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."