THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE UC-NRLF EDWARD GRUBB THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE AN EXAMINATION OF SOME OF THE DIFFICULTIES OF CHRISTIAN FAITH BY EDWARD 9RUBB, M.A. Author of " Authority and the Li*ht Within? " The True Way of Life,' " What is Quakerism" &c. LONDON HEADLEY BROS. PUBLISHERS, LTD, 72, OXFORD STREET, W.i 26 Gj PREFACE MOST of the chapters in this book contain the substance of Lectures delivered bv the author at Summer Schools mf and other gatherings for religious study. They have been put together in such a way as to form a more or less consecutive exposition of Christian belief in relation to some of the questions that still perplex sincere en- quirers ; whose difficulties the author appreciates, alike through his own experience and from the many opportunities he has had for personal discussion. He writes as a simple layman, who has found in the Quaker principle of the Inward Light that which leads to a satisfying experience of Jesus Christ as the way to God. The selection and arrangement of the topics to be dealt with has not been an easy matter, and some repetition has been unavoidable. The fabric of Christian belief is not like a tower, where stone is laid on stone till the whole is completed ; its nature is rather that of an organism, in which the development of each part involves all the others. Experience of the Fatherhood of God, for example, raises (when its implications are thought out) the whole question of Divine and human Personality and is inseparably bound up with the Christian conceptions of Sin and US* 6 PREFACE Redemption, of Prayer and Providence, and with the problems of Evil and of human Immortality. These questions have necessarily to be dealt with in succession ; but none of them can be adequately treated in isolation from the rest. The endeavour has been made, by the free use of cross-references and in other ways, to reduce as far as possible the repetition of arguments. The thanks of the author are due ; for permission to reprint matter that has previously appeared, to the Editors of The Friend, The Expository Times, and The London Quarterly Review. Mr. A. Glutton-Brock's Studies in Christianity (Constable, 45. 6d. net) has appeared since this volume was written. While the author has not attempted to cover the whole ground, his book contains a most illuminating exposition of some of the foundation principles of our faith, and should be read by all who wish to work out more deeply some of the leading thoughts suggested in the following pages. EDWARD GRUBB. Croydori, October, 1918. CONTENTS CHAPTER L THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. Experience the Vital Core of Religion . . - 13 Insistence on Experience by Modern Religious Writers - 16 The Experimental Method, in Religion and in Science 16 What Religious Experience is, and what it is not 1 7 Its Validity : is it merely " Self-suggestion " ? 19 It needs the suppoit of Reason - 21 The Conscience : in what sense it is ths Voice of God 22 CHAPTER IL THE INWARD LIGHT AND FAITH. An Inward Light at Work in all " Judgments of Value ' 26 Moral and Esthetic Appreciation 27 The Understanding of Personal Character 29 Apprehension of the Personality of Jesus Christ, and so of the Character of God 30 The Inward Light and the Faith that receives it 33 Faith as the opening of our inward eyes 34 The Moral Demand of Faith 35 CHAPTER III. FAITH AND REASON. The Use of Reason as laying a foundation for Faith 37 " Existence " or " Reality " means Existence for Thought or Consciousness 38 Conflict between Faith (as Intuition) and Logical Reasoning 41 The Use of Reason in correcting the credulity of Faith 43 Faith demands a God of personal and ethical character, which Reason is slow to grant - 44 But even Reason requires the self -limitation of the Divine, which includes self-revelation 47 CHAPTER IV. BERGSON ON " INTUITION." Present tendencies to depreciate the Intellect : 50 Pragmatism, its strength and weakness - 50 8 CONTENTS PAGE Bergson's Criticism of the Intellect : 51 Perception does not give us the " real inwardness ' of things - 52 Conception yields symbolic and abstract, not real, knowledge 52 Conceptual knowledge as a cinematograph 53 " Mental States " abstractions not realities 54 Only by Intuition can we discern reality, outward or inward 54 The Life-Impulse freely creative and essentially purposive 55 Its Manifestations in Vegetism, Instinct, and Intelligence 56 The Intellect evolved for action in relation to Matter 57 Intuition as Instinct that bias become reflective and intelligent, - 57 Intuition and Religious Faith - 58 CHAPTER V. REVELATION THROUGH PERSONALITY. Revelation does not consist in dogmatic statements about God, but is the manifestation of His character or quality 60 Revelation to persons, in Religious Experience, and through persons : work of the Hebrew Prophets 62 Jesus Christ the Supreme Revealer of the Personality of God 63 Value of Modern Psychology in enlarging the idea of Personality 64 (1) Personality not atomistic but conjunct 64 (2) Personality larger than our conscious self : the sub- conscious life unites us to other persons and to God - 65 (3) Personality as a goal to be achieved 68 God as the perfect Person 69 CHAPTER VI. THE CHRIST OF HISTORY. Tests of the assumption that the Gospels give accounts of a real Person 70 Other witnesses to the reality of Jesus : Josephus, Tacitus, Paul, the Book of Acts 71 Character and History of the Synoptic Gospels 74 The Career of Jesus in Mark - 77 The Teaching of Jesus : its inimitable quality 77 The Character and Person of Jesus : 79 Human yet Super-human - - 79 His claims not obtruded - 80 A Person so perfect in character as to be perfect in humility - 80 This is the final proof of historicity - 81 CONTENTS 9 CHAPTER VII. THE CHRIST OF EXPERIENCE. PAGE Two Orders of Religious Experience, Historical and Spiritual, blend in Christianity - 82 Transition from the Outward to the Inward Experience of Christ found (a] in the Resurrection 83 Its Difficulties 83 Essentially a religious, not a merely sensuous, experience - 86 (b) In the experience of Pentecost 87 Early Christianity the Religion of the Spirit 87 The " Spirit " identified with the risen Jesus - 87 This blending of two strains of experience made a Christology necessary - 88 Growth of New Testament Christology : 88 Christ as " Wisdom " 88 Christ as " Logos " or Word - 90 The Fourth Gospel and its Purpose - 91 Note on the theological importance of the Subconscious - 94 CHAPTER VIII. FAITH AND FACTS. Christian Faith not a blind acceptance of outward authority, but a response to present Divine revelation 97 T. H. Green's criticism of the dependence of Faith on historical statements 98 This overlooks the distinction between belief in the occurrence of events and assurance of the character of a person 99 The right place of Criticism in preparing the ground : but Intuition has a real place in discovering the facts 100 Our certainty of the perfection of Christ's character 101 It is not ideas but apprehension of the significance of objective facts that gives assurance 104 Conflict of Christianity with rival ethics : Nietzsche 105 CHAPTER IX. THE SUPERNATURAL IN CHRISTIANITY. The question of the supernatural affects not only the Bible but all real religion - 106 Rigid mechanical Determinism is in conflict with religion, but it is not necessarily the verdict of science - 107 The future is not absolutely determined by the past ; but freedom is freedom for purpose, not for breach of law 108 Events in the Gospels cannot be rejected simply because they look " supernatural," but must be judged in the light of Christ's whole personality - no io CONTENTS PAGE A " miracle " is a supernormal event in which God is specially manifested: Jesus Himself the greatest miracle 112 Special fitness of His " mighty works " as an aid tc establishing the Kingdom of God 113 The Supernatural in our own religious life 115 Note on some particular Gospel Miracles - 116 CHAPTER X. THE INSPIRATION OF THE BIBLE. Abandonment of the idea of infallibility in the Bible does not make it worthless. 