Should you in all seriousness, if participation in such a world were proposed to you, feel bound to reject it as not safe enough?  Would you say that, rather than be part and parcel of so fundamentally pluralistic and irrational a universe, you preferred to relapse into the slumber of nonentity from which you had been momentarily aroused by the tempter’s voice?

Of course if you are normally constituted, you would do nothing of the sort.  There is a healthy-minded buoyancy in most of us which such a universe would exactly fit.  We would therefore accept the offer—­“Top! und schlag auf schlag!” It would be just like the world we practically live in; and loyalty to our old nurse Nature would forbid us to say no.  The world proposed would seem ‘rational’ to us in the most living way.

Most of us, I say, would therefore welcome the proposition and add our fiat to the fiat of the creator.  Yet perhaps some would not; for there are morbid minds in every human collection, and to them the prospect of a universe with only a fighting chance of safety would probably make no appeal.  There are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick of self and tired of vainly striving.  Our own life breaks down, and we fall into the attitude of the prodigal son.  We mistrust the chances of things.  We want a universe where we can just give up, fall on our father’s neck, and be absorbed into the absolute life as a drop of water melts into the river or the sea.

The peace and rest, the security desiderated at such moments is security against the bewildering accidents of so much finite experience.  Nirvana means safety from this everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists.  The hindoo and the buddhist, for this is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life.

And to men of this complexion, religious monism comes with its consoling words:  “All is needed and essential—­even you with your sick soul and heart.  All are one with God, and with God all is well.  The everlasting arms are beneath, whether in the world of finite appearances you seem to fail or to succeed.”  There can be no doubt that when men are reduced to their last sick extremity absolutism is the only saving scheme.  Pluralistic moralism simply makes their teeth chatter, it refrigerates the very heart within their breast.

So we see concretely two types of religion in sharp contrast.  Using our old terms of comparison, we may say that the absolutistic scheme appeals to the tender-minded while the pluralistic scheme appeals to the tough.  Many persons would refuse to call the pluralistic scheme religious at all.  They would call it moralistic, and would apply the word religious to the monistic scheme alone.  Religion in the sense of self-surrender, and moralism in the sense of self-sufficingness, have been pitted against each other as incompatibles frequently enough in the history of human thought.