"They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me thy fly, I am the wings."
This is what the genuine object of loyalty, the unity of the spiritual life, always says to us when we examine it in the right spirit. But the one source of our deepest insight into this unity of the spirit which underlies all the varieties, and which leads us upward to itself past all the sunderings and doubts of existence, is the loyal spirit itself. Loyalty asserts: "My cause is real. I know that my cause liveth." But the cause, however imperfectly interpreted, is always some sort of unity of the spiritual life in which we learn to share whenever we begin to be loyal. The more we grow in loyalty and in insight into the meaning of our loyalty, the more we learn to think of some vast range of the unity of spiritual life as the reality to which all the other realities accessible to us are in one way or another subordinate, so that they express this unity, and show more or less what it means. I believe that a sound critical philosophy justifies the view that the loyal, precisely in so far as they view their cause as real, as a personal, but also as an over-individual, realm of genuine spiritual life, are comprehending, as far as they go, the deepest nature of things.
Religion, in its higher sense, always involves a practical relation to a spiritual world which, in its significance, in its inclusiveness, in its unity, and in its close and comforting touch with our most intense personal concerns, fulfils in a supreme degree the requirements which loyalty makes when it seeks for a worthy cause. One may have a true religion without knowing the reason why it is true. One may also have false religious beliefs. But in any case the affiliation of the spirit of the higher religion with the spirit of loyalty has been manifest, I hope, from the outset of this discussion of loyalty. By religious insight one may very properly mean any significant and true view of an object of religious devotion which can be obtained by any reasonable means.
In speaking of loyalty and insight I have also given an indication of that source of religious insight which I believe to be, after all, the surest, the most accessible, the most universal, and, in its deepest essence, the most rational. The problem of the modern philosophy of life is, we have said, the problem of keeping the spirit of religion, without falling a prey to superstition. At the outset of this lecture I told briefly why, in the modern world, we aim to avoid superstition. The true reason for this aim you now see better than at first I could state that reason. We have learned, and wisely learned, that the great cause of the study of nature by scientific methods is one of the principal special causes to which man can be devoted; for nothing serves more than the pursuit of the sciences serves to bind into unity the actual work of human civilization. To this cause of scientific study we have all learned to be, according to our lights, loyal. But the study of science makes us averse to the belief in magic arts, in supernatural interferences, in special providences. The scientific spirit turns from the legends and the superstitions that in the past have sundered men, have inflamed the religious wars, have filled the realm of imagination with good and evil spirits. Turns from these—to what? To a belief in a merely mechanical reality? To a doctrine that the real world is foreign to our ideals? To an assurance that life is vain?
No; so to view the mission of the study of science is to view that mission falsely. The one great lesson of the triumph of science is the lesson of the vast significance of loyalty to the cause of science. And this loyalty depends upon acknowledging the reality of a common, a rational, a significant unity of human experience, a genuine cause which men can serve. When the sciences teach us to get rid of superstition, they do this by virtue of a loyalty to the pursuit of truth which is, as a fact, loyalty to the cause of the spiritual unity of mankind: an unity which the students of science conceive in terms of an unity of our human experience of nature, but which, after all, they more or less unconsciously interpret just as all the other loyal souls interpret their causes; namely, as a genuine living reality, a life superior in type to the individual lives which we lead—worthy of devoted service, significant, and not merely an incidental play of a natural mechanism. This unity of human experience reveals to us nature's mechanisms, but is itself no part of the mechanism which it observes.
If, now, we do as our general philosophy of loyalty would require: if we take all our loyalties, in whatever forms they may appear, as more or less enlightened but always practical revelations that there is an unity of spiritual life which is above our present natural level, which is worthy of our devotion, which can give sense to life, and which consists of facts that are just as genuinely real as are the facts and the laws of outer nature—well, can we not thus see our way towards a religious insight which is free from superstition, which is indifferent to magic and to miracle, which accepts all the laws of nature just in so far as they are indeed known, but which nevertheless stoutly insists: "This world is no mere mechanism; it is full of a spiritual unity that transcends mere nature?"
I believe that we can do this. I believe that what I have merely hinted to you is capable of a much richer development than I have here given to these thoughts. I believe, in brief, that in our loyalties we find our best sources of a genuinely religious insight.
Men have often said, "The true source of religious insight is revelation; for these matters are above the powers of human reason." Now, I am not here to discuss or to criticize anybody's type of revelation. But this I know, and this the believers in various supposed revelations have often admitted—that unless the aid of some interior spiritual insight comes to be added to the merely external revelation, one can be left in doubt by all possible signs and wonders whereby the revelation undertakes to give us convincing external evidence. Religious faith, indeed, relates to that which is above us, but it must arise from that which is within us. And any faith which has indeed a worthy religious object is either merely a mystic ecstasy, which must then be judged, if at all, only by its fruits, or else it is a loyalty, which never exists without seeking to bear fruit in works. Now my thesis is that loyalty is essentially adoration with service, and that there is no true adoration without practical loyalty. If I am right, all of the loyal are grasping in their own ways, and according to their lights, some form and degree of religious truth. They have won religious insight; for they view something, at least, of the genuine spiritual world in its real unity, and they devote themselves to that unity, to its enlargement and enrichment. And therefore they approach more and more to the comprehension of that true spiritual life whereof, as I suppose, the real world essentially consists.
Therefore I find in the growth of the spirit of loyalty which normally belongs to any loyal life the deepset source of a genuinely significant religious insight which belongs to just that individual in just his stage of development.
In brief: Be loyal; grow in loyalty. Therein lies the source of a religious insight free from superstition. Therein also lies the solution of the problems of the philosophy of life.