enlarged power to comprehend, to survey, to harmonise, to
triumph over our natural life would give. This vision comes to us at
moments, in glimpses--and is seen through a glass darkly. Our {53}
need is to see face to face and to live in the light thus to be
discovered. And so to live would be salvation. The word salvation is
fitting, because the need is so great and because the transformation
would be so profound. The endlessly various interpretations of this
one ideal and of the nature of the saving process are due to the
wealth of life and to the imposing multitude of motives and of
experiences that the religious consciousness has to consider. But
beneath and above all the varieties of religious experience lies the
effort to win in reality what the vision of the harmonious and
triumphant life suggests to us in our moments of clearness. Since our
own natures leave us hopelessly remote from this goal, while our
glimpses of spiritual harmony and power reveal to us its preciousness,
our religious need is supreme, and is accompanied with the perfectly
well-warranted assurance that we cannot attain the goal unless we can
get into some sort of communion with a real life infinitely richer
than our own--a life that is guided by a perfect and unwavering
vision, and that somehow conquers and annuls all fickleness, conflict,
and estrangement. Such a life rightly seems to us to be superhuman in
its breadth of view and in its spiritual power, if indeed there be
such a life at all. If there is no such life, none the less we need
it, and so need salvation. If salvation is possible, then there is in
the universe some being that knows us, and that is the master of life.
And we seek ourselves to know {54} even as we are known and to live as
the wise one would have us live.

Thus simple and, for all to whom even the occasional moments of wider
vision come, universal are the religious motives. James was wrong when
he sought them in any capricious interference of the subliminal self,
or of its superhuman controls, with our natural selves. It is we who
in our natural lives are capricious and narrowly interfere with our
own freedom. It is we who are the disturbers of our own peace. The
religious ideal grows out of the vision of a spiritual freedom and
peace which are not naturally ours. No two of us get that vision in
quite the same way. But all its forms show us the same far-off shining
light. The problem of religious insight is the problem