RELIGION AND THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. Since human nature remains constant in its essential traits, despite the variations it exhibits among different individuals, it is to be expected that certain experiences should be fairly common and recurrent among all human beings. Joy and sorrow, love and hate, jubilance and despair, disillusion and rapture, triumph and frustration, these occur often, and to every man. They are, as it were, the sparks generated by the friction of human desires with the natural world in which they must, if anywhere, find fulfillment. Just such a normal, inevitable consequence of human nature in a natural world is the religious experience. It is common in more or less intense degree to almost all men, and may be studied objectively just as may any of the other universal experiences of mankind.

There are, however, certain peculiar difficulties in the study of the religious experience. Most men are by training emotionally committed to one particular religious creed which it is very difficult for them impartially to examine or to compare with others. In the second place, there is a confusion in the minds of most people between the personal religious experience, and the formal and external institution we commonly have in mind when we speak of “religion.” When we ordinarily use the term, we imply a set of dogmas, an institution, a reasoned theology, a ritual, a priesthood, all the apparatus and earmarks of institutionalized religion. We think of Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism, the whole welter of churches and creeds that have appeared in the history of mankind. But these are rather the outward vehicles and vestments of the religious experience than the experience itself. They are the social expressions and external instruments of the inner spiritual occurrence. But the latter is primary. If man had not first been religious, these would never have arisen. In the words of William James:

In one sense at least, the personal religion will prove itself more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches when once established live at second hand upon tradition, but the founders of every Church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all the originators of Christian sects have been in this case; so personal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who esteem it incomplete.

Before we examine the social institutions and fixed apparatus of ritual and of reasoned theology in which the religious experience has become variously embodied, we must pause to analyze the experience itself. To be religious, as a personal experience, is, like being philosophical, to take a total attitude toward the universe. But the religious attitude is one of a somewhat specific kind. It is, one may arbitrarily but also somewhat fairly say, to sense or comprehend one’s relation to the divine, however the divine be conceived. It is to have this sense and comprehension not only deeply, as one might in a poetic or a philosophical mood, but to have it suffused with reverence. We shall presently see that the objects of veneration have had a different meaning for different individuals, groups, and generations. But whatever be the conception of the divine object, the religious attitude seems to have this stable feature. It is always an awed awareness on the part of the individual of his relation to that “something not himself,” and larger than himself, with whom the destinies of the universe seem to rest. This somehow sensed relation to the divine appears throughout all the varieties of religion that have appeared in the world, and among many individuals not popularly accounted religious.

It is just such an experience, for example, that Wordsworth expresses when he says in the “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey”:

“... And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”

It is the same sense that comes over so-called worldly people when oppressed suddenly by a great sorrow, or uplifted by a sudden great joy, an awareness of a divine power that moves masterfully and mysteriously through the events of life, provoking on the part of finite creatures a strange and compelling reverence. This “divinity that shapes our ends” may be variously conceived. It may be an intimately realized personal God, “Our Father which art in Heaven.” It may be such an abstract conception as the Laws of Nature or Scientific Law, such a religion as is expounded by the Transcendentalists, in particular by Emerson:

These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance: thus in the soul of man there is a justice whose rétributions are instant and entire.... If a man is at heart just, then, in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with justice.... For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is differently named, love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes.... The perception of this law awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable.

It may be conceived as Nature itself, as it was by Spinoza, for whom Nature was identical with God. It may be the World-Soul which Shelley sings with such rapture:

“That Light whose smile kindles the universe,
That beauty in which all things work and move,
That benediction which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining love,
Which through the web of being, blindly wove,
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality."

In all these conceptions it still seems to be a hushed sense of reverential relationship to the divine power that most specifically constitutes the religious experience. The latter exhibits certain recurrent elements, any of which may be present in a more intense degree in some individuals than in others, but all of which appear in some degree in most of the phenomena of personal life that we call religious.

“THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN.” In the first place may be noted the sense of the actuality and nearness of the divine power, what James calls the “reality of the unseen,” and what is frequently spoken of by religious men as “the presence of God.” James quotes in this connection an interesting letter of James Russell Lowell’s:

I had a revelation last Friday evening.... Happening to say something of the presence of spirits of whom, as I said, I was often dimly aware, Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with me on spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the whole system seemed to rise up before me, like a vague destiny looming from the abyss. I never before felt the spirit of God so keenly in me, and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of something I knew not what. I spoke with the calmness and clearness of a prophet.

