V
THE RELIGION OF LOYALTY
Our first two lectures dealt with sources of religious insight well known to all of you, however unsatisfactory you may have found them. Our third and fourth lectures have led us into philosophical discussions which many of you will have found neither satisfactory nor familiar. And so, in imagination, I can hear you declaring that, if the foregoing sources of insight are indeed all that we have, religious truth seems still very far away. "The saints," I hear you saying, "may comfort us when they tell us of their personal and private intuitions; but they perplex us with the conflicting variety of their experiences. The social enthusiasts undertake to show us the way to salvation through love; but the world of men in which they bid us seek the divine is a world that is by nature as much in need of salvation as we ourselves are. The sages point to the starry heaven of reason which, as they insist, overarches us; but this heaven seems cold; and its stars appear far away from our needy life. And if, replying to this very objection, and, incidentally, replying also to the doctrine of the pragmatists, [{166}] somebody insists that this heavenly world of the reason is also an expression of the living divine will, we still remember that our deepest need is to see how the divine will may be done on earth as it is in heaven. And this is what we have not yet learned to see. The foregoing sources then appear to leave us, after all, with no vital and positive religion."
I
Thus some of you may at this point express your discontent. If you do, I find this discontent justified. If the foregoing lectures had indeed exhausted the account of the accessible sources of religious insight, we should be hopeless of finding any religion that could satisfy at once the individual need for salvation, the social requirement that we should seek for salvation through union with our brethren, the rational demand for a coherent view of truth, and the aim of the will to conform itself to the laws of the master of life with whom we need to be united. In other words, all of the foregoing sources of insight, considered as separate sources, present to us problems which they do not solve, and leave the real nature of the saving process clouded by mists of ignorance. What we most need at this point is some source of insight which shall show how to unite the lessons that the preceding sources have furnished. The present lecture must be devoted to an account of such a source. I should be quite [{167}] helpless to engage in this new undertaking were it not for the fact that the spiritual life of humanity's best servants and friends has long since shown us how to overcome the difficulties by which our present inquiry is, at this point, beset. These friends and servants of mankind have used, in fact, that source of insight which I mentioned in the closing words of the last lecture, a source by means of which the results and the moving principles of individual experience, of social experience, of reason, and of will are brought into a certain creative unity to which the noblest spiritual attainments of our world are due. We shall return, therefore, in this lecture, from speculation to life; and our guides will be, not the philosophers, nor yet the geniuses of the inarticulate religious intuitions, but those who, while they indeed possess intuitions and thoughts, also actually live in the spirit.
Nevertheless, for our purpose, the foregoing method of approaching our topic has been, I hope, justified. We wish to know the sources and to see what each is worth. We must therefore consider each source in its distinction from the others. Then only can we see what brings them together in the higher religious life. We must reflect where religion itself wins its way without reflection. Had we begun our study where this lecture begins, with the effort to understand at once this new source of insight, we should have been less able than we now are to discern the motives that enter into its [{168}] constitution and to appreciate its accomplishments. We have had to emphasise difficulties in order to prepare the way for our study of that source of insight which, in the history of humanity's struggles toward the light, has best enabled men to triumph over these difficulties.
This new source has come into the lives of men in intimate connection with their efforts to solve the problem not merely of religion, in our present sense of the word, but also of duty. I shall therefore first have to tell you how the problem of duty is distinguished from the problem of religion. Then I shall show you how the effort to solve each of these problems has thrown light upon the other.
Duty and religion have, in the minds of all of you, close relations. Both have to do with our ideals, with our needs, with the conforming of our lives to our ideals, and with the attainment of some sort of good. Yet you also well know that these relations of duty and of morality on the one hand, of religion and of salvation on the other, are not relations easy to define with entire clearness. Some men in our age, as you know, tell you that they are unable, in their present state of mind, to get much help from religion. And some men who insist that the religious problems have for them no solution whatever, are ardently and sincerely dutiful in spirit. On the other hand, there are those who, in their own minds, are so sure of salvation that they actually make light of the call of duty, or at least [{169}] see little that is saving in the thought of duty. In the opinion of very many, no effort to lead a dutiful life can lead to salvation unless some sort of divine grace, which is a free gift from above, intervenes to accomplish the saving process. Meanwhile, there are those who declare not only that the dutiful life tends of itself to lead to salvation, but that the persistent doing of our duty is precisely the whole of what constitutes salvation.
You will readily see that the plan of these lectures forbids any direct study of the Pauline doctrine regarding the relation of faith to works, of divine grace to human dutifulness. The mere mention of St. Paul, however, side by side with the reminder that, at many times in history, and especially to-day, there are those for whom, despite Paul's teaching as to the vanity of mere works, there is no religion but the religion of duty, will serve to show that serious questions are here involved, and that the true relations between religion and morality are by no means self-evident.
Let me briefly distinguish between the religious interest and the moral interest. Then we may be able to recognise how closely they are related, and yet how far, under certain conditions, they may drift apart, and how sharply they may sometimes come to be opposed.