s that we need what I have ventured
to call by the traditional name salvation, are, from my point of view,
experiences common to a very large portion of mankind. They are great
and, in certain respects at least, simple experiences. You can have
them and estimate them without being committed to any one form of
religious faith, without accepting any special creed about
supernatural {38} things, and even without hoping to find out any way
of salvation whatever. The essential conditions for discovering that
man needs salvation are these: You must find that human life has some
highest end; and you must also find that man, as he naturally is, is
in great danger of failing to attain this supreme goal. If you
discover these two facts (and I personally hold them to be facts whose
reality you can experience), then the quest for the salvation of man
interests you, and is defined for you in genuinely empirical terms.
Given the problem, you may or you may not see how to solve it. You may
or you may not appeal to what you suppose to be a revelation to guide
you on the way. But in any case, granted these conditions, granted
that your experience has shown you your need of salvation--then the
problem of religion is upon your hands. Soluble or insoluble, the
topic of a revelation from above, or of a scientific inquiry, or of a
philosophy, or of a haphazard series of efforts to better your
condition, this problem, if it once comes to hold your attention, will
make of you a religious inquirer. And so long as this is the case, no
degree of cynicism or of despair regarding the finding of the way to
salvation, will deprive you of genuinely religious interest. The issue
will be one regarding facts of live experience. The concerns that for
you will seem to be at stake will be perfectly human, and will be in
close touch with every interest of daily life.

{39}

To conceive the business of religion in this way simplifies our
undertaking, in so far as it connects religion not merely with
doubtful dogmas and recondite speculations, but rather with personal
and practical interests and with the spirit of all serious endeavour.

Upon the other hand, this way of defining religion does, indeed, also
complicate certain aspects of our present task. For if, from our point
of view, religion thus becomes, in one way or another, the concern of
everybody who has once seen that life has a highest goal, and that we
are all naturally in great danger of missing