The archives of the psychology of religion are crowded with instances of men who have felt deeply, intimately, and irrefutably the near and actual presence of God. This sense of the reality of an unseen Thing or Power is not always identified with God. There come moments in the lives of normal men and women when the world of experience seems alive with something that is apprehended through none of the five senses. There are times when things unseen, unheard, and untouched seem to have, nay, for those concerned, do have, a clearer and more unmistakable reality than the things we can touch, hear, and see. Sometimes, in the hearing of beautiful music, we sense a transcendent beauty which is something other than, something more real than, the specific harmonies which we physically hear. In rare moments of rapture, when the imagination or the affections are intensely stirred, we become intensely aware of this reality which is made known to us through none of the ordinary avenues of experience. The Unseen is not only vividly felt, but is deeply felt and regarded as a thing of deep significance, and is experienced in most cases with great inexplicable joy. And, not infrequently, this significant and beautiful Unseen Somewhat is identified with God.

The sense of the reality of the divine, is, however, as it were, only the prerequisite of the religious experience. When an individual does have this sense, what interests the student of the psychology of religion is the attitude it provokes and the satisfactions it gives. These we can the better understand if we examine the conditions in an individual’s experience which make this longing for the divine presence acute, and the general circumstances of human life which make it a continuous desire in many people.

There are, to begin with, constant facts of experience which make the realization of the divine presence not only a satisfaction, but the indispensable “staff of life” for certain human beings. In their unfaltering faith in God’s enduring and proximate actuality lies their sole source of security and trust. For such persons a lapse or a lack of faith is the prelude to utter collapse. A vague general assurance of the dependability of the future is, for most people, a prerequisite for a sane and untroubled existence. Even those who live in unreflective satisfaction with the fruits of the moment would find these moments less satisfactory were they not set in a background of reasonably fair promise. The exuberant optimist, when he stops to reflect, has a buoyant and inclusive faith in the essential goodness of man and the universe. Whitman stands out in this connection as the classic type. Evil and good were to him indifferently beautiful. He maintained an incredibly large-hearted and magnanimous receptivity to all things great or small, charming or ugly, that lightened or blackened the face of the planet.

While the average man accepts the universe with a less wholesale and indiscriminate appreciation, yet he does feel vaguely assured that the nature of things is ordered, harmonious, dependable, and regular, that affairs are, cosmically speaking, in a sound state. He feels a vast and comfortable solidity about the frame of things in which his life is set; he can depend on the familiar risings and settings of the sun, the recurrent and assured movement of the seasons. Were this trust suddenly removed, were the cosmic guarantee withdrawn, to live would be one long mortal terror. That this is precisely what does happen under such circumstances, the voluminous literature of melancholia sufficiently proves.

The sense of insecurity takes various forms. Sometimes the patient experiences a profound and intimate conviction of the unreality of the world about him. His whole physical environment comes to seem a mere phantasy and a delusion. In some cases he finds himself unmoved by the normal interests and excitements of men, unable to find any stimulus, value, or significance in the world.

Esquirol observed the case of a very intelligent magistrate.... Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested neither perversion nor violence, but a complete absence of emotional reaction. If he went to the theater, which he did out of habit, he could find no pleasure there. The thought of his house, of his home, of his wife, and of his absent children, moved him as little, he said, as a theorem of Euclid.

The sense of futility, of the flatness, staleness, and unprofitableness of the world, which is felt in such extreme forms by pronounced melancholiacs, is experienced sometimes, though to a lesser degree, by every sensitive mind that reflects much upon life. Such an attitude, it is true, arises principally during moments of fatigue and low vitality, and is undoubtedly organic in its origins, as for that matter is optimism. Again such a sense of world-weariness comes often in moments of personal disappointment and disillusion, when friends have proved false, ambitions empty, efforts wasted. At such times even the normal man echoes Swinburne’s beautiful melancholy:

“We are not sure of sorrow,
And joy was never sure,
To-day will die to-morrow,
Time stoops to no man’s lure;
And love grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful,
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful,
Weeps that no loves endure.

“From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives, forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river,
Winds somewhere safe to sea."

Even the eager and exuberant, if sufficiently philosophical and generous-minded, may come, despite their own success, to a deep realization of the utter futility, meaninglessness, and stupidity of life, of the essential blindnesses, cruelties, and insecurities which seem to characterize the nature of things. Unless against this dark insight some reassuring faith arises, life may become almost unbearable. In extreme cases it has driven men to suicide. Take, for example, the picture of the universe as modern materialism presents it:

Purposeless... and void of meaning is the world which science reveals for our belief.... That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving, that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought or feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave, that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievements must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins all these things if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Such a prospect to the serious-minded and sensitive-spirited cannot but provoke the profoundest melancholy. There is, even for the most healthy-minded of us, sufficient ground for pessimism, bitterness, insecurity. Even if we personally largely through the accidents of circumstance happen to be successful, “our joy is a vulgar glee, not unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success.” The utter futility and evanescence of earthly goods, beauties, and achievements is sensed at least sometimes by normally complacent souls. And so patent and ubiquitous are the evidences of decay, disease, and death at our disposal, that they may easily be erected into a thoroughgoing philosophy of life:

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?...

All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the good so is the sinner; and he that sweareth as he that feareth an oath....

For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.

