words.

At this purely subjective rating, therefore, Religion must be
considered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.
It would seem that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but
must exert a permanent function, whether she be with or without
intellectual content, and whether, if she have any, it be true or false.

We must next pass beyond the point of view of merely subjective
utility, and make inquiry into the intellectual content itself.

First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common
nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously?

And second, ought we to consider the testimony true?

I will take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in
the affirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various
religions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform
deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two
parts:--

1. An uneasiness; and

2. Its solution.

1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that
there is SOMETHING WRONG ABOUT US as we naturally stand.

2. The solution is a sense that WE ARE SAVED FROM THE WRONGNESS by
making proper connection with the higher powers.

In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the
wrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical
tinge. I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common
to all such minds if we formulate the essence of their religious
experience in terms like these:--

The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises
it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible
touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the
wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be
but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real
being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage
of solution or salvation) arrives,[349] the man identifies his real
being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the
following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is
conterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which is
operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in
working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself
when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.

[349] Remember that for