A number of religions also satisfy for many the need of being linked with the ultimate and eternal. Death is not permanent defeat and disappearance; man has a second chance. He is not lost in the abyss of endless time; he has endless being. Religion at its best also offers the experience of spiritual fulfillment by inviting man into the highest realm of the spirit. Religion can summate, epitomize, relate, and conserve all the highest ideals and values -- ethical, aesthetic, and religious -- of man formed in his culture.

There is also the possibility, among higher religions, of experiencing consistent meaning in life and enjoying guidance and expansiveness. The kind of religious experience that most moderns seek not only provides, clarifies, and relates human yearnings, values, ideals, and purposes; it also provides facilities and incitements for the development of personality, sociality, and creativeness. Under the religious impulse, whether theistic or humanistic, men have joy in living; life leads somewhere. Religion at its best is out in front, ever beckoning and leading on, and, as Lippman put it, ``mobilizing all man's scattered energies in one triumphant sense of his own infinite importance.''

At the same time that religion binds the individual helpfully to the supernatural and gives him cosmic peace and a sense of supreme fulfillment, it also has great therapeutic value for him. It gives him aid, comfort, even solace, in meeting mundane life situations where his own unassisted practical knowledge and skill are felt by him to be inadequate. He is confronted with the recurrent crises, such as great natural catastrophes and the great transitions of life -- marriage, incurable disease, widowhood, old age, the certainty of death. He has to cope with frustration and other emotional disturbance and anomie. His religious beliefs provide him with plausible explanations for many conditions which cause him great concern, and his religious faith makes possible fortitude, equanimity, and consolation, enabling him to endure colossal misfortune, fear, frustration, uncertainty, suffering, evil, and danger. Religion usually also includes a principle of compensation, mainly in a promised perfect future state.