is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the
religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are
positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in
order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy
and felicitous what in any case is necessary; and if it be the
only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital importance
as a human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute. It becomes
an essential organ of our life, performing a function which no
other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill. From
the merely biological point of view, so to call it, this is a
conclusion to which, so far as I can now see, we shall inevitably
be led, and led moreover by following the purely empirical method
of demonstration which I sketched to you in the first lecture.
Of the farther office of religion as a metaphysical revelation I
will say nothing now.

But to foreshadow the terminus of one's investigations is one
thing, and to arrive there safely is another. In the next
lecture, abandoning the extreme generalities which have engrossed
us hitherto, I propose that we begin our actual journey by
addressing ourselves directly to the concrete facts.



Lecture III

THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN

Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the
broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it