, in our former
lecture, we defined that paradox, depends upon the fact that the
principal religious motives are indeed perfectly natural and {42}
human motives, which need no mysterious movings from another world to
explain their presence in our lives; while, on the other hand, these
very motives, when once they appear, force us to seek for relief from
spiritual sources that cannot satisfy unless they are far above our
natural human level of life--that is, unless they are in some
definable sense superhuman. But about superhuman matters it is not
surprising that ignorant mortals should widely differ, despite the
deeper unity that underlies all our nobler religious needs.

Thus the unity of the religious concerns of mankind is perfectly
compatible with the fact that men differ so widely in faith. The
mysteries of religion belong to our natural failure to conceive
readily and to grasp adequately the religious objects. But our
religious need is not a mystery; and our religious interests are as
natural as is our ignorance. The higher forms of the religious
consciousness are due to perfectly human motives but lead to a
stubborn quest for the superhuman. To understand whence the higher
religions get their moving principle, you have only to survey our
natural life as it is, in all its pathetic and needy fallibility. But
if the higher