Also their love and their hatred and their envy is now perished; neither have they any more a portion forever in anything that is done under the sun.

Religion offers solace to those perturbed and passionate souls, among others, to whom these futilities have become a rankling, continuous torment and depression. When life on earth appears fragmentary and disordered, not only nonsense but terrifying nonsense, full of hideous injustices, sickening uncertainties, and cruel destructions, men have not infrequently found a refuge in the divine. “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

In the religious experience man finds life to be made clear, complete, and beautiful. What seems a contradictory fragment finds its precise niche in the divine scheme, what seems dark and cruel shines out in a setting of eternal beneficence and wisdom. The experience of the individual, even the happiest, is always partial, broken, and disordered. No ideal is ever completely realized, or if realized leaves some perfection to be desired. Men living in a natural existence imagine values and ideals which can never be realized there. In religion, if anywhere, men have found perfection, and ultimate sufficiency.

This perfection, completion, and clarification of life has been attained in various ways. The religious experience itself, when intense, may give to the individual apart from a reasoned judgment, or from any actual change in his physical surroundings, a translucent insight during which he sees deeply, calmly, joyously into the beautiful eternal order of things. This mystic insight has been experienced on occasion by quite normal and prosaic men and women. While it lasts, reality seems to take on new colors and dimensions. It becomes vivid, luminous, and intense. The mystic seems to rise to a higher level of consciousness, in which he experiences a universe more significant, ordered, and unified than any commonly experienced through the senses. One may take, as an example, such an instance autobiographically and anonymously reported a few years ago, and well documented:

It was not that for a few keyed-up moments I imagined all existence as beautiful, but that my inner vision was cleared to the truth so that I saw the actual loveliness which is always there, but which we so rarely perceive; and I knew that every man, woman, bird, and tree, every living thing before me, was extravagantly beautiful, and extravagantly important. And as I beheld, my heart melted out of me in a rapture of love and delight. A nurse was walking past; the wind caught a strand of her hair and blew it out in a momentary gleam of sunshine, and never in my life before had I seen how beautiful beyond all belief is a woman’s hair. Nor had I ever guessed how marvelous it is for a human being to walk. As for the internes in their white suits, I had never realized before the whiteness of white linen; but much more than that, I had never so much as dreamed of the beauty of young manhood. A little sparrow chirped and flew to a near-by branch, and I honestly believe that only “the morning stars singing together, and the sons of God shouting for joy” can in the least express the ecstasy of a bird’s flight. I cannot express it, but I have seen it.

Once out of all the gray days of my life I have looked into the heart of reality; I have witnessed the truth; I have seen life as it really is ravishingly, ecstatically, madly beautiful, and filled to overflowing with a wild joy, and a value unspeakable. For those glorified moments I was in love with every living thing before me the trees in the wind, the little birds flying, the nurses, the internes, the people who came and went. There was nothing that was alive that was not a miracle. Just to be alive was in itself a miracle. My very soul flowed out of me in a great joy.

The mystic experience is important in the study of religion because it has so frequently given those who have had it a very real feeling of “cosmic consciousness.” The individual feels “for one luminously transparent conscious moment,” at one with the universe; he has a realization at once rapturous and tranquil of the passionate and wonderful significance of things. He has moved “from the chill periphery to the radiant core.” All the discrepancies which bestrew ordinary life are absent. All the negations of disappointment, all conflicts of desire disappear. The mystic lives perfection at first hand:

“The One remains, the many change and pass,
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly,
Life, like a dome of many colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.”

This sense of splendid unity in which all the divisive and corroding elements of selfhood are obliterated has “to those who have been there” no refutation. “It is,” writes William James, “an open question whether mystic states may not be superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out on a more extensive and inclusive world.”

Whatever be the logical validity of the intense mystical insight, of his singular gift for a vivid and intimate union with eternity which has been known by so many mystics, the fruits of this insight are undeniable. During such a vision the world is perfect. There is no fever or confusion, but rapture and rest. And to some degree, at a religious service, a momentous crisis, joy at deliverance or resignation at calamity, during beatific interludes of friendship or of love, men have felt a clear enveloping oneness with divinity.

Such states of intense religious experience, however, are as transient as they are ineffable. Though they recur, they are not continuous, and something more than occasional vivid unions with the divine enter into the constant perfection with which the world, as it appears to the religious man, is endowed. He feels himself, in the first place, to be part of a world scheme in which ultimate perfection is secured. It has already been pointed out that any individual human life is characterized by negation, conflict, and disappointment. Our lives seem largely to be at the mercy of circumstance. Our inheritance is fixed for us without our connivance in the matter; accident determines in which social environment we happen to be born. And these two facts are the chief determinants of our careers. Even when successful we realize either the emptiness of the prize we had desired, or the distance we are in reality from the goal we had set ourselves. Generalizing thus from his own experience, the individual notes the similar disheartening discrepancies throughout human life. He sees the good suffer, and the wicked prosper; the innocent die, and the guilty escape. Disease is no respecter of persons, and death comes to the just and the unjust alike.

Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?
Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring
before their eyes.
Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them.
Their bull gendereth and faileth not; their cow calveth and casteth
not her calf.
They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their children dance.
They take the timbrel and harp, and rejoice at the sound of the organ.
They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down to the grave.
Therefore they say unto God; depart from us, for we desire not the
knowledge of thy ways.
What is the Almighty that we should serve him? And what profit
should we have if we pray unto him?

In contrast, in the religious experience man feels himself to be a part of a world scheme in which justice and righteousness are assured by an incontestable and invulnerable power; “God’s in his Heaven; all’s right with the world.” Despite the grounds he has for doubt, Job robustly avers: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” Calamities are but temporary; God will bring all things to a beautiful fruition.

Or a man may feel that the evils he or others experience here are not real evils, that, seen sub specie oeternitatis, they would cease to be regarded as such. He may feel that God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform, that “somehow good may come of ill.” He may feel, as does the Christian believer, that all the evils and pains unjustly experienced in this world will be adjusted in the next. Whatever be my privations from earthly good, “in my Father’s house are many mansions.” Immortality is, indeed, the religious man’s faith in a second chance. The surety of a world to come, in which the blessed shall live in eternal bliss, is a compensation and a redress for the ills and frustrations of life in this world. Whatever be the seeming ills or injustices of life, there is eventual retribution, both to the just and the unjust. Once more to quote Emerson:

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances, and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener, is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighbourhoods of men.

On a larger scale, from the cosmic rather than from the personal point of view, an individual, gifted with a large and charitable interest in the future of mankind, is secured and sustained by the feeling that he is a part of that procession headed to the “one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.” The lugubrious picture of an utterly meaningless world, blind, purposeless, and heartless, which materialistic science reveals, is sufficient to wreck the equanimity of a sensitive and thoughtful mind.

That is the sting of it, that in the vast drifting of the cosmic weather, though many a jewelled shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved even as our world now lingers for our joy yet when these transient products are gone, nothing, absolutely nothing remains. Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. Without an echo, without a memory; without an influence on aught that may come after, to make it care for similar ideals. This utter wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism, as at present understood.

A belief that a divine power governs the universe, that all these miscellaneous and inexplicable happenings will be gathered up into a smooth and ultimate perfection, gives faith, comfort, and solace. We are on the side of the angels, or rather the angels are on our side. Human passion, purpose, and endeavor are not wasted. They are small but not altogether negligible contributions to eventual cosmic good. And good is eventual. Perfection may be long delayed, but God’s presence assures it. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”

A world with a God in it to say the last word may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of Him as still mindful of the old ideals, and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that where He is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things.

Amid tragic errors and pitiful disillusions, men have yearned for “a benediction perfect and complete where they might cease to suffer and desire.” This perfection religion has, as we have seen, accorded them in various ways. Some have found it in the immediate vision, the ecstatic union with the divine that, in intense degree, is peculiarly the mystic’s. Some have found it in the assured belief that evil is itself an illusion, and, if rightly conceived, a beautiful dark shadow to set off by contrast the high lights of a divinely ordered cosmos, a minor note giving lyric and lovely poignancy to the celestial music. Some have rested their faith in a perfect world not here, but hereafter, “where the blessed would enter eternal bliss with God their master.” Thus man has in religion found the fulfillment of his ideals, which always outrun the actualities amid which he lives. In the religious experience, in all of its forms throughout the ages, man has had the experience of perfection at first hand, in the immediate and rich intensity of the mystic ecstasy, in the serene faith of a lifelong intuition or of a reasoned belief in the ultimate divinely assured rightness of things.

Besides experiencing perfection, man has, in the sense of security and trust afforded by the religious experience, found release from the fret, the fever, the compulsion, and constriction under which so much of life must be lived. Whatever happens, the truly devout man has no fears or qualms. He has attained equanimity; the Lord is his shepherd; he shall not want. There is a serenity experienced by the genuinely faithful that the faithless may well envy. God is the believer’s eternal watcher; a wise and merciful Providence, his infinite guarantee.

Whoever not only says but feels, “God’s will be done” is mailed against every weakness; and the whole historic array of martyrs, missionaries and religious reformers is there to prove the tranquil-mindedness, under naturally agitating or distressing circumstances, which self-surrender brings.

But peace is attained not only through faith in the fulfillment of desire, but in a marked lessening in the tension of desire itself, in a large and spacious freedom attained through release from the confinement of self. We saw in the chapter on the Consciousness of Self how much exertion and energy may be devoted to the enhancement of Self through fame, achievement, social distinction, power, or possession. We saw how, in the frustration of self, the germ of great tragedy lay. From the tragedy and bitterness of such frustration men have often been reassured by a genuine conversion to the religious life. Through the negation of self rather than through its fulfillment men have found solace and rest. And this negation, when it takes religious form, has consisted in a rapturous submission to the will of God.