120 The necessary place and function of Criticism 120 Objections answered 121 Jesus and the Old Testament : He recognised the progressive character of Revelation 122 The meaning of Inspiration must be discovered experimentally 124 Inspiration a matter of degree - 124 But we may speak of the Inspiration cf the Bible as a whole, since it is the record of a Divine movement towardsmen 125 The need of a written record - 128 Criticism brings some loss but greater gain 129 CHAPTER XT. THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. The Fatherhood of God in the teaching and life of Jesus 131 In what sense it was new : the changeless love of God, and His providential care for the individual - 132 The Christian life joyous because free from care 133 But can God's Fatherhood be reconciled with the facts of life, especially in time of war ? 134 Survival of human faith, and its justification in history - 134 Belief in God's Fatherhood is faith in a good Purpose, which may be thwarted. Also faith in Guidance 135 It must be understood in the light of Divine immanence. Immanence in inorganic nature, in living beings, in personality, in the good will, in Jesus Christ 137 Jesus the way to assured belief in the Fatherhood of God 139 " Law " and " Chance " as subject to the Divine Purpose 140 The Cross the supreme revelation of Piovidence 141 CHAPTER XII. THE WORTH OF PRAYER AND WORSHIP. Prayer as the main condition of religious experience 142 Universality of the prayer instinct : it culminates in Jesus - 142 Illustrations of the worth of prayer : 1 44 (a) As Correspondence with Environment 144 (b) As Work in the spiritual sphere - 145 CONTENTS ii PAGE Difficulties : (i) The Reign of Law. This is no obstacle to prayer in the sphere of free personality 146 (2) The unchangeability of God. True object of prayer not to change His will but to bring our will into conformity with His - 148 (3) The seeming uselessness of prayer. This is largely removed if God meets us mainly in the sub-conscious 150 Prayer in regard to special temptations 151 The Worth of Worship : (i) As fellowship in the religiou? life 151 (2) As the offering of ourselves to God 152 Worship " in spirit and truth " ; the use of Silence - 152 CHAPTER XIII. SIN AND REDEMPTION. The fact of Sin not a theological fiction 155 Its manifestation in the War - 155 It is not natural but unnatural 155 Not dependent on the historical truth of the " Fall " 156 Not mere Animalism, for animals do not sin : it only arises with intelligence and free choice 156 Its nearest analogue is in the parasitic habit : but it is a disease of the Will, and can only be cured by change of will 158 Deepening of the thought of Sin with the personal thought of God : the meaning of Forgiveness 159 Christ proclaims God's forgiveness, and calls on us to complete it 160 Divine punishments for sin can only in part -be remitted, and this by making us new creatures 160 The Atonement as based on the Fatherhood of God - 161 The Redemption of man from Sin was Christ's whole work ; but was consummated by His Death 162 CHAPTER XIV. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IN THE WORLD. The world, without and within, presents a spectacle of discord. Can God be at once all-powerful and ail-good ? 165 No problem presented by goodness and happiness 166 Three aspects of Evil : - - * 166 (1) Suffering : its uses in teaching us what to avoid, and in developing character - 167 (2) Heartlessness : Impartiality a necessary consequence of the unity of the world. Calamities not " sent " by God, but the inevitable consequence of taking risks. Impartiality of the world order recognised by Jesus - 169 12 CONTENTS PAGE (3) Moral Evil : unnecessary and unnatural, but the outcome of intelligence and freedom 170 Tragedy of the will gone wrong 171 Christianity, as the religion of redemption, the only satisfying solrtion 172 CHAPTER XV. HUMAN IMMORTALITY. Widespread uncertainty as to the reality of a Future Life - 174 The need of strenuous search for the truth 175 Causes of Doubt : (i) Apparent dependence of Mind on Brain Evidences of increasing independence of Mind - 176 (2) At what point in development does man become possessed of an immortal- soul ? Are animals excluded ? Is immortality universal or conditional ? These questions must be considered in the light of the achievement of personality 177 (3) The Silence of the Grave. Attempts to obtain positive evidence of survival 179 (4) Absence of clear information in the New Testament as to future conditions. The dogma of Eternal Punishment 180 Belief in Immortality is bound up with faith in the Fatherhood of God, and neither can stand alone - 182 The belief remains as Faith and not as positive Knowledge 183 CHAPTER XVI. THE KINGDOM OF GOD. The Kingdom of God as the Christian Ideal - 185 Development of the conception of the Kingdom among the Jews 186 The deeper thoughts of Jesus as to the Kingdom and the work of the Messiah : His use of apocalyptic imagery 187 His " Coming in Glory " is His death and consequent victory 188 The inward basis and outward expression of the Kingdom 189 The Kingdom a.3 seed growing in secret. But " natural " pro- cesses do not exhaust the Divine resources - 189 The Kingdom as a Love-system can only be established by Love to the uttermost 190 The Church at first understood this, but afterwards forgot it; and from the first was hampered by apocalyptic expectations - - 191 The Kingdom for us the crown of life's endeavour. The need for its coming : war, social confusion, the unchristian- ised East - 193 Unity of all work for the coming of the Kingdom. Undying worth of the apocalyptic hope 196 List of Books 199-202 CHAPTER I THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE THE inner heart of all religion consists in a consciousness of relation to an unseen Something, whether regarded as Power, Principle, or Person, which the religious mind calls God. Even in its elementary and in its degraded forms, religion, if it is rightly so called at all, is rooted in the sense of an Unseen Presence, and of a demand that with this Presence life shall be brought into relation. This vital core of religion has to find expression in life and action ; and in the process it is often overlaid and obscured by ideas and practices which grow up around the centre, and which attract so much attention that they tend to be mistaken for the essence of religion itself. Institutional religions arise, in which the due performance of ceremonial, generally with some form of sacrifice, appears to be an end in itself ; legal religions, like that of the Pharisees, in which the detailed ful- filment of a code of written precepts seems almost to exhaust the field ; dogmatic religions, where the one thing necessary appears to be the profession of belief in a series of statements represented as vouched for by Divine authority. To one who looks at the surface only, it may well appear that Religion is simply a device whereby the ruling authority, or a caste of priests, has imposed upon men's minds an elaborate system designed to secure and retain its power or its emoluments. But on deeper scrutiny this is clearly seen to be a shallow theor} r , which misses the central fact. There would be no great 14 THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE institution with its ceremonies and creeds, there would be no priests to administer and expound them, there would be no code of written precepts, were it not for the fundamental religious needs and religious experiences to which these were originally intended to minister, and on which as a foundation they have been built up. Deep behind all the forms and creeds and precepts there is the inward experience, collective and personal, which is the seed out of which these external manifestations grow and develop If we confine our thoughts to the higher religions of men, it is probably quite safe to say that every new variety has originally sprung from a deepening of the religious consciousness of some one person.