exclusively appeals
to our own energies that he seems to hold that our duty would be just
as much our duty, "If we were alone upon the earth and the gods
blind," somewhere meets the religious opponent who mocks his pride, or
despises his restlessness, or laments his contempt for the divine
grace.

Now these conflicts are, I insist, no merely speculative
controversies. They play a great part in history. They have darkened
countless lives. And they grow out of motives deep in human nature.
What is here most important for us is that they point us toward our
new source of insight. What a narrower way of living can divide, a
deeper and {181} truer mode of living can unite. Our problem assumes a
new form. Is there any mode of living that is just _both_ to the moral
and to the religious motives? Is there any way of reconciling our
need, of a grace that shall save with the call of the moral life that
we shall be strenuous in the pursuit of our duty?

Let us here approach this problem from the side of our moral
consciousness. For at this point we are already familiar with the
religious need. Does there exist amongst men a type of morality that,
in and for itself, is already essentially religious, so that it knows
nothing of this conflict between duty and religion? I reply, there is
such a type of morality. There is a sort of consciousness which
equally demands of those whom it inspires, spiritual attainment and
strenuousness, serenity and activity, resignation and vigour, life in
the spirit and ceaseless enterprise in service. Is this form of
consciousness something belonging only to highly and intellectually
cultivated souls? Is it the fruit of abstract thinking alone? Is it
the peculiar possession of the philosophers? Or, on the other hand,
does it arise solely through dumb and inarticulate intuitions? Is it
consistent only with a highly sensitive and mystical temperament? Does
it belong only to the childhood of the spirit? Is it exclusively
connected with the belief in some one creed? To all these questions I
reply: No.

This sort of consciousness is possessed in a very {182} high degree by
some of the humblest and least erudite of mankind. Those in whose
lives it is a notable feature may be personally known only to a few
near friends. But the spirit in which they live is the most precious
of humanity's possessions. And such people may be found belonging to
all the ages in which we can discover any genuinely humane activ