salvation. Normally the way to salvation, if there be
any such way, must lead through social experience. But when our social
experience shows us any such way upward it does so, if it truly does
so, because human social life is the hint, the likeness, or the
incarnation of a life that lies beyond and above our present human
existence. For human society as it now is, in this world of care, is a
chaos of needs; and the whole social order groans and travails
together in pain until now, longing for salvation. It can be saved, as
the individual can be saved, only in case there is some way that leads
upward, through all our turmoil and our social bickerings, to a realm
where that vision of unity and self-possession which our clearest
moments bring to us becomes not merely vision, but fulfilment, where
love finds its own, and where the power of the spirit triumphs. Of
such a realm the lovers dream and the religions tell. Let us appeal to
a further source of insight. Concerning the realities that we need,
let us next consult our Reason.

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III

THE OFFICE OF THE REASON

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III

THE OFFICE OF THE REASON

Thus far we have dealt with sources of religious insight which are
indispensable, but which confess their own inadequacy so soon as you
question them closely. Individual experience can show us, in its
moments of wider vision, our ideal, and its times of despair, of
aspiration, or of self-examination, our need. But whenever it attempts
to acquaint us with the way of salvation, its deliveries are clouded
by the mists of private caprice and of personal emotion. Social
experience, in its religious aspects, helps the individual to win the
wider outlook, helps him also to find his way out of the loneliness of
guilt and of failure toward wholeness of life, and promises salvation
through love. But, like individual experience, it is beset by what we
have called the religious paradox. And it does not solve that paradox.
Confessing its own defects, it still undertakes to discern how to
overcome them. In so far as it is merely social experience it deals
with the world of weak mortals, of futile bickerings, and of love
that, in this world, deifies but never quite finds its true beloved.
By virtue of this transforming love it indeed gives {80} us the hint
that our social world may be an apparition or an incarnation of s