* Any religious faith that has been long held tonds to stereo- type itself in forms and institutions which, while not necessarily destructive of personal religious life, too often become a substitute for it. A man is held to be religious if he accepts the forms and directs his conduct in accordance with the institutions, even though his character be unchanged, and his inner life untouched by their true meaning. Then, it may be after gener- ations of formal or r dead ' religion, there arises a prophet or leader, whose soul, on fire for truth, melts through the crust of forms and comes into direct con- tact with their inner reality : that is to say with the experience of God which produced them, and which, for many minds, they obscure rather than illuminate. He finds for himself a personal faith, and calls upon men to share it. In a time of spiritual drought and hunger, many, it may be, respond with joy to the message of one who can tell them at first hand of that which they have, consciously or unconsciously, yearned for, but * " As religion enters into the deeper and more fertile strata of the knowledge of God, it becomes evident that the development of religion faUs increasingly upon the shoulders of individual men, whose experience of God and its cognitive content becomes authoritative for others." (Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, P- THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 15 which they have sought in vain in the outward practices of conventional religion. If this is so, a new religious movement begins : a movement which may very probably take the form of a revolt against the estab- lished forms and institutions, coming into sharp conflict with the people of power, whose interests lie in main- taining them. The newf aith is a persecuted faith until, if it survives the conflict, it too, in time, tend? to lose its fresh inspiration, and to become stereotyped like that which it replaced."* Illustrations of this will occur to us at once in the cases of the Hebrew Prophets, of the rise of Christianity, and of many of the new religious movements within Christianity itself. Further illustrations might be drawn from the founding of most other religions, and of new movements within their borders. The vital heart of religion, which consists in a consciousness of relation to that which is felt to be Divine, comes freshly to the surface in some one soul, and spreads from him to the souls of others. It is probably also true to say that, at any rate in the higher religions, this inner heart is never wholly lost. At least in Christianity, with all its failures, it would seem that there has always been somewhere, if only in obscure and unknown lives, some persistence, whether dim or clear, of that direct consciousness of God which to its Founder was the very breath of life. The Church," says Dr. Rufus Jones, f " has never in any period quite sunk to the level of tradition and the automatism of habit, for it has always had beneath its system of organisation and dogma a current, more or less hidden and subterranean, of vital, inward, spiritual religion, dependent for its power of conviction, not on books, councils, hierarchies, creeds, not upon * From The Unity of Faith, edited by Geoffrey Rhodes : the chapter by the present writer on " The Society of Friends," pp. 147, 148. (Kegan Paul, 1912). f Studies in Mystical Religion, p. xiv. 16 THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE anything kept in cold storage, but on the soul's experiences of eternal Realities." This has been con- spicuous in the Catholic mystics, though not felt by them to be independent of the ecclesiastical forms to which they were accustomed. In our own day there is, throughout the world, wide spread and deep seated, a weariness of the old forms of religion, and a hunger for something more vital and more real. This is true of all ( Christian ' countries, whether the prevailing forms are Orthodox or Catholic or Protestant. In far-off J apan and China the religions of centuries are being relegated to the dust- heap ; in populous India movements of reform are being tried on every hand. And happily there is a rapidly growing conviction, in the minds of religious leaders, that what will meet this need is not the forms or institutions of any particular Church, but an appeal and a response to that inward hunger which can only find its true satisfaction in personal contact with God Himself. The note of direct religious experience is characteristic of all our best religious teachers to-day, whatever form of faith they may profess Catholic and Protestant, Anglican and Free Churchman, Methodist and Quaker ; and while they touch this note they are all at one. A great religious poem, like Francis Thompson's The Hound of Heaven, wins re- sponse from all alike, and it never occurs to any of us to ask what particular form of religion the writer professed. Further, there is a close relation between the experi- mental note in Religion and that of Science, which in our own day has changed not only the outward face of human life, but men's whole conception of the universe and their very methods of thought. The man of science insists on verification on bringing every theory or doctrine to the test of facts that can be observed and described. The modern religious teacher equally insists that the doctrines of his faith arose out of THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 17 experience out of what men actually felt, and thought they knew, of God ; and that if we are to understand and appreciate these doctrines, or even criticise them to any purpose, we must ourselves come into the place of experience. And not the ' modern ' religious teacher only ; the same demand was made by the Founder of Christianity when He taught that r the pure in heart ' alone should ' see ' ' ; that he who would " do the will ' of the Father should " know concerning the doctrine/' " There is a noble contribution, which the scientific mind is making to the religious, a keen and quickened sense of truth and a passion for verination. And it is a curious situation when the man of science says to the disciple of J esus of Nazareth : ' Make sure ; be sure that you know ; look to it for yourself : verify.' It is the method of Jesus Himself, and it will give us again f the deep and firm sense of realitj',' which, as Matthew Arnold pointed out, characterises the thinking of Jesus ; for * theory ' as Arnold elsewhere says, " Jesus never touches, but bases Himself invariably upon experience.' "* Now, what is this " experience ' to which religious teachers in these days are more and more appealing ? It includes everything in human consciousness which has to do with an awareness of relations with that Unseen Presence which is called God. It is needless to deal with its cruder manifestations ; our purpose will be answered if we illustrate it from the higher forms of religious life. There is a consciousness of Sin : the discomfort of feeling that we are out of tune with that which was meant to be a harmony ; the sense of an inward discord between what we are and what we were meant to be ; the strain and friction of a divided will. Along with this there is often Penitence- : sorrow and shame for what we have done, or what we are, with the * Glover, The Christian Tradition and its Verification, p. 16. 