And
this loyalty depends upon acknowledging the reality of a common, a
rational, a significant unity of human experience, a genuine cause which
men can serve. When the sciences teach us to get rid of superstition,
they do this by virtue of a loyalty to the pursuit of truth which is, as
a fact, loyalty to the cause of the spiritual unity of mankind: an unity
which the students of science conceive in terms of an unity of our human
experience of nature, but which, after all, they more or less
unconsciously interpret just as all the other loyal souls interpret
their causes; namely, as a genuine living reality, a life superior in
type to the individual lives which we lead--worthy of devoted service,
significant, and not merely an incidental play of a natural mechanism.
This unity of human experience reveals to us nature's mechanisms, but is
itself no part of the mechanism which it observes.

If, now, we do as our general philosophy of loyalty would require: if we
take all our loyalties, in whatever forms they may appear, as more or
less enlightened but always practical revelations that there is an unity
of spiritual life which is above our present natural level, which is
worthy of our devotion, which can give sense to life, and which consists
of facts that are just as genuinely real as are the facts and the laws
of outer nature--well, can we not thus see our way towards a religious
insight which is free from superstition, which is indifferent to magic
and to miracle, which accepts all the laws of nature just in so far as
they are indeed known, but which nevertheless stoutly insists: "This
world is no mere mechanism; it is full of a spiritual unity that
transcends mere nature?"

I believe that we can do this. I believe that what I have merely hinted
to you is capable of a much richer development than I have here given to
these thoughts. I believe, in brief, that in our loyalties we find our
best sources of a genuinely religious insight.

Men have often said, "The true source of religious insight is
revelation; for these matters are above the powers of human reason."
Now, I am not here to discuss or to criticize anybody's type of
revelation. But this I know, and this the believers in various supposed
revelations have often admitted--that unless the aid of some interior
spiritual insight comes to be added to the merely external revelation,
one can be left in doubt by all possible signs and wonders whereby the
revelation und