beyond good and evil"--masters in the coming
world of triumphant democracy. The social experience of our time is
full of ambiguous lessons. Its way toward salvation leads not only
over the Hill of Difficulty, but both ways around the hill; and it
shows us no one straight and narrow road to peace. Whoever would
traverse its wilderness and reach salvation needs to supplement his
social insight by a use of other and deeper sources.

And as to what these deeper sources of insight are, the teacher whom I
have already repeatedly cited--William James--asserts a doctrine that,
as you already know, I do not regard as adequate, but that I must
again here emphasise, because its contrast with that social theory of
religion which I just characterised is so instructive.

James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," shows the utmost
liberality toward differences of {62} faith, and insists in the
opening chapters of his book that religious experience is a field
where one must beware of defining sharp boundary lines or of showing a
false exclusiveness. Yet _one_ boundary line he himself defines with
the greatest sharpness; and in respect of _one_ matter he is rigidly
exclusive. Religious experience, he insists, is, as you will remember
from our first lecture, the experience of an individual who feels
himself to be "alone with the divine." And the social types of
religious experience James rigidly excludes from the "varieties"
whereof he takes account. And James's reason for this procedure is
explicit. In its social aspects religion, so he insists, always
becomes, or has already become, conventional. James no longer finds in
the religious life of communities the novelty and independence of
vision which he prizes. The essence of true religious experience lies,
for him, in its originality, in its spontaneity, and so in the very
solitude which is a condition, to James's mind, for the discovery of
that which saves.

The words "originality" and "spontaneity" emphasise the features
which, as I think, James most meant to emphasise. The problem of
salvation, for James, must be an essentially individual problem; for
nobody else ever faced _your_ need of salvation, or had your personal
issues to meet. If you win religious insight, you will have to win it
very much as you will have to die--alone. Of course James does not
hesitate to test the value of religious {63} experience, in his
pragmatic fashion, by its social as well as by its indiv