said to you in
this introduction. It is always easy to see that, in religion, one man
thinks thus and another man thinks otherwise, and that no man knows as
much as we all wish to know. But I want to lay stress upon those
perennial sources from which human insight has flowed and for ages in
the future will continue to flow. To understand what these sources are
will help us, I believe, toward unity of spirit, toward co-operation
in the midst of all our varieties of faith, and toward insight itself
and the fruits of insight.

{19}

IV

I can best undertake my brief initial study of the way in which the
experience of the individual human being is a source of religious
insight by meeting an objection that a reading of my printed programme
may have aroused in the minds of some of you. My list of the sources
of religious insight, as contained in the titles of these lectures,
makes no express reference to a source which some of you will be
disposed to regard as the principal source, namely, Revelation. Here,
some of you will already have said, is a very grave omission. Man's
principal insight into the need and the way of salvation comes, and
must come, you will say, from without, from the revelation that the
divine power which saves, makes of itself, through Scripture or
through the Church. Now, so far as this thesis forms part of the
doctrine of a particular religion, namely, in your own case, of
Christianity, I shall in these lectures omit any direct discussion of
that thesis. The reason for the omission I have already pointed out.
These lectures undertake a limited task, and must be judged by their
chosen limitations. But in so far as revelation is a general term,
meaning whatever intercourse there may be between the divine and the
human, all these lectures, in dealing with sources of religious
insight, will be dealing with processes of revelation. And in what
sense this {20} assertion is true we shall see as we go on with our
undertaking. This first mention of revelation enables me, however,
both to state and to answer the objection to my programme which I have
just mentioned, and in doing so to vindicate for the experience of any
religiously disposed individual its true significance as a source of
insight. Hereby, as I hope, I can forthwith show that even the present
deliberately limited undertaking of these lectures has an importance
which you ought to recognise, whatever your own views a