and right, for they were outworn.  But we are never going to lose the central experience that produced them, and our task is to find a new philosophy to express these inner things for which the words “supernatural,” “absolute,” are no longer intelligible.  For we still know that behind man’s partial and relative knowledge, feeling, willing, is an utter knowledge, a perfect feeling, a serene and unswerving will; that beneath man’s moral anarchy there is moral sovereignty; that behind his helplessness there is abundant power to save.  Perhaps this Other is always changing, but, if so, it is a Oneness which is changing.  In short, the thing that is characteristic of religion is that it dwells, not on man’s likenesses, but on his awful differences from nature and from God; sees him not as little counterparts of deity, but as broken fragments only to be made whole within the perfect life.  It sees relativity as the law of our being, yes, but relativity, not of the sort that excludes, but is included in, a higher absolute, even as the planet swings in infinite space.

The trouble with much preaching is that it lacks the essentially religious insight; in dwelling on man’s identities it confuses or drugs, not clarifies and purges, the spirit.  Thus, it obscures the gulf.  Sometimes it evades it, or bridges it by minimizing it, and genuinely religious people, and those who want to be religious, and those who might be, know that such preaching is not real and that it does not move them and, worst of all, the hungry sheep look up and are not fed.  For in such preaching there is no call to humility, no plea for grace, no sense that the achievement of self-unity is as much a rescue as it is a reformation.  But this sense of the need of salvation is integral to religion; this is where it has parted company with humanism.  Humanism makes no organic relations between man and the Eternal.  It is as though it thought these would take care of themselves!  In the place of grace it puts pride; pride of caste, of family, of character, of intellect.  But high self-discipline and pride in the human spirit are not the deepest or the highest notes man strikes.  The cry, not of pride in self, but for fellowship with the Infinite, is the superlative expression of man.  Augustine sounded the highest note of feeling when he wrote, “O God, Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”  The words of the Lord Jesus gave the clearest insight of the human mind when He said, “And when he came to himself, he said, I will arise and go to my Father.”

CHAPTER FIVE

GRACE, KNOWLEDGE, VIRTUE

I hope the concluding paragraphs of the last chapter brought us back into the atmosphere of religion, into that sort of mood in which the reality of the struggle for character, the craving of the human spirit to give and to receive compassion, the cry of the lonely soul for the love of God, were made manifest.  These are the real goods of life to religious natures; they need this meat which the world knoweth not of; there is a continuing resolve in them to say, “Good-by, proud world, I’m going home!” The genuinely religious man must, and should indeed, live in this world, but he cannot live of it.