ing light.

So let me next attempt to define salvation in a sufficiently general
sense. Man is an infinitely needy creature. He wants endlessly
numerous {12} special things--food, sleep, pleasure, fellowship, power
in all its Protean shapes, peace in all its elusive forms, love in its
countless disguises--in brief, all the objects of desire. But amongst
these infinitely manifold needs, the need for salvation stands out, in
the minds of those who feel it, as a need that is peculiarly
paramount, so that, according to their view of life, to desire
salvation is to long for some pearl of great price, for the sake of
which one would be ready to sell all that one has. The idea that man
needs salvation depends, in fact, upon two simpler ideas whereof the
main idea is constituted. _The first is the idea that there is some
end or aim of human life which is more important than all other aims,
so that, by comparison with this aim all else is secondary and
subsidiary, and perhaps relatively unimportant, or even vain and
empty. The other idea is this: That man as he now is, or as he
naturally is, is in great danger of so missing this highest aim as to
render his whole life a senseless failure by virtue of thus coming
short of his true goal_. Whoever has been led to conceive human life
in these terms, namely, to think that there is for man some sort of
highest good, by contrast with which all other goods are relatively
trivial, and that man, as he is, is in great danger of losing this
highest good, so that his greatest need is of escape from this
danger--whoever, I say, thus views our life, holds that man needs
salvation.

Now, I beg you to observe that such a view of {13} life as this is in
no wise dependent upon any one dogma as to a future state of reward
and punishment, as to heaven and hell, as to the fall of man, or as to
any point of the traditional doctrine of this or of that special
religion. Philosophers and prophets, and even cynics, learned and
unlearned men, saints and sinners, sages and fanatics, Christians and
non-Christians, believers in immortality and believers that death ends
all, may agree, yes, have agreed, in viewing human life in the general
spirit just characterised. A very few examples may serve to show how
wide-spread this longing for salvation has been and how manifold have
also been its guises.

I have already mentioned Buddhism as a religion that seeks the
salvation of man. The central idea of the orig