apparition of the Christ; but he is explicitly a heretic
regarding the old faith of the church.

But with tradition as tradition, these lectures have to do only by way
of occasional illustration. What interests us more, for our present
purpose, is the fact that, despite the predominance of the social
interpretations of religion of which I have just reminded you, there
are still some of our recent teachers who stoutly insist that our
social {60} experience does not adequately show us any way of
salvation whatever.

And here first I must call attention to certain of the most modern and
least theologically disposed of our leaders, namely, to those who
emphasise the most characteristic recent forms of individualism. I
have mentioned Nietzsche in my former lecture. Surely he stands for
opposition to tradition and he expresses tendencies that are potent
to-day. But while he lived and wrote, he aspired to be a sort of
Antichrist, and preached the doctrine that a religion of love can
never save, because, as he insists, what the self needs is power, and
power is not to be won by attempting to please a world of slaves.
Nietzsche may seem to you, as he has seemed to so many, a hopeless
abnormity; but his Titanism is in fact a wayward modern expression of
a motive that has always played its notable part in the search for
salvation, ever since heroism and the resolute will were first
discovered by man. Nietzsche's insight too, such as it is, is a social
insight. It comes through noting that, even if the individual needs
his social world as a means of grace and a gateway to salvation, the
social order, in its turn, needs individuals that are worth saving,
and can never be saved unless it expresses itself through the deeds
and the inner life of souls deeply conscious of the dignity of
selfhood, of the infinite worth of unique and intensely conscious
personal life.

{61}

As a fact, individualism is as potent an ethical motive in the life of
to-day as is the collectivism just characterised. Each of these
tendencies, in our present social order, feeds upon and intensifies
the other. Socialism opposes, and yet inevitably encourages, the
purposes of the very individual who feels his social ties as a galling
restraint. It preaches solidarity and brotherhood and love; but wins a
ready hearing from those who view all these tendencies mainly as means
whereby they may hope to have their own way, and to become, as
Nietzsche's Superman, "