II
There is an obvious contrast between the points of view from which morality and religion consider the problem of life. Whatever may be your views as to what your duty is, it is plain that the moral interest centres about this idea of duty. That is, the moral interest seeks to define right deeds and to insist that they shall be done. It estimates the rightness of deeds with reference to some ideal of life. But however it conceives this ideal, it makes its main appeal to the active individual. It says: "Do this." The religious interest, on the other hand, centres about the sense of need, or, if it is successful in finding this need satisfied, it centres about the knowledge of that which has delivered the needy from their danger. It appeals for help, or waits patiently for the Lord, or rejoices in the presence of salvation. It therefore may assume any one of many different attitudes toward the problem of duty. It may seek salvation through deeds, or again it may not, in the minds of some men, appeal to the active nature in any vigorous way whatever. Some religious moods are passive, contemplative, receptive, adoring rather than strenuous. It is therefore quite consistent with the existence of a religious interest to feel suspicious of the dutiful restlessness of many ardent souls.
"They also serve who only stand and wait."
Such is sometimes the comforting, sometimes the warning word that seems to many to express the religious interest.
This general contrast between the two interests assumes many special forms when we consider how moralists--that is, teachers who especially emphasise the call of duty--may stand related to the two postulates upon which, as we have seen, the higher religions base their appeal. Religion, in our sense of the word, depends upon asserting: (1) That there is some one highest end of existence, some goal of life, some chief good; and (2) That, by nature, man is in great danger of completely failing to attain this good, so that he needs to be saved from this danger.
Now the first of these two postulates religion has frequently, although not always, shared with the moralists, that is, with those who devote themselves to teaching us how to act rightly. Aristotle, for instance, based his ethical doctrine (one of the most influential books in the history of morals) upon the postulate that there is a highest good. Many others who have discussed or have preached morality, have asserted that all obligations are subject to one ultimate obligation, which is the requirement to act with reference to the highest good. Yet this agreement as to the highest good turns out to be not quite universal when one compares the opinions of the teachers of religion, on the one hand, and of the moralists on the other. Popular and traditional morality often takes the form of a little hoard of [{172}] maxims about right acts--maxims whose relations to one another, and to any one highest goal of life, remain obscure. Each maxim is supposed to define a duty. Of course it also tells us how to win some special good or how to avoid some particular evil. But what this special duty has to do with winning any one highest good is not thus made explicit. And since many who make traditional morality prominent in their minds and lives are unaware of the deeper spirit that indeed, as I hold, underlies every serious endeavour, these persons simply remain unconscious that their morality has any religious motive or that they are dealing with the problem of salvation. Even some professional teachers of duty are mere legalists who do not succeed in reducing the law which they teach to any rational unity. And for such people the postulate which religion makes the head of the corner is rather a stumbling-stone. They doubt or question whether there is any highest good whatever or any pearl of great price. Yet they illustrate the essential feature of morality by insisting that certain deeds must be done.
But, however it may be with the first of the religious postulates, it is the second (the postulate that we are naturally in very great danger of missing the true goal of life) which leaves open the greater room for differences of interest as between the religious teachers and the teachers of duty. Suppose that we are in agreement in holding that there is a highest [{173}] good. Nevertheless, the question: How far is man naturally in danger of missing this supreme goal? is a question which, since we are all fallible mortals, leaves room for many varieties of opinion. How I myself view the matter, I told you in our first lecture. And to me the religious need seems an insistent and clear need. But many moralists are partisans of duty as a substitute for religion. And they are often much more optimistic regarding human nature than I am. In their opinion the goal can be reached, or at least steadily approached, by simple dutifulness in conduct, without any aid from other motives that should tend to our salvation.
There is, then, a pearl of great price. But--so such teachers hold--why sell all that you have to buy that pearl, when by nature you are able to win it through a reasonable effort? Dutifulness is the name for the spirit that leads to such an effort. And dutifulness, say these teachers, is as natural as any other normal function. "No general catastrophe threatens our destiny," they insist. "Why not do right? That is in your own personal power and is sufficient for your deepest need. You need cry out for no aid from above. You can be saved if you choose. There is no dark problem of salvation."
To such optimists the intensely religious often respond with that strange horror and, repugnance which only very close agreement can make possible. Near spiritual kin can war together with a bitterness that mutual strangers cannot share. In this case, [{174}] as you see, the goal is the same for both parties to the controversy. Both want to reach some highest good. The cheerful optimists simply feel sure of being able to reach, through action, what the earnestly devout are passionately seeking by the aid of faith. Yet each side may regard the other with a deep sense of sacred aversion. "Fanatic!" cries the partisan of duty to his religious brother. "Mere moralist," retorts the other, and feels that no ill name could carry more well-founded opprobrium. The issue involved is indeed both delicate and momentous.
