her; we must rely on the authorities.
They tell us that sometime we are going to talk through wireless
telephones across thousands of miles, so that no man need ever be out of
vocal communication with his family and friends. Is that true? It seems
to us an incredible miracle, but we suppose that it is so, as the
authorities say. In a word, the idea that we do not use authority in
science is absurd. Science is precisely the place where nine hundred and
ninety-nine men out of a thousand use authority the most. The chemistry,
biology, geology, astronomy which the authorities teach is the only
science which most of us possess.

There is another realm, however, where we never think of taking such an
attitude. They tell us that friendship is beautiful. Is that true?
Would we ever think of saying that we do not know, ourselves, but that we
rely on the authorities? Far better to say that our experience with
friendship has been unhappy and that we personally question its utility!
That, at least, would have an accent of personal, original experience in
it. For here we are facing a realm where we never can enter at all until
we enter, each man for himself.

Two realms exist, therefore, in each of which first-hand experience is
desirable, but in only one of which it is absolutely indispensable. We
can live on what the authorities in physics say, but there are no proxies
for the soul. Love, friendship, delight in music and in nature, parental
affection--these things are like eating and breathing; no one can do them
for us; we must enter the experience for ourselves. Religion, too,
belongs in this last realm. The one vital thing in religion is
first-hand, personal experience. Religion is the most intimate, inward,
incommunicable fellowship of the human soul. In the words of Plotinus,
religion is "the flight of the alone to the Alone." You never know God
at all until you know him for yourself. The only God you ever will know
is the God you do know for yourself.

This does not mean, of course, that there are no authorities in religion.
There are authorities in everything, but the function of an authority in
religion, as in every other vital realm, is not to take the place of our
eyes, seeing in our stead and inerrantly declaring to us what it sees;
the function of an authority is to bring to us the insight of the world's
accumulated wisdom and the revelations of God's seers, and so to open our
eyes that we may see, e