18 THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE longing to do better or to be different ; and (in Christi- anity at least) there may be also the joyful sense of Divine Forgiveness and restoration, the germ and pledge of a life in the true harmony. There is also Prayer, the inward approach to God, the aspiration to know Him better, the cry for help and strength, the utterance of the soul in thankfulness and praise ; and with this sometimes the consciousness of an answer, which comes bringing inward peace and strength and purity : an experience of Divine Grace ' made .perfect in weakness." Siich are among the normal elements of the higher religious experience. In some persons of a particular psychical quality in whom the ' subconscious "part of the personality lies, so to say, near the surface, and who are subject to ' uprushes ' from the subliminal region there may be seasons of ecstasy, when the walls that usually confine the ego seem to be dissolved and the whole being is flooded with a sense of the Divine. Such have been many of the Mystics. But it would be a grave mistake to imagine that theirs is the only type of religious experience worthy of the name, or that the multitudes of devout and holy souls who are strangers to it are shut out from communion with God. Another mistake often made is to confound religious experience with Emotion. Intense feeling may indeed often accompany it, especially in its more esctatic forms ; but emotion is no more the thing itself than the joy which accompanies the perception of beauty in nature or in art is the same as the perception of beauty itself. Religious experience, in fact, goes down deeper into the personality than the common division of the functions of the ego into Feeling, Thought, and Will. It is not Thought or Intelligence, though it involves thought : it is not Feeling, though it is normally accompanied by emotion ; it is not Will, though the will must be set on God if He is to be experienced. ' Faith," says the Dean of St. Paul's, " is something THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 19 deeper, more universal, more fundamental, than any- thing that can be assigned to the independent activities of the intellect, will, or feelings. . . . It is a basal energy of the whole man."* The ordinary experience of the senses, ordered by the unifying intellect, yields the fabric of what we call our Knowledge. These inward experiences yield that which we call our Faith. But just as the word ' r Know- ledge ' means both the sum of what is known and also the power or process by which we know it, so the word ; Faith ' is used not only objectively, for the sum of what is believed or held on to, but also subjectively, for the power or process of holding on. This we must consider further in the next chapter. For the present it is enough to point out that Faith (in its subjective sense) bears to religious experience a similar position to that which the senses and the intellect bear to ordinary experience. It is by faith our primary and deepest self responds to our spiritual environment ; just as by the senses and the intellect we respond to our material environment. t A difficult question here emerges. What is the validity of religious experience ? If Faith is ' the evidence (or proving) of things not seen," in what sense does it prove ' them, and what is the value of the ' evidence ' it yields ? In the case of ordinary knowledge we have an easy test. If our experience agrees with that of other people, we believe it gives us reality, t If I see what I take to be a human being in * Faith and Us Psychology, pp. 42, 53. t The distinction here drawn between " religious " and " ordinary " experience is only a rough one, true so far as it goes, and it must not be so pressed as to make it appear that our lives are to be lived in water- tight compartments of thought. We are right in striving, as we are bound to strive, for the unification of all our knowledge, religious and " secular." J Compare Hocking, The Meaning of God, p. 288 : " II is through a prior recognition of the presence of Other Mind that my physical experience acquires objectivity at all." 20 THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE a place where the people round me can see no one at all, I naturally conclude that either I have mistaken what I saw or else that I have experienced a hallu- cination ; and in the latter case I assume that my experience is not ' valid," does not represent reality. But in the case of religious experience we have no such easy test. Some people assert, and with obvious sincerity, that they have no consciousness of God at all, and this (in some cases) even when they are giving evidence of living good and worthy lives. The lan- guage used by religious people appears to them all unreal, because it answers (or seems to answer) to nothing in their own experience. Even if my religious experience, or the ' faith ' by which I acquire it, affords to me (as at its best it does) absolute certitude of Reality, it is yet largely incommunicable : I cannot share it, as I can ordinary knowledge, with the first person I meet. Hence religious experience is easily open to the charge of being nothing more than " self-suggestion" : just as some artists are said to have the power, by concen- trating their thoughts on an imaginary object, of seeing it as plainly as if it were objectively before their eyes. The essentially personal and incommunicable character of religious experience must always make us careful not to take for granted that what is absolutely real to ourselves is objectively valid ; careful also not to infer that other people who are without it, or whose experi- ence is very different from our own, are wilfully obtuse or morally inferior. " There are some," says William Temple," who, though they have been in touch with what is spiritual, have felt compelled by motives which we must respect, by reverence for truth, to believe that it was all illusion ; while others have never come in touch with what is spiritual at all, because the intellectual barrier has always stood in the way and prevented them from yielding themselves to the influences. That THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 21 means that religious experience appeals for external support."* It means that we """cannot do without a rational enquiry into the meaning and validity of the word ' God." Such an enquiry is not the direct purpose of this volume ; but it is hoped that indirectly there will be not a little to indicate that the concept " God," as representing the deepest ground of all reality, is one that Reason cannot dispense with. The point, just now, is this : religious experience by itself, on account of its personal and incommunicable character, cannot be assumed to be objectively valid. It needs the support of Reason, which is common to all normally constituted minds : what is proved true is true for all who think sanely. If Reason can show that the only condition on which we can make the distinction between truth and error which in fact we all do make is the real existence of an Intelligence at the back of Nature, then the verdict of religious experience, which claims to have direct access to such Intelligence, cannot be set aside as of no validity. Reason and religious experience will then afford each other mutual support. Further, historical study may convince us that religious experience is a very great and important factor in human life ; that it is normal to humanity at its best ; that s'uch a faculty cannot have been developed out of nothing, and cannot persist (as it has done and seems likely to do) if there is no response to it, no spiritual Environment to which it corresponds. Thus the religious experience of the race, though we cannot say the same of that of the individual person taken alone, affords evidence, open to all, of something more than its own existence, f Again, it is possible that Thought may throw light on the difficult question why. religious experience is * The Faith and Modern Thought, p. 6. f For a severely scientific treatment of this question see W. James Varieties oj Religious Experience. 