The same issue may become only graver in its intensity when, in a given case, a religious man and a moralist agree as to both of the main postulates of religion, so that for both there is a highest good to seek and a great peril to avoid. For now the question arises: What way leads to salvation?
Suppose that the answer to this question seems, at any point in the development of human insight, simply doubtful. Suppose mystery overhangs the further path that lies before both the religious inquirer and the moralist. In such a case the religious interest meets at least a temporary defeat. The religious inquirer must acknowledge that he is baffled. But just this defeat of the religious interest often seems to be the moralist's opportunity. "You cannot discover your needed superhuman truths," he then says. "You cannot touch heaven. You remain but a man. But at all events you can [{175}] do a man's work, however hard that work is, however opposed it is to your natural sloth and degradation, however great the danger of perdition. Perhaps nobody knows the way of salvation. But a man can know and can daily do each day's duty. He does not know how to attain the goal. But he knows what the goal is, and it is better to die striving for the goal than to live idly gazing up into heaven." In such a case, even if the moralist fully recognises the depth of our need of salvation, and the greatness of the danger, still the strenuous pursuit of duty often seems to him to be a necessary substitute for religion. And then the moralist may regard his own position as the only one that befits a truth-loving man; and the religious interests, which appear to fix the attention upon remote and hopeless mysteries, may seem to him hindrances to the devoted moral life. Against all dangers and doubts he hurls his "everlasting No." His only solution lies in strenuousness. He is far from the Father's house. He knows not even whether there is any father or any home of the spirit. But he proposes to face the truth as it is, and to die as a warrior dies, fighting for duty.
But of course quite a different outcome is, for many minds, the true lesson of life. The religious man may come to feel sure that the way of salvation is indeed known to him; but it may seem to him a way that is opened not through the efforts of moral individuals, but only through the workings [{176}] of some divine power that, of its own moving, elects to save mankind. In this case the classic doctrine that grace alone saves, and that, without such grace, works are but vanity, is, in one form or another, emphasised by religious teachers in their controversies with the moralists. The history of Christianity illustrates several types of doctrine according to which divine grace is necessary to salvation, so that mere morality not only cannot save, but of itself even tends to insure perdition. And in the history of Northern Buddhism there appear teachings closely analogous to these evangelical forms of Christianity. So the religious interests here in question are very human and wide-spread. Whoever thus views the way of salvation can in fact appeal to vast bodies of religious experience, both individual and social, to support his opposition against those who see in the strenuous life the only honest mode of dealing with our problem. Whoever has once felt, under any circumstances, his helplessness to do right knows what such religious experience of the need of grace means. Hence it is easy to see how the earnest followers of a religion may condemn those moralists who agree with them both as to the need and as to the dangers of the natural man. In fact the two parties may condemn each other all the more because both accept the two postulates upon which the quest for salvation is based.
Yet even these are not the only forms in which this tragic conflict amongst brethren often appears. [{177}] I must mention still another form. Suppose that, in the opinion of the followers of some religion, not only the knowledge of the way of salvation is open, but also the attainment of the goal, the entering into rest, the fruition, is, for the saints or for the enlightened, an actual experience. There is, then, such a thing as a complete winning of the highest good. So the faithful may teach. Hereupon the moralists may adopt the phrase which James frequently used in opposing those who seemed to themselves to be in actual touch with some absolute Being. The only use of the opinion of such people, James in substance said, is that it gives them a sort of "moral holiday." For James, quite erroneously, as I think, supposed that whoever believed the highest good to be in any way realised in the actual world, was thereby consciously released from the call of duty, and need only say:
"God's in his heaven,
All's right with the world."
In such a world, namely, there would be, as James supposed, nothing for a righteous man to do. The alternative that perhaps the only way whereby God can be in his heaven, or all right with the world, is the way that essentially includes the doing of strenuous deeds by righteous men, James persistently ignored, near as such an alternative was to the spirit of his own pragmatism.
