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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: coagulating about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming
horror, surrounding him without opening or end. Not the
conception or intellectual perception of evil, but the grisly
blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation of it close upon one, and
no other conception or sensation able to live for a moment in its
presence. How irrelevantly remote seem all our usual refined
optimisms and intellectual and moral consolations in presence of
a need of help like this! Here is the real core of the religious
problem: Help! help! No prophet can claim to bring a final
message unless he says things that will have a sound of reality
in the ears of victims such as these. But the deliverance must
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