22 THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE incommunicable : why it is so easy for most of us to doubt the reality of the spiritual world. It may be that the highest purpose we can discern or imagine in the world is the development of character, and that such development requires the effort and the strain and the venture which we call Faith : that if the spiritual world obtruded itself upon us as the natural world does, if we could not doubt it, a main condition of our training in character would be taken away. This is a thought which we cannot here pursue ; it has been followed out with great suggestiveness by Henry Churchill King, in his volume The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual Life. Let us conclude this chapter by a brief consideration of religious experience in a simple and rudimentary form that of Conscience and of its value as a witness to the Divine. " There is," says Dr. Rufus Jones, ' an augustness in Conscience which has made men in all ages name it the Voice of God." * " Duty," says James Martineau, " involves the discovery of some- thing higher than ourselves which has claims upon us."t But, if this is so, why is Conscience so uncertain and variable in its witness ? Why does it teach a Jew or a Moslem that the eating of pork is wrong, while it tells a Christian that " nothing entering into a man can defile him ' morally ? Why does it teach a modern Christian that to hold his fellow men in bondage as slaves is absolutely wrong, while to the best of the Greeks of old it made no such deliverance ? Conscience, as we have it, is obviously the result of education and training, and of the moral ideas that are current all about us. Are we to suppose that the Voice of God is thus variable, and says one thing to men to-day and another thing to-morrow ? To assert this would be * Studies in Mystical Religion, p. xviii. * Types of Ethical Theory, ii., 104. THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 23 to make the way easy for the denial that God ever speaks to men at all. To answer this difficult question it must be recog- nised that the word Conscience, like many others, has different meanings. There is, first, the perception of the difference between right and wrong (which we may compare with the difference between beauty and ugliness), along with the conviction that the right is better, that we ought to follow it, and that we stand self-condemned if we follow the worse. Purely for the sake of distinction, let us term this the " Rational ' or ' Formal ' Conscience. Secondly, there is the feeling which Conscience arouses in us that some particular classes of actions are right and others wrong : that I ought not to lie, steal, kill, commit adultery, and so forth. Let us call this, again for the sake of distinction, the " Empirical ' or ' Material ' Conscience. It will be found that it is in the second sense only that Conscience varies from age to age and from people to people that it is in this sense, and not in the other, that it is the product of education and environment, and of the moral standards of the day. The history of human progress is very largely the story of the develop- ment and enlightenment of the Empirical Conscience. All of us, in these days, are absolutely sure that Slavery is wrong many of us are becoming convinced that War, and preparations for War, are equally evil. It is to the further development and enlightenment of the Empirical Conscience that we have chiefly to look as the condition of human progress. How is this development possible, and what are its conditions ? Surely it is only made possible by the presence in men everywhere, throughout all human history, of something higher the Rational Conscience. Why is it that the teachings of the prophets and seers of humanity, many of whom have suffered martyrdom for opposing the conventional morality and customs of 24 THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE their day, have been adopted by their successors, and have helped to form a new Conscience among men ? Simply because there was in those who heard the new teaching, even if (in support of the customary stan- dards) they opposed and tried to stifle it, something that compelled them, in spite of their prejudices, to see that it was true and good and must be followed. A deeper Light than was clearly discerned by them was at work within them, developing a new and larger and truer Empirical Conscience.* In this higher sense then what we have termed the Rational Conscience we may still call Conscience the Voice of God within us. The great prophets and moral reformers of humanity have believed that God was working through them, revealing Himself and His will more clearly than it had been known before. It is the great glory of the Hebrew prophets that they, once for all, united religion with morality, and made men sure that no ceremonies apart from righteousness were of any religious significance. Since they have spoken, no new religion that does not call men to higher and real moral duties has any chance of general accept- ance among men. And we, looking back, may be sure that unless there had been at work in men a Light and Truth beyond their own, something of the Divine that was progress- ively revealing itself, the emancipation from the bondage of customary moral ideas, and the setting up of new and larger and truer standards, would have * We may recall what happened to Peter on the house-top at Jopp ' when he saw that he must no longer " call any man common or unclean " ; and the parallel awakening of Paul to the unimportance of circumcision and other details of the Mosaic law. We may also note the rapid dying-out, in Anglo-Saxon communities at least, of the idea of personal " honour ," which led to the supposed necessity of the duel. The idea persists in the national sphere among those who imagine that " nations will never consent to submit to arbitration a question that affects their honour." A notion of " honour " which was purely self- regarding is giving place to a larger and truer thought : that that alone is " honourable " which is just and true and right. THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 25 been impossible. That Light and Truth we need as much as ever, and it is still at work. Our present Empirical Conscience is no final authority ; it provides us with no infallible text-book on the whole duty of man. There is infinite room for progress yet in the relations of man to man, of man to woman, of nation to nation, of race to race. Our knowledge of the Good, like that of the Beautiful and the True, is ever growing, and can never be defined by any formula. The nature of the Divine Light which shines in man, and has gradually developed his Empirical Conscience, will be further considered in the next chapter. CHAPTER II THE INWARD LIGHT AND FAITH. THE Inward Light which has been at work in men in all ages, developing and purifying the P^mpirical Con- science, has its analogue in other departments of human life. Wherever men are led to discern worth or value in the objects of their experience, to differentiate and classify them as better or worse, beautiful or ugly, noble or base, the distinction is made in virtue of a power within them that may be called an Inward Light, because it is immediate, direct, and intuitive. Religious experience is not an isolated portion of our life ; it is closely connected with the instinct or tend- ency to assign values to the things we meet with ; it is akin to that which leads us to admire and strive after the Beautiful and the Good ; it is a part of all that makes life worthy and glorious. But this tend- ency to assign values to things is altogether different from the use of the senses and the intellect, whereby we obtain knowledge of things themselves. All the judgments we make about things may be arranged in two categories : judgments concerning matters of fact or existence, and judgments of value or worth. Science (which includes Mathematics) deals almost wholly with the first kind ; Esthetics, Ethics, and Religion deals almost entirely with the second. Philosophy, as the criticism of all our experi- ence, should include both. For reaching sound judg- ments of the first order as that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or that the tides are caused by the attraction of the moon sense THE INWARD LIGHT AND FAITH 27 experience, ordered by the intellect, is (broadly speak- ing)* sufficient. But for arriving at sound judgments of the second class for deciding what is really beautiful, noble, and worthy a faculty must be employed altogether different from any that the senses or intellect can supply. No amount of investigation of what is, however patient and accurate, will ever inform us how things ought to be, or give us a criterion for distinguishing them as better or worse. " There is nothing," says Miss Benson (in what is perhaps rather an over-statement), ' in the scientific aspect of phenomena which can make anything in any possible way worth while ; for even the idea of ' worth ' does not enter into the conceptions of science, and thus the essential nature of everything we care for is entirely outside it. Science can analyse the production of sound, and ignore the soul of music ; it can show the cause of colour, and miss the ioy of beauty ; it can show the genesis of all manner of social institutions, and miss the heart of love ; it may even find the con- ditions of life, but cannot ask what life is ; it may sweep the heavens with its telescope, and fail to find God."f And yet it would be quite erroneous to infer that judgments of value ' are purely subjective and individual, and that there is no true objective standard of real worth. In the domain of aesthetics, for example, a child begins by preferring bright colours, even if inharmonious, and crude forms. But as he attends to the teaching of persons of more developed powers of perception, and learns to judse for himself, he awakens to harmony of colour and beauty of line and composition. It is the same in music and poetry. This development is only possible because of the presence in all normally constituted persons of an * I say " broadly speaking " because moral qualities such as patience, accuracy, disinterestedness, can by no means be excluded as among the conditions needed for the discovery of scientific truth. f The Venture of Rational Faith, pp. 174, 175. 