In such elemental ways the process of salvation can be made to appear as essentially a social process, just because its opposite, perdition, seems to mean banishment from amongst men.
Another group of cases presents to us the same need for human companionship as a means to salvation, but presents it in the winning guise of salvation beginning through love, without the main stress being laid upon the previous despair. In such cases the despair may be mentioned but at once relieved. The religion of friendship and of love is a familiar human experience. James, in his fear of debasing religion by romantic or by grosser associations, unjustly neglects it in his study of "varieties." In fact, to seem to find the divine in the person of your idealised friend or beloved is a perfectly normal way of beginning your acquaintance with the means of grace. You meet, you love, and--you seem to be finding God. Or, to use our present interpretation of what reveals the [{72}] divine, love seems to furnish you with a vision of a perfect life, to give you a total survey of the sense of your own life, and to begin to show you how to triumph. If there be any divine life, you say, this is my vision of its beauty and its harmony. So the divine appears in one of Browning's later lyrics:
"Such a starved bank of moss.
Till, that May morn.
Blue ran the flash across;
Violets were born!
"Sky--what a scowl of cloud
Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud
Splendid! a star!
"World--how it walled about
Life with disgrace,
Till God's own smile came out;
That was thy face!"
In the sonnets of Shakespeare this religion of friendship has found some of its most perfect expressions.
"Haply I think of thee, and then my state.
Like to the lark's, at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate."
And again, in Mrs. Browning's "Sonnets from the Portuguese," the religion of love not only uses speech intensely personal, fond, intimate, but also, [{73}] and deliberately, accompanies all this with words derived from reflective metaphysics, or from theology, and intended to express the miracle that the nearest movings of affection are also a revelation of the highest powers of the spiritual world.
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being, and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath.
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death."
Surely one could not better express, than this sonnet does, the naturalness of the religious motive--the mystery of the religious object.
And finally, turning from these cases to those which are social in the larger sense, every patriotic song which deifies one's country, every other form of the religion of patriotism, exemplifies the experience of the devoted lover of his country by teaching that it is "man's perdition to be safe" in case his social world calls for the sacrifice of his life, and that salvation comes through service.