III
Religious Insight means then, for my present purposes, insight into the need and into the way of salvation. If the problem of human salvation has never come home to your mind, as a genuine problem of life and of experience, you will feel no interest in religion in the sense to which the present lectures will arbitrarily confine the term. If, on the other hand, your live personal experience has made you intimate with any form or phase of this problem of the pathetic need and cry of man for salvation, then I care not, at least at the outset of these discourses, whether you have thought of this problem in theological or in secular, in reverent or in rebellious, or in cynical terms, whether you have tried to solve it by scientific or by sentimental or by traditional means, or whether the problem now takes shape in your mind as a problem to be dealt with in a spirit of revolt or of conformity, of sceptical criticism or of intuitive faith, of hope or of despair. What we want is insight, if insight be possible, into the way of salvation. The problem with which these lectures are to deal is: What are the sources of such insight?
At the outset of our effort to deal with this problem, I shall try to show how the experience of the individual human being is related to the issues that are before us. That is, in this and in part of our next lecture, I shall discuss the sense in which the individual experience of any one of us is a source of insight into the need and the way of salvation. Hereby we shall erelong be led to our social experience as a source of still richer religious insight. And from these beginnings we shall go on to a study of sources which are at once developments from these first mentioned sources, and sources that are much more significant than these first ones would be if they could be isolated from such developments. I ask you to follow my discourse in the same spirit of tolerance for various opinions and with the same effort to understand the great common features and origins of the religious consciousness--with the same spirit and effort, I say, by which I have tried to be guided in what I have already said to you in this introduction. It is always easy to see that, in religion, one man thinks thus and another man thinks otherwise, and that no man knows as much as we all wish to know. But I want to lay stress upon those perennial sources from which human insight has flowed and for ages in the future will continue to flow. To understand what these sources are will help us, I believe, toward unity of spirit, toward co-operation in the midst of all our varieties of faith, and toward insight itself and the fruits of insight.