28 THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE aesthetic faculty, which, though at any particular stage it may yield imperfect verdicts, gradually comes to perceive real beauty, and pronounces judgments in which all competent authorities agree. The develop- ment of the aesthetic sense is parallel to that of the Empirical Conscience. In both cases, the faculty, as it develops, leads us in the direction of truth : towards an understanding and appreciation of real values. In all these matters of aesthetic and moral judgment, we say that an " Inward Light " is at work within us, because the judgments are our own, or they are nothing at all. They are direct, immediate, and individual, though they issue in conforming to an objective and universal standard. They are not reached by argu- ment, nor by submission to authority however com- petent ; we cannot prove a picture or a symphony to be beautiful to one whose perceptions are undeveloped, nor convince him of its worth by naming those who have praised it. " You may be right," is the best he can say if he is sincere, ' but it is not so to me." In the teaching of Literature, to take another example, there is all the difference in the world between the most minute and painstaking analysis of the facts of a poem or drama or prose masterpiece, and the awakening, in the learner, of a real power to appreciate its worth. The facts can be learned by intellectual processes, and for the most part are accepted on the authority of competent students. The knowledge of them may be important. It is of great service, even as a help to the appreciation of a poem, to know when and under what circumstances it was written, to study its language and metrical form, to be informed about its logical and grammatical structure, its literary and historical allusions, and, above all, the main thought that it is intended to convey ; yet this knowledge at its best is but a skeleton whose purpose should be to support the living fabric of flesh and blood to THE INWARD LIGHT AND FAITH 29 deepen and steady, that is, the whole impression made by the poem itself. That impression must be mine if it is to be real for me ; another person can never impart it, though he may do much, by pointing out beauty of thought and language, to quicken my power of perception. Unless an Inward Light comes into play within me, I miss the inmost soul of literature. Here again it may be well to point out that this perception of beauty in nature or art, as well as the apprehension of moral excellence, is not mere emotion. Emotion may, and usually does, accompany the sense of beauty, but the perception and the emotion are not the same. I feel because I see or hear ; the thrill of pleasurable emotion is not the sense of beauty itself. The psychologist and physiologist may attempt, possibly with some success, to show why harmony of colours or sounds is pleasing, and discord the reverse ; why certain forms and designs give pleasure and others are unendurable ; but such analysis does not really explain the perception of beauty, which remains some- thing quite apart from all that scientific study can accomplish, apart also from the emotional feeling that accompanies it. The same working of an Inward Light is seen in another field that of the appreciation of personal character. It is by an Inward Light by something direct, immediate, and intuitive that I apprehend the character of my nearest friend (or enemy), or of the historical persons of whom I read in history or litera- ture. Sense perceptions, of course, have their place here, just as in the apprehension of beauty. I judge of my friend's character from what I see in his face, hear in his words, discern in his acts ; the intellect, too, comes into play in forming correct inferences as to what these indications mean. But how do I know that certain signs mean Love, others Anger or Resentment, and so on ? Simply because I know in mvself, in my own inner experience, what these things are. Apart 30 THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE from such personal and incommunicable experience, his looks and words and acts would have no meaning for me they would be a riddle without an answer. And if my own inner experience has been partial and one- sided, I may altogether misapprehend and misin- terpret the signs of character. It has often been pointed out that we judge others largely by what we are ourselves. The sensual man does not believe in the purity of women ; the persistent egoist has no con- ception of disinterested goodness. A prodigal son may see in his father or mother nothing but sternness and old-fashioned prejudice ; not until he awakens to love may he have any conception of the depth of long-suffering devotion with which they have sought to win him to his better self. In all our knowledge of persons, then, and our apprehension of personal character, there is an Inward Light at work. This holds true even when the person is one in history. " The inner content," says Herrmann, ' of any historical personality is laid open only to those who become personally alive to it and feel them- selves aroused by contact with it, and see their horizon widened. The picture of a personality becomes visible to us in this way, and cannot be handed over to us by any communication from others ; it must arise within ourselves as the free revelation of the living to the living."* Most of all is this true in the case of the one perfect Person who, as we Christians believe, lived and breathed on earth as Jesus of Nazareth. A Christian is essenti- ally one whose inward eyes have been opened to behold the beauty and significance of the character of Jesus, and whose life is being moulded by what he has seen therein. Such knowledge of Him is based indeed upon the picture contained in the Gospel records, inter- preted by the experience of the Christian Church ; but no mere acceptance of the truth of Scripture, or * The Communion of the Christian with God, p. 74. THE INWARD LIGHT AND FAITH 31 submission to dogmatic authority, will ever make a Christian. Unless an Inward Light reveals to us something of what Jesus was (and is), and draws us into growing conformity with that character, we have no right to the name. Christian experience, at its best, everywhere testifies that, as we yield ourselves to that influence, we shall be brought into acknowledgment of two things : that we have in Jesus, first, a revelation of perfect human character ; and second, a revelation (such as we get from no other source) of the quality and character of God. " In this respect," says Herrmann, " Jesus is in- comparable, that He first saw what is good in all its glory, its fulness, and its power, and that He never- theless had riot to feel ashamed of what He was, com- pared with what He knew and what He said. In all other cases, the very men whose goodness raises us give us such a conception of what is good that we measure their own moral shortcomings by it. Jesus alone has had the conviction that it was not so with Him, and the man who learns to know Him admits that conviction to be correct."