nce with the nature and marks and, so to speak, signature of
the divine will. Hereupon arises the question: How should I, weak of
wit as I am, ignorant, fallible, a creature of a day, come to possess
that intimate acquaintance with the plan of all things, and with the
meaning of life, and with the divine, which I must obtain in case I am
to pass upon the marks whereby any revelation that can save me is to
be tested? The paradox is that a being who is so ignorant of his duty
and of his destiny as to need guidance at every point, so weak as to
need saving, should still hope, in his fallible experience, to get
into touch with anything divine. The question is, how is this
possible? What light can my individual experience throw upon vast
problems such as this?

{26}
V

I have stated what I call the religious paradox. The whole of what I
have hereafter to tell you is needed in order to throw such light as I
can here attempt to throw upon the solution of the paradox. You will
not expect, then, an immediate answer to the question thus brought
before you. Yet you see our present situation: Unless there is
something in our individual experience which at least begins to bring
us into a genuine touch, both with the fact that we need salvation and
with the marks whereby we may recognise the way of salvation, and the
essentially divine process, if such there be, which alone can
save--unless, I say, there is within each of us something of this
interior light by which saving divine truth is to be discerned,
religious insight is impossible, and then no merely external
revelation can help us. Let us then, without further delay, turn
directly to the inner light, if such light there be, and ask what,
apart from tradition, apart from external revelation, apart from
explicit theories or reports concerning the universe, apart from all
other sources, our own individual experience can tell us as to the
need and the way of salvation, and as to the marks by which we may
recognise whatever real influences, or divine beings, can intervene to
help us in our need. We shall not upon this occasion answer the
question; but we may do something to clarify the issue.

{27}

My dear friend, the late William James, in his book called "The
Varieties of Religious Experience," defined, for his own purposes,
religious experience as the experience of individuals who regard
themselves as "alone with the divine." In portraying wha