religions are to find what they seek, they call for
sources of insight which you cannot define, unless we are able to know
a reality that transcends human nature as it is--unless we can come
into genuine intercourse with a spiritual realm that is above man.
This naturalness of the religious {43} motives, this supernatural and
naturally baffling character of the religious objects, I am, then,
first to illustrate still further than I at the last time was able to
do.

I shall thus be led, in the second place, to the mention of that
source of religious insight to which, at the close of the former
lecture, I directed your attention, namely, to our social experience.
Society, in a certain sense, both includes and transcends the
individual man. Perhaps, then, something can be done toward solving
the problem of the religious paradox, and toward harmonising the
varieties of religious opinion, by considering the religious meaning
of our social consciousness. The religious paradox is that the needy
and ignorant natural man must somehow obtain the spiritual power to
get into a genuine touch with a real life that is above his own level.
If he is to be saved, something that is divine must come to be born in
the humble manger of his poor natural lie. How is this apparition of
the divine in the human, of the supernatural in the natural,
conceivable? It is that question which most of all divides men into
various religious sects. Perhaps a study of our social experience,
which, indeed, often tends to mould our naturally narrow selfishness
into nobler spiritual forms, may throw light upon this problem. And so
I shall, in this second part of the present discourse, state the case
for our social experience as a source of religious insight.

{44}

We shall, however, no sooner state this case than we shall begin to
see how inadequate our ordinary social experience is to give us full
religious insight. Therefore, in the third place, I shall try to
estimate more critically both the merits and the imperfections of this
second source of religious light, and thus I shall be led, as I close,
to the mention of a third source, from which, as I hold, we can learn
what neither our unaided private experience nor our ordinary social
experience ever adequately shows.

III

Let me proceed at once to the first of these three undertakings. I am
further to illustrate, on the one hand, the unity and the naturalness
of the