“Outside, the world is wild and passionate.
Man’s weary laughter and his sick despair
Entreat at their impenetrable gate,
They heed no voices in their dream of prayer.

“Calm, sad, secure, with faces worn and mild,
Surely their choice of vigil is the best.
Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild;
But there beside the altar there is rest."

EXPERIENCES WHICH FREQUENTLY FIND RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION. The religious experience, as pointed out in the beginning of this discussion, has its roots in the same impulses which cause men to love and to hate, to be jubilant and sorrowful, exalted and depressed. All these human experiences sometimes take a religious form, that is, their expressions have some reference to the supernatural and the divine. We find, in surveying the history of religion, that certain experiences more than others tend to find religious expression. We shall examine a few of the chief of these.

NEED AND IMPOTENCE. An awed, almost frightened sense of dependence overcomes even the most robust and healthy-minded man when he sees the forces of Nature suddenly unloosed on a magnificent scale. A terrific peal of thunder, an earthquake or a cyclone will send thrills of terror through the normally calm and self-sufficient. Even apart from such vivid and terrifying examples of the range and scale of non-human power, there comes to the reflective a sense of the frailty of human life, of the utter dependability of all human purposes and plans on conditions beyond human control. In our most fundamental industry, agriculture, an untimely frost can undo the work of the most ingenious industry and thrift. A tornado or a snowstorm can disorganize the cunning and subtle, swift mechanisms of communication which men have invented. In the field of humanly built-up relations, again, a fortune or a friendship may depend on some chance meeting; a man’s profession and ideals are fixed by a single fortuitous conversation, by a chance encouragement, opportunity or frustration.

There is thus a psychological though perhaps not literal truth in the figure of Fate, or in the metaphor that speaks of human destiny as lying on the knees of the gods. Action so often wanders from intent, so much in the best-laid plans is at the mercy of external circumstance! A creature whose being can be snuffed out in a moment, whose life is less than an instant in the magnificent perspective of eternity, comes not unnaturally to be aware of his own insignificance as compared with those vast forces, some auspicious and some terrible, which are patently afoot in the world.

But as patent a fact as man’s impotence is his desire. The individual realizes how powerless is a human being to fulfill, independently of external forces, those impulses with which these same inexplicable forces have launched him into the world. Thus do we feel even to-day when we have learned that the forces of Nature, obdurate to the ignorant, yet become flexible and fruitful under the knowing manipulation of science. We realize that despite our cunning and contrivance, our successes are, as it were, largely matters of grace; the changes we can make in Nature are as nothing to the slow, gradual processes by which Nature makes mountains into molehills, builds and destroys continents, develops man out of the lower animals, and, by varying climates and topographies, affects the destinies of nations.

To primitive man the sense of impotence and need were not derived from any general reflections upon the insecurity of man’s place in the cosmos, but rather from the sharp pressure of practical necessity.

The helplessness of primitive man set down in the midst of a universe of which he knew not the laws, may perhaps be brought home to the mind of modern man, if we compare the universe to a vast workshop full of the most various and highly-complicated machinery working at full speed. The machinery, if properly handled, is capable of producing everything that the heart of primitive man can wish for, but also, if he sets hand to the wrong part of the machinery, is capable of whirling him off between its wheels, and crushing and killing him in its inexorable and ruthless movement. Further, primitive man cannot decline to submit himself to the perilous test: he must make his experiments or perish, and even so his survival is conditional on his selecting the right part of the machine to handle. Nor can he take his own time and study the dangerous mechanism long and carefully before setting his hand to it: his needs are pressing and his action must be immediate.

The very food of primitive man was to him as precarious as it was essential. His life was practically at the mercy of wind and rain and sun. His food and shelter were desperately lucky chances. Not having attained as yet to a conception of the impersonality of Nature, he regarded these forces which helped and hindered him as friendly and alien powers which it was in the imperative interests of his own welfare to placate and propitiate. It was in this urgent sense of helplessness and need that there were developed the two outstanding modes of communication with the supernatural, sacrifice and prayer.

Primitive man conceived his universe to be governed by essentially human powers; powers, of course, on a grand scale, but human none the less, with the same weaknesses, moods, and humors as human beings themselves. They could be flattered and cajoled; they could be bribed and paid; they could be moved to tenderness, generosity, and pity. “Holiness,” says Socrates in one of Plato’s dialogues, “is an art in which gods and men do business with each other, ... Sacrifice is giving to the gods, prayer is asking of them." In Frazer’s Golden Bough one finds the remarkably diverse sacrificial rites by which men have sought to win the favor of the divine. Primitive man believed literally that the universe was governed by superhuman personal powers; he believed literally that these are human in their motives. He believed in consequence that sacrifices to the gods would help him to control the controlling powers of Nature for his own good, just as modern man believes that an application of the laws of electricity and mechanics will help him to control the natural world for his own purposes. The sacrifices of primitive man were immensely practical in character; they were made at the crucial moments and pivotal crises of life, at sowing and at harvest time, at the initiation of the young into the responsibilities of maturity, at times of pestilence, famine, or danger. The gods were given the choice part of a meal; the prize calf; in some cases, human sacrifices; the sacrifice, moreover, of the beautiful and best. The chief sacrificial rites of almost all primitive peoples are connected with food, the sustainer, and procreation or birth, the perpetuator, of life.

