In short, the dualism of nature is revealed in the dualism of the soul.  There is a gulf within, and if only man can span the inner chasm, he will know how to bridge the outer.  He must begin by finding God within himself, or he will never find Him anywhere.  Now, it is out of this sense of a separation within himself, from himself and from the Author of himself, that there arises that awful sense of helplessness, of dependence, of bewilderment, which is the second great element in the religious life.  Man is alone in the world; man is helpless in the world; man ought not to be alone in the world; man is therefore under scrutiny and condemnation; he must find reconciliation, harmony, companionship, somehow, somewhere.  Hence the religious man is not arrogant like the pagan, nor proud like the humanist; he is humble.  It is Burke, I think, who says that the whole ethical life of man has its roots in this humility.[27] The religious man cannot help but be humble.  He has an awful pride in his kinship with heaven, but, standing before the Lord of heaven, he feels human nature’s proper place, its confusion and division and helplessness; its dependence upon the higher Power.

[Footnote 27:  Correspondence, III, p. 213.]

It is at this point that humanism and religion definitely part company.  The former does not feel this absolute and judging Presence, hence cannot understand the spiritual solicitude of the latter.  St. Paul was not quite at home on Mars Hill; it was hard to make those who were always hearing and seeing some new thing understand; the shame and humility of the cross were an unnecessary foolishness to them.  So they have always been.  The humanist cannot take seriously this sense of a transcendent reality.  When Cicero, to escape the vengeance of Clodius, withdrew from Rome, he passed over into Greece and dwelt for a while in Thessalonica.  One day he saw Mount Olympus, the lofty and eternal home of the deities of ancient Greece.  “But I,” said the bland eclectic philosopher, “saw nothing but snow and ice.”

How inadequate, then, as a substitute for religion, is even the noblest humanism.  True and fine as far as it goes, it does not go far enough for us.  It takes too little account of the divided life.  It appears not to understand it.  On the whole it refuses to acknowledge that it really exists, or, if it does, it is convinced of man’s unaided ability to efface it.  It isn’t something inevitable.  Hence the pride which is an essential quality of the humanistic attitude.

But the religious man knows that it does exist and that while he is not wholly responsible for it, yet he is essentially so and that, alas, in spite of that fact, he alone cannot bridge it.  So he cries, “Wretched man that I am, what shall I do to be saved?” Here is the feeling of uneasiness, the sense of something being wrong about us as we naturally stand, of which James speaks.  In that sense of responsibility is the confession of sin and in the confession of sin is the acknowledgment of the impotence of the sinner.