Nevertheless, it is true that there have indeed [{178}] been, amongst the religiously minded, many who have conceived the highest good merely in the form of some restful communion with the master of life, merely as tranquillity in the presence of God, or merely as a contemplative delight in some sort of beauty. And it is true that some of these have said: "The saints, or at all events the enlightened, even in the present life, do enter into this rest. And for them there is indeed nothing left to do." To such, of course, the moralists may reply: "You enlightened ones seem to think yourselves entitled to a 'moral holiday.' We strenuous souls reject your idleness as unworthy of a man. Your religion is a barren aestheticism, and is so whether it takes the outward form of an ascetic and unworldly contemplation or assumes the behaviour of a company of highly cultivated pleasure-seekers who delight in art merely for art's sake and know nothing of duty." To such believers in salvation through mere attainment of peace, James's criticism rightly applies. In these lectures, as I ask you to note, I have never defined salvation in such terms. Salvation includes triumph and peace, but peace only in and through the power of the spirit and the life of strenuous activity.
But such partisans of the religion of spiritual idleness as I have mentioned may nevertheless return the moralist's scorn with scorn. If they are advocates of art for art's sake, of mere beauty as the highest good, they find the restlessness of the [{179}] moralists hectic or barbarous. If they are mystical quietists, they regard mere moralism as the struggling of a soul that is not saved. If moral endeavour were the last word, they insist, we should all of us be in the Hades of Sisyphus. And no doubt their scorn, even if ill-founded, deserves consideration. For even the most one-sided emphasis upon any aspect of spiritual truth is instructive, if only your eyes are open.
Such are some of the ways in which, in the course of human history, the religiously minded and the moralists have been divided. To sum up: Certain of the lovers of religion have, upon occasion, condemned moralists, sometimes as legalists who do not know that there is any highest good, sometimes as vain optimists who ignore the danger of perdition, sometimes as despisers of divine grace, sometimes as the barbarous troublers of spiritual peace. Certain moralists, in their turn, and according as they ignore or accept the postulates upon which the religious interest is based, have condemned the devout, sometimes as the slanderers of our healthy human nature, sometimes as seekers in the void for a light that does not shine, sometimes as slavish souls who hope to get from grace gifts that they have not the courage to earn for themselves, sometimes as idlers too fond of "moral holidays." And, as moralists, their common cry has been, ever since the times of Amos: "Woe unto those who are at ease in Zion."
We have reviewed, then, some of these conflicts. I hope that you see upon what general issue they all alike turn. The moralists are essentially the partisans of action. They seek a good. But their great postulate is that there is something right for us to do. Therefore the issue is that between our need of something not ourselves to save us and our power to win a greater or lesser good through our own moral activity. Whoever so exclusively emphasises the fact that the divine is not of our making, and that its ways are not our ways, and that its good is something beyond our power to create or attain of ourselves--whoever, I say, so exclusively emphasises these things that he makes light of our efforts to attain the good somewhere comes into conflict with moralists. Whoever, as moralist, so exclusively appeals to our own energies that he seems to hold that our duty would be just as much our duty, "If we were alone upon the earth and the gods blind," somewhere meets the religious opponent who mocks his pride, or despises his restlessness, or laments his contempt for the divine grace.
Now these conflicts are, I insist, no merely speculative controversies. They play a great part in history. They have darkened countless lives. And they grow out of motives deep in human nature. What is here most important for us is that they point us toward our new source of insight. What a narrower way of living can divide, a deeper and [{181}] truer mode of living can unite. Our problem assumes a new form. Is there any mode of living that is just both to the moral and to the religious motives? Is there any way of reconciling our need, of a grace that shall save with the call of the moral life that we shall be strenuous in the pursuit of our duty?
Let us here approach this problem from the side of our moral consciousness. For at this point we are already familiar with the religious need. Does there exist amongst men a type of morality that, in and for itself, is already essentially religious, so that it knows nothing of this conflict between duty and religion? I reply, there is such a type of morality. There is a sort of consciousness which equally demands of those whom it inspires, spiritual attainment and strenuousness, serenity and activity, resignation and vigour, life in the spirit and ceaseless enterprise in service. Is this form of consciousness something belonging only to highly and intellectually cultivated souls? Is it the fruit of abstract thinking alone? Is it the peculiar possession of the philosophers? Or, on the other hand, does it arise solely through dumb and inarticulate intuitions? Is it consistent only with a highly sensitive and mystical temperament? Does it belong only to the childhood of the spirit? Is it exclusively connected with the belief in some one creed? To all these questions I reply: No.
This sort of consciousness is possessed in a very [{182}] high degree by some of the humblest and least erudite of mankind. Those in whose lives it is a notable feature may be personally known only to a few near friends. But the spirit in which they live is the most precious of humanity's possessions. And such people may be found belonging to all the ages in which we can discover any genuinely humane activities, and to all those peoples that have been able to do great work, and to all the faiths that contain any recognisable element of higher religious significance.