Happiness
and religious peace consist in living on the plus side of the
account. In the religion of the twice-born, on the other hand,
the world is a double-storied mystery. Peace cannot be reached
by the simple addition of pluses and elimination of minuses from
life. Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and
transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being. Cancelled as
it all is by death if not by earlier enemies, it gives no final
balance, and can never be the thing intended for our lasting
worship. It keeps us from our real good, rather; and renunciation
and despair of it are our first step in the direction of the
truth. There are two lives, the natural and the spiritual, and
we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.
In their extreme forms, of pure naturalism and pure salvationism,
the two types are violently contrasted; though here as in most
other current classifications, the radical extremes are somewhat
ideal abstractions, and the concrete human beings whom we
oftenest meet are intermediate varieties and mixtures.
Practically, however, you all recognize the difference: you
understand, for example, the disdain of the methodist convert for
the mere sky-blue healthy-minded moralist; and you likewise enter
into the aversion of the latter to what seems to him the diseased
subjectivism of the Methodist, dying to live, as he calls it, and
making of paradox and the inversion of natural appearances the
essence of God's truth.
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