“To most of us religion comes in a way that makes a veto on our active faith illogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having a personal form. The universe is no longer a mere _It_ to us, but a _Thou_, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here. For instance, although in one sense we are passive portions of the universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we were small active centers on our own account. We feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld unless we met the hypothesis half way. To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who, in a company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one’s word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would earn,--so here, one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making the gods’ acquaintance. This feeling ... that by obstinately believing that there are gods ... we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the being and essence of the religious hypothesis.” I do not lay this passage before you as an example of clear thinking and cogent reasoning. Who does not find it baffling, elusive, leading to no kind of action, must have a mind differently constituted from mine or from any with which I am more intimately acquainted. It is, if you please, the groping of a faith that feels it has a right to exist, but does not know as yet what is right for it to do. All of which is most unpragmatic--not at all practical. But perhaps this very quality, this manner of James’s of feeling his way through the dark _en tâtonnant_, with his heart’s courage for his only light, is what most endears him to our age. We sit with Zarathustra midst shattered tables of the law, and our awkward fingers cannot grave new ones hurriedly. We fumble, we hesitate, we begin again. We fumble, we hesitate, but we _do_, if we are idealists, begin again. Now, one of the new things we have tried is just this manner of meeting the universe half way in the matter of religious faith. And this trial has been no interchange of philosophical abstractions; but a struggle of very living men. To tell about it will perhaps illustrate better than anything else the appeal pragmatism made to some and the offense it gave to others. * * * * *