at it is not so much to the ordinary experience of average men
and women that M. Sabatier appeals as to the exceptional experiences of
the great religious minds. He lays the chief stress upon those
exceptional moments of religious history when a new religious idea
entered into the mind of some prophet or teacher, _e.g._ the unity of
God, the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of Man. Here, just because
the idea was new, it cannot (he contends) be accounted for by education
or environment or any other of the psychological causes which obviously
determine the traditional beliefs of the great majority. These new
ideas, therefore, he assumes to be due to immediate revelation or
inspiration from God. Now it is obvious that, even if this inference
were well grounded, it assumes that we have somehow arrived independently
at a conception of God to which such inspirations can be referred. The
Psychology of the human mind cannot assume the existence of such a Being:
if we infer such a Being from our own mental experience, that is not
immediate but {116} mediate knowledge. It is a belief based on
inference, and a belief which is, properly speaking, metaphysical. The
idea of a Religion which is merely based upon Psychology and involves
nothing else is a delusion: all the great Religions of the world have
been, among other things, metaphysical systems. We have no means of
ascertaining their truth but Reason, whether it assume the form of a
rough common-sense or of elaborate reasoning which not only is Metaphysic
but knows itself to be so. Reason is then the organ of religious truth.
But then, let me remind you, Reason includes our moral Reason. That
really is a faculty of immediate knowledge; and it is a faculty which, in
a higher or lower state of development, is actually found in practically
all human beings. The one element of truth which I recognize in the
theory of an immediate knowledge of God is the truth that the most
important data upon which we base the inference which leads to the
knowledge of God are those supplied by the immediate judgements or
intuitions of the Moral Consciousness.

And here let me caution you against a very prevalent misunderstanding
about the word Reason. It is assumed very often that Reason means
nothing but inference. That is not what we mean when we refer moral
judgements to the Reason. We do not mean that we can prove that things
are right or {117} wrong: we mean precisely the opposi