* The other assertion of the Christian consciousness is that the perception of the character and moral worth of Jesus carries with it a unique revelation of the significance of the word " God." We do not always recognise sufficiently how little we know of the mean- ing of that great word, how urgently we need a revela- tion if it is to be to us more than a term with which to argue, if it is to represent to us a warm, living, con- crete reality, of which we are absolutely assured. Just as we do not know in detail what " perfection ' is * Herrmann, op. cit., p. 91. The difficulty felt by many in these days, that the assertion of the moral perfection of Jesus is after all a historical judgment, and that statements as to what happened in past history must always be open to critical correction and can never represent more than probabilities, I must leave for later treatment. (See Chapter VIII., pp. looff). 32 THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE until we see it embodied in a concrete human person- ality, so it is with the term " God," until we learn the meaning of the words ' ' He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." It follows that the knowledge of God must come to us by revelation, or by an Inward Light. The assurance that " God is real ' is much more like a r value- judgment ' than like a judgment of bare fact or existence such as the intellect properly deals with. That God in some sense exists, no one can rationally deny. That there is a Power of some kind working behind the phenomenal universe everyone practically believes, and, as he examines his experience, finds that he must believe. The real question on which men's minds are divided, or doubtful, is as to the quality and character of that Power. Is it intelligent, is it purpose- ful, is it good, is it personal, in the sense that we can enter into personal relations with it ? Does it care for us as individuals, or is it more correctly described as a ' stream of tendency ' ? These are among the questions really at issue when men ask whether God " exists," and they are all questions of quality and worth rather than of mere fact. And what Jesus has done for men is to give them, as no other religious teacher ever did, positive assurance in answer to such questions. He does it by bringing them into that personal apprehension of His own character, of which I have been speaking. " Jesus does establish in us, through the fact of His personal life, a certainty of God which is superior to every doubt. When once He has attracted us by the beauty of His person, and made us bow before Him by His exalted character, then, even amid our deepest doubts, the Person of Jesus will remain present with us as a thing incomparable, the most precious fact in history, and the most precious fact our life contains. If we then yield to His attraction, and come to feel with deep reverence how His strength and purity dis- THE INWARD LIGHT AND FAITH 33 close to us the impurity and weakness of our souls, then His mighty claim comes home to us. We learn to share His invincible confidence that He can uplift and bless perfectly those who do not turn away from Him. In this confidence in the Person and cause of Jesus is implied the idea of a Power greater than all things, which will see to it that Jesus, who lost His life in this world, shall be none the less victorious over the world. The thought of such a Power lays hold of us as firmly as did ithe impression of the Person of Jesus by which we were overwhelmed. It is the beginning of the con- sciousness within us that there is a living God."* " So, through the thunder comes a human voice, Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here ! Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself ! Thou hast no power, nor mayst conceive of mine, But love I gave thee, with myself to love, And thou must love me who have died for thee ! ' "f That is what I have been leading up to : the thought that if we are to know God it must be by ' revela- tion " that is, by an Inward Light that shines in our own souls individually, and which is not the mere result of sense experience, or intellectual demonstration, or the testimony of others embodied in the authority of Church or Bible. While all these things may have their right and necessary place in preparing us for the knowledge of God, by themselves they cannot give it. But I have endeavoured to lay a strong foundation for this doctrine by showing that the same thing is true in measure of all the best part of our experience of all those ' judgments of value/' whether in regard to beauty, or moral worth, or personal character, which make our life truly worth living. Now what about the " Faith," which (as was said in the last chapter) " bears to religious experience a similar relation to that which the senses and the intellect bear to ordinary experience ? ' Well, the * Herrmann, op. cit., p. 97. \ Browning, An Epistle. 34 THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE Inward Light, and the Faith which receives and responds to it, come so near together that they may be almost used as convertible terms ; but while ' ' Faith ' has primary reference to an energy of our own being, the ' Inward Light ' suggests something above and beyond ourselves that yet works in us. Even in the experience of the senses Seeing involves Light, but Light also involves Seeing ; for apart from a seeing eye and mind there is no Light but only molecular and etherial vibrations. There is only light for those who open their eyes and see. So, in the domain of spiritual experience, the Inward Light that comes from God, and the human Faith that uses it, imply and involve one another. Whenever we respond actively to the call of Truth, Beauty and Goodness, seeking to 'think clear, feel deep, bear fruit well" whenever we strive loyally to be true to the best we know we are exercising essential Faith.* When, on the other hand, we allow ourselves to be so immersed in the things of the outward world that we let our finer powers of perception atrophy and decay ; when we give no thought to the meaning and purpose of life ; when we become pessimists, and see in the world of our experience only the working of a hostile power ; or sceptics and cynics, denying the worth of the true, the beautiful and the good then a force is working within us which is the exact antithesis of Faith. The Inward Light shines, in measure and potentially, in the souls of all men ; but we ourselves determine whether we will or will not open our inward eyes to its radiance. Faith essentially is the opening of those inward eyes the response of our deepest personality to the unseen spiritual environment that we call God, who is ever striving to reveal Himself to us in the True, the Beautiful, the Good, in those i * " All Faith consists essentially in the recognition of a world of spiritual values behind, yet not apart from, the world of natural phenomena." (Inge, Faith and its Psychology, p. 51). THE INWARD LIGHT AND FAITH 35 personal characters that inspire and uplift us, and most of all in the one perfect Person of Jesus Christ. " Will we willingly surrender to the spiritual power whose influence we thus perceive to be all around us ? Or will we treat this incomparable thing as an every- day matter, and in laziness forget it and turn our backs on it ? This, at last, is the real test-question of Faith. And it passes over immediately into the other question, whether or not we are willing to be sincere."