version to
the religious life. Through the negation of self rather than
through its fulfillment men have found solace and rest. And
this negation, when it takes religious form, has consisted in
a rapturous submission to the will of God.

"Outside, the world is wild and passionate.
Man's weary laughter and his sick despair
Entreat at their impenetrable gate,
They heed no voices in their dream of prayer.

"Calm, sad, secure, with faces worn and mild,
Surely their choice of vigil is the best.
Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild;
But there beside the altar there is rest."[1]

[Footnote 1: Ernest Dawson: _Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration._]

EXPERIENCES WHICH FREQUENTLY FIND RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION.
The religious experience, as pointed out in the beginning of
this discussion, has its roots in the same impulses which cause
men to love and to hate, to be jubilant and sorrowful, exalted
and depressed. All these human experiences sometimes take
a religious form, that is, their expressions have some reference
to the supernatural and the divine. We find, in surveying the
history of religion, that certain experiences more than others
tend to find religious expression. We shall examine a few of
the chief of these.

NEED AND IMPOTENCE. An awed, almost frightened sense of
dependence overcomes even the most robust and healthy-minded
man when he sees the forces of Nature suddenly unloosed
on a magnificent scale. A terrific peal of thunder, an
earthquake or a cyclone will send thrills of terror through the
normally calm and self-sufficient. Even apart from such
vivid and terrifying examples of the range and scale of non-human
power, there comes to the reflective a sense of the
frailty of human life, of the utter dependability of all human
purposes and plans on conditions beyond human control. In
our most fundamental industry, agriculture, an untimely frost
can undo the work of the most ingenious industry and thrift.
A tornado or a snowstorm can disorganize the cunning and
subtle, swift mechanisms of communication which men have
invented. In the field of humanly built-up relations, again, a
fortune or a friendship may depend on some chance meeting;
a man's profession and ideals are fixed by a single fortuitous
conversation, by a chance encouragement, opportunity or
frustration.

There is thus a psychological though perhaps not literal
truth in the figure of Fate, or in the metaphor that speaks