As Jane Harrison puts it:

If man the individual is to live, he must have food; if his race is to persist, he must have children. To live and to cause to live, to eat food and beget children, these were the primary wants of man in the past, and they will be the primary wants of man in the future, so long as the world lasts. Other things may be added to enrich and beautify life, but unless these wants are first satisfied, humanity itself must cease to exist. These two things, therefore, were what men chiefly sought to procure by the performance of magical rites for the regulation of the seasons.... What he realizes first and foremost is that at certain times the animals, and still more the plants, which form his food, appear, at certain others they disappear. It is these times that become the central points, the focusses of his interest, and the dates of his religious festivals.

Sacrifice is only one way primitive man contrives of winning the favor of the gods toward the satisfaction of his desires. Another common method is prayer. In its crudest form prayer is a direct petition from the individual to divinity for the grant of a specific favor. The individual seeks a kindness from a supernatural power whose motives are human, and who may, therefore, be moved by human appeals; whose power is superhuman and can therefore fulfill requests. Prayer may become profoundly spiritualized, but in its primitive form it is, like sacrifice, a certain way of getting things done. They are both to primitive man largely what our science is to us.

Both prayer and sacrifice arise in primitive man’s need and helplessness and terror before mysterious supernatural powers, but they may rise, in the higher form of religion, to genuine nobility, from this crass commerce with divinity, this religion of bargaining and quid pro quo. Sacrifice may change from a desperate reluctant offering made to please a jealous god, to a thanksgiving and a jubilation, an overflowing of happiness, gratitude, and good-will.

Greek writers of the fifth century B.C. have a way of speaking of an attitude toward religion, as though it were wholly a thing of joy and confidence, a friendly fellowship with the gods, whose service is but a high festival for man. In Homer, sacrifice is but, as it were, the signal for a banquet of abundant roast flesh and sweet wine; we hear nothing of fasting, cleansing, and atonement. This we might explain as part of the general splendid unreality of the Greek saga, but sober historians of the fifth century B.C. express the same spirit. Thucydides is by nature no reveller, yet religion is to him, in the main, a rest from toil. He makes Pericles say of the Athenians: Moreover we have provided for our spirit very many opportunities of recreation, by the celebration of games and sacrifices throughout the year.

Sacrifice may become spiritualized, as it is in Christianity, “instead of he-goats and she-goats, there are substituted offerings of the heart for all these vain oblations.” The sacrificial heart has at all times been accounted germane to nobility. There is something akin to religion in the laying down of a life for a cause or a country or a friend, in surrendering one’s self for others. It is this power and beauty of renunciation that is the spiritual value behind all the rituals of sacrifice that still persist, as in the sacraments of Christianity. It is the tragic necessity of self-negation that haloes, even in secular life, the sacrificial attitude:

But there is in resignation a further good element. Even real goods when they are attainable ought not to be fretfully desired. To every man comes sooner or later the great renunciation. For the young there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a passionate will, and yet unattainable, is to them not credible. Yet by death, by illness, by poverty, or, by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to power is not only just and right; it is the very gate of wisdom.

The spiritual meaning and value of sacrifice is thus seen to lie in self-surrender. The human being, born into a world where choices must be made, must make continual abnegation. And when the temporary good is surrendered in the maintenance of an ideal, sacrifice becomes genuinely spiritual in character.

Prayer, also, becomes genuinely spiritual in its values when one ceases to believe in its practical efficacy and comes to think it shameful to traffic with the divine. Prayer beautifully illustrates a point previously noted, how speech oscillates between the expression of feeling and the conveyance of ideas. Beginning in primitive religion as a crude and cheap petition for favors, it becomes in more spiritual religious experience, a lyric cry of emotion, a tranquil and serene expression of the soul’s desire. Prayer is, moreover, “religion in act.” That deep sense of an awed relationship to divine power which was, in the beginning of this discussion, noted as constituting certainly one of the outstanding characteristics of the religious experience, finds its most adequate emotional expression in prayer.

Religion is nothing [writes Auguste Sabatier] if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws life. This act is prayer, by which I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repetition of certain sacred formulas, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence it may be even before it has a name by which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or doctrines, we have religion.