* " The Way into the Great Values," then, is to be willing to take pains with our inner life, and to give free play to those deepest instincts of our nature which lead us to respond to the things of eternal worth. There need be no pretence. We are called simply to give attention, time and thought ; the great realities and values will, thus, finally verify them- selves. But where one has given a great value no opportunity to make its legitimate impression, he cannot wonder that the sense of its reality and sig- nificance is lacking. We have no right to expect conviction and sense of value where we have not given the best an honest chance at us. Probably the greatest reason for failure in the sense of reality and achieve- ment in the spiritual life lies just here. And it is thus, above all, that ' the inner light fails.' t We learn to appreciate the beauty of a picture by attending to what experts tell us, and then, to the best of our ability, judging for ourselves. We learn the worth of a friend's character by attending to his words and acts, and responding to them with sympathy and trust. We enter into a deepening personal relation, like that of a true marriage, by learning to forget ourselves and our doubts and hesitations, and letting ourselves go in a venture of faith which is rewarded. So also we learn to know God by taking advantage of * Herrmann, op. cit., p. 83. t H. C. King, The Seeming Unreality of the Spiritual World, pp. 113, 114. 36 THE RELIGION QF EXPERIENCE such " proofs ' as sound reason can offer, of such testimony as comes to us from the larger experience of saintly souls, and (most of all) of the light that was brought into the world in the person of Jesus Christ ; and then making the great venture of living resolutely as if all this were true. We shall find that here too the venture is rewarded, and faith is verified by experience. " Jesus Christ has revealed the nature and character of our Heavenly Father, the Creator of this world in which we live ; has revealed that nature and character to be such as we could not, in the absence of that revelation, have assumed it to be ; but, now that we have that revelation, we can progressively verify its truth for ourselves by living as if we knew it to be true, and finding that all along the line our experience is what it would be if the revelation were true."* ^ Which is an excellent exposition of the nature of true Faith. * Inge, Speculum AnimcB, p. 26. CHAPTER III FAITH AND REASON THE purpose of this chapter is to examine the place and function of Reason in relation to Religious Experience, and to the Faith which is its organ. Religious Experience, as we have seen, is in the first instance personal and incommunicable : however abundant the assurance of Reality it brings to the experient, he cannot share that certainty with others as he can the normal experience of the senses and the coercive demonstrations of mathematical truth. It needs, therefore, the support of Reason ; it needs to be upheld and justified against the criticism that it is purely subjective, that the seeming reality of its object is due merely to self-suggestion.* The old : proofs of the existence of God ' have almost ceased to count since the days when Kant once for all exposed their weakness a weakness which the modern doctrine of Evolution has rendered more conspicuous. Roughly speaking, its root lies here : that you cannot get out of a syllogism more than is implicitly contained in the premisses. You cannot, starting with particular and finite and imperfect experiences, make them yield a cogent demonstration of the Universal, the Infinite, the Perfect. There cannot be a proof of the reality of God like that which shows that the three angles of a triangle are equal to * All our " judgments of value " are likewise incommunicable, but most of them are not open to the charge that their object is unreal, because it is usually given in sense experience. When we are enthralled by the beauty of a landscape, we are not likely to be told that the landscape is not there at all. 37 38 THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE two right angles. For, to give another reason the only proof of the " existence of God " that would be of any use would be not merely quantitative, like the demonstrations of mathematics, but qualitative : the real question, as I urged above (p. 32) is not whether some kind of God exists, but what kind. And yet Reason, in the shape of philosophy, can do something. Though it cannot give us the rich quali- tative Being that religious experience requires, it can prove that the material universe is not self-sufficient and self-explanatory that its reality depends on a deeper Reality which is spiritual and not material in its nature. In other words, philosophy can destroy the illusion called Materialism, and thereby remove one of the chief obstacles to belief in God. The God of philosophy is not all we need, but it is something : it is a Form, the living Substance of which must be reached along other lines of approach. What Kant taught us to do is to examine and criticise our experience of the world : to see (if we can) how we come to have such experience at all, and investigate the conditions under which it is possible : to find what is implied in the marvellous fact that we do actually reach, through science, a progressive knowledge of the real world in which we live. It is, of course, quite impossible, here and now, to enter on such a task. All I can do is to indicate, with the utmost brevity, some of the results of such investigation, which appear to me to be soundly reached. The first of these is to bring new force and freshness into the old axiom of Descartes, ' Cogito ergo sum." My knowledge of the world is nothing apart from myself as the knower. Even if as I am compelled to do I imagine the universe of matter as existing long ages before I was born, and continuing ages after I shall have passed away from it, still I am imagining that. I cannot by any sort of possibility think of a world without a thinker in the background. FAITH AND REASON 39 Thought is thus the prius ' of all knowledge of reality ; there cannot be knowledge without a knower ; to " exist ' means to be an object of Thought or Consciousness, without which the word reality has no meaning. Further, it is Thought or Consciousness which works up the formless, disconnected experiences that come to me through the senses into a unity, which makes me sure that they bring me into relations with one world with one real and persistent world, such that what I find true in it to-day will be true to-morrow. Without this assurance of the unity of the world, or (what amounts to the same thing) of ' the uniformity of nature," science could not even begin. But psychology is showing, with ever increasing clearness, that I do not reach this experience of a real world alone. If from earliest infancy I could have been kept alive in total isolation from other persons, there is strong reason to believe that I should never have reached it effectively at all. From the dawn of self- conscious life I have discovered that what is true for me is true for other persons also that we have a joint experience of the world. This is the main reason why I pronounce " unreal ' the world of my dreams. I could not reckon them unreal unless I had a standard of reality with which to compare them, and this I gain in my daily intercourse with others. " To those who are awake," said Heraclitus, " there is but one world ; but sleepers have each a world of their own." What is real, then, is what exists for a larger consciousness than that of the individual taken singly. We all suppose, however, that the world would have existed even if no human beings had ever appeared in it, and that it would continue to exist even should the human race disappear. But if this " existence ' or f reality ' means (and to us it can never mean anything else than) existence for Consciousness, what is this but to assume in the background of our 40 THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE minds, perhaps quite unrecognised by ourselves a universal and eternal Consciousness, of which the consciousness of each one of us is (so to say) but a fragment : a focus-point in which the Universal Light is operating ? It is not merely my consciousness or yours, or both together, that underlies the unity of objective truth ; that which is really true is an object to a Consciousness greater than our own, of which ours are but partial and fragmentary manifestations. This is what the philosopher means by ' creation." God is that Eternal and Universal Consciousness which is necessary for the existence of the world ; His thoughts are objective truth. I am quite aware that the