right in holding that man as he lives in his social world can
never save man. Our social consciousness is too barefaced and open in
its union of triviality and pathos. What we want as the saving power
is, for a teacher such as James, something more mysterious, deep,
subconscious or superconscious, and in this sense, indeed, superhuman.

Still I am only depicting, not yet judging. I have now briefly stated
opinions that favour and opinions {65} that oppose an interpretation
of religious insight in terms of our social experience. But what are
the merits of the case? In what sense can there be a religion of the
social consciousness?

VI

The answer to this question involves, I think, two considerations,
both of them exemplified by the various views here in question, both
of them familiar, both of them easily misinterpreted. The first is the
very consideration upon which our popular teachers of salvation
through love most insist. We ourselves came upon that consideration at
the close of our first lecture. Man is, indeed, a being who cannot be
saved alone, however much solitude may help him, at times, toward
insight. For he is bound to his brethren by spiritual links that
cannot be broken. The second consideration is this: So long as man
views his fellow-man _merely_ as fellow-man, he only complicates his
problem, for both he and his fellow equally need salvation. Their
plight is common; their very need of salvation chains them together in
the prison of human sorrow. If, to adapt the symbolism of ancient
stories to our case, the angel of love is to appear in their prison,
is to loosen their chains, is to open the doors, it must be, in some
wise, as an angel, not as a merely human presence, that love must
appear.

Perhaps the best way to indicate wherein lies the {66} strength and
the weakness, the irresistible authority and the pathetic limitation
of our social experience as a religious guide, and the best way also
to indicate its true relations to the religious experience of the
human individual, is to remind ourselves of a very few familiar cases
in which an individual finds that his own way toward salvation, if any
such way is to exist for him at all, lies through his social world, so
that he cannot be saved without the help of his fellows.

Our first instance shall be an extreme one, in which the sense of need
is intense and the longing for salvation acute, but where there is
little o