In prayer, furthermore, we may hope to find not the fulfillment of our desires, but what our desires really are. We are released temporarily from tension of temporal and selfish longings. We hold a tranquil and reverential speech with a power not ourselves, and in communion with the infinite purge ourselves of the dross of immediate personal needs. In such a peaceful interlude we may find at once clarity and rest. Prayer, at its highest, might be defined as audible meditation, controlled by the sense of the divinity of the power we are addressing. So that the truly spiritual man prays not for the fulfillment of his own accidental longings, but pleads rather: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, 0 Lord, my strength and my redeemer.”

FEAR AND AWE. Man’s attitude toward the divine was noted to have arisen partly in his feeling of dependence on personal forces incomparably superior to himself, and in his urgent need for winning their favor. In primitive man this sense of dependence was certainly bound up with a feeling of fear.

It must be borne in mind that uncivilized peoples had pathetically little understanding or control of the forces of Nature. In consequence on being afflicted with some sudden catastrophe of famine or disease, on experiencing a sudden revelation in storm, wind, or volcanic eruption, of the terrible magnificence of elemental forces, he must have been struck with dread. He was living in a world that appeared to him much less ordered and regular than ours appears to us. His prayers and sacrifices were not always friendly and confidential intercourse with the gods; they were as often ways of averting the evils of malicious and terrifying demons. The enemies of religion have been fond of pointing out how much of it has been a quaking fear of the supernatural. It is in this spirit that Lucretius’s bitter attack is conceived.

When the life of man lay foul to see and grovelling upon the earth, crushed by the weight of religion, which showed her face from the realms of heaven, lowering upon mortals with dreadful mien, ’t was a man of Greece who dared first to raise his mortal eyes to meet her, and first to stand forth to meet her; him neither the stories of the gods nor thunderbolts checked, nor the sky with its revengeful roar, but all the more spurred the eager daring of his mind to yearn to be the first to burst through the close-set bolts upon the doors of nature.

Primitive man feared the gods as much as he needed them. Jane Harrison points out, for example, that as great a part of Greek religion was given over to the exorcising of the evil and jealous spirits of the underworld, as in friendly communion with the beautiful and gracious Olympians.

But what appears in the ignorant and harassed savage as fear may be transformed in civilized man into awe. Long after man’s crouching physical terror of the divine has passed away, he may still live awed by the ultimate power that orders the universe. He may, “at twilight, or in a mountain gorge,” at a canon or waterfall, experience an involuntary thrill and breathlessness, a deepened sense of the divinity which so orders these things. He may have the same feeling at the crises of life, at birth, disease, and death. He may sense on occasion that overwhelming and infinite power of which Job becomes aware, as he listens to the voice out of the whirlwind:

Who hath divided a water course for the overflowing of waters, or a
way for the lightning of thunder?
To cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness,
wherein there is no man;
To satisfy the desolate and waste ground; and to cause the bud of the
tender herb to spring forth? ...
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the
bands of Orion? ...
Knowest thou the ordinances of Heaven? Canst thou set the
dominion thereof in the earth? ...
Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto thee,
Here we are?
Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts? Or who hath given
understanding to the heart?

Where man experiences such awe, he will become reverential, and, if articulate, will express his reverence in prayer, again not the prayer of practical requests for favors from God, but a hushed meditation upon the assured eternity in which the precarious and finite lives of men are set.

REGRET, REMORSE REPENTANCE AND PENANCE. Regret is a sufficiently common human experience. There are for most men wistful backward glances in which they realize what might have been, what might have been done, what might have been accomplished. For many this never rises above pique and bitterness over personal failure, a chagrin, as it were, over having made the wrong move. But to some regret may take on a deeply spiritual quality. Instead of regretting merely the successes which he hoped, as it proved vainly, to attain, a man may become passionately aware of his own moral and spiritual shortcomings. This sense of dereliction and delinquency may take extreme forms. James quotes a reminiscence of Father Gratry, a Catholic philosopher:

... All day long without respite I suffered an incurable and intolerable desolation, verging on despair. I thought myself, in fact, rejected by God, lost, damned! I felt something like the suffering of hell. Before that I had never even thought of hell.... Now, and all at once, I suffered in a measure what is suffered there.

Normal individuals may come to a deep consciousness of having left undone the things they ought to have done, of having done the things they ought not to have done. This realization may be at once a “consciousness of sin,” and a desire for a new life. If it is the consciousness of sin which becomes predominant, then a desolate and tormenting remorse engulfs the individual. But the consciousness of sin for the religious becomes simply a prelude to entrance upon a better life. The awareness of past sins is combined in the religious, especially in devout Christians, with faith in God’s mercy, and in his welcoming of the penitent sinner:

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite
heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.
Have mercy upon me, O God; according to thy loving kindness, blot
out my transgressions.
Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.
Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be
whiter than snow.

