ns the creed or the language of
his tribe may suggest to him. He may say, and perhaps truthfully:
"This is the ideal that God sets before me. This is the divine will
regarding my life." For at such times he conceives of God as the being
who has widest vision and who knows him best. Therefore he conceives
of God's plan as the fulfilment of his own rational plan. But the
interior source of the plain man's view regarding the divine will is
simply his better vision of the meaning of his life, the vision that
comes at moments when he is not forgetful of the whole; when he does
not want to swear fidelity to one beloved, and then, like Siegfried,
pursue and win another; when he wants to be true to the whole of
himself. No wonder that he, indeed, conceives this supreme goal of
life as the goal set for him by some will higher than his own private
will. He is right. For, as we shall see, throughout our later study,
we are, indeed, helpless either to hold before us this our personal
vision of the triumphant life and of the unity of the spirit, or to
turn the vision into a practical reality, unless we come into touch
and keep in touch with an order of spiritual existence which is {52}
in a perfectly genuine sense superhuman, and in the same sense
supernatural, and which certainly is not our natural selves.

But in any case the plain man must needs interpret his vision of the
ideal in terms of whatever conception of God, or of the triumphant
life, or of spiritual power, his traditions and his stage of personal
development may suggest to him. Hence the endless varieties in the
formulation of the religious ideal. Whatever is suggested to a man, at
his moments of wider vision, as a law or as a motive which, _if_ it
were the ruling motive or the supreme law would make life a consistent
whole--this he takes to be God's will, or the truth that is to save
him if, indeed, salvation is possible.

If this account of the sources of the religious motive is right, we
need not view the religious interest as the result of an arbitrary
intrusion from above--as if the gods loved to disturb us and to
trouble our peace. Nor need we, with James, speak of a marvellous and
capricious uprush from below the level of our natural consciousness.
Yet just as little need we think of religion as having no concern with
what is, indeed, superhuman. Religion is, indeed, our own affair; for
it grows out of our personal vision of the transformation that a
divinely