Again the New Testament call to repentance is symbolic of the experience of millions of religious people. “Repent ye, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” There is a terrible intensity and immediate imperativeness about this call. But to all there comes at one time or another an urgent sense of spiritual shortcoming and the desire to lead a better life. The lamenting of sins becomes the least part; what is important is the immense new impetus toward a better life. The records of religious conversion are full of instances where men by this sudden penitential revulsion from their past life and a startled realization of new spiritual possibilities, have broken away permanently from lifelong habitual vices. James cites a case of an exceedingly belligerent and pugilistic collier named Richard Weaver, who was by a sudden conversion to religion not only made averse to fighting, but persistently meek and gentle under provocation. Similar cases, genuine and well documented, fill the archives of religious psychology.

The religious man in repenting knows that God will, if his repentance is sincere, forgive him, and sustain and support him in his new life.

I say unto you that likewise Joy shall be in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance.

I say unto you there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.

While regret over sin, alienation from a past life of evil, and a persistent dedication to a purified and righteous existence constitute, spiritually, the phenomena of repentance and conversion, repentance has had in religion certain fixed outward forms. If sin had been committed, merely inward spiritual realization was not sufficient, penance must be done. Penance in the early days of the Christian Church was public. Later penance became a private matter (public penance was suppressed by an ordinance of Pope Leo I in 461 A.D.).

Private penance took various familiar forms, such as scourgings, fastings on bread and water, reciting a given number of psalms, prayers, and the like. Later penalties could be redeemed by alms. A penitent would be excused from the prescribed works of penance at the cost, e. g., of equipping a soldier for the crusade, of building a bridge or road. Gradually in the history of the Christian religion, penances have been lightened. In the Protestant Church, with the enunciation of the principle of justification through faith alone there could be no sacrament of penance.

One form in which the penitential mood receives expression is in confession in which the penitent acknowledges his sins. There is no space here to trace the development of this practice in religion. It must suffice to point out that psychologically it is a cleansing or purgation. It clears the moral atmosphere. It is a relief to the tormented and remorseful soul to say “Peccavi,” and to confide either directly or indirectly to the divine the burden of his sins. It is for many people the necessary pre-condition, as it is in the Catholic Church, to penitence and the actual performance of penance.

The psychological value of confession varies with individual temperaments; for many it is high. There are few so self-contained and self-sufficient that they do not seek to express their emotions to others. It is not surprising that the gregarious human creature should find confession a restorative and a solace. Human beings are not only natively responsive to the emotions of others, but by nature tend to express their own emotions and to be gratified by a sympathetic response. Emotions of any sort, joyous or sorrowful, find some articulation. The oppressive consciousness of sin particularly must find an outlet in expression. And the expression of sin must somewhere be received. The wrong done rankles heavily in the private bosom. The crucified soul demands a sympathetic spirit to receive its painful and personal revelation. He that would confess his sins requires a listener of a large and understanding heart. Just such a merciful, forgiving, and understanding friend is the God whom Christianity pictures. God waits with infinite patience for the confessions and the surrender of the contrite heart. The normal human desire to rid one’s self of a tormenting secret, to “exteriorize one’s rottenness,” finds satisfaction on an exalted plane in confession to God, or to his appointed ministers.

JOY AND ENTHUSIASM FESTIVALS AND THANKSGIVINGS. So far our account has been confined to experiences in which man felt the need or fear of the divine, because of his own desires, weaknesses, or sins. But humans find religious expression for more joyous emotions. Even primitive man lives not always in terror or in tribulation. There are occasions, such as plentiful harvests, successful hunting, the birth of children, which stir him to expressions of enthusiastic appreciation and gratitude toward the divine. Some of the so-called Dionysiac festivals in ancient Greece are examples of the enthusiasm, joy, and abounding vitality to which religion has, among so many other human experiences, given expression. In the religion of the Old Testament, again, we find that the Psalmist is time and again filled with rejoicing:

O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good, and his mercy endureth
forever.
Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, whom he hath redeemed from
the hand of the enemy.
And he gathered them out of the lands from the east and from the
west, from the north and from the south.
They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no
city to dwell in.
Hungry and thirsty their soul fainted in them.
Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered
them out of their distresses.
And he led them forth by the right way that they might go to a city
of habitation.
O that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his
wonderful works to the children of men.
For he satisfieth the longing soul and filleth the hungry heart with
goodness.

Nor need this rejoicing be always an explicit thanksgiving for favors received. It may be, as were the dithyrambic festivals of Greece, the riotous overflow of enthusiasm, a joyous, sympathetic exuberance with the vital processes of Nature. Dionysos stood for fertility, life, gladness, all the positive, passionate, and jubilant aspects of Nature. And the well-known satyr choruses, the wine and dance and song of the Greek spring festivals, are classic and beautiful illustrations of the religion of enthusiasm. Euripides gives voice to this spirit in the song of the Maenads in the Bacchoe:

“Will they ever come to me, ever again,
The long, long dances,
On through the dark till the dim stars wane?
Shall I feel the dew on my throat and the stream
Of wind in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam
In the dim expanses?
O feet of a fawn to the greenward fled,
Alone in the grass and the loveliness?"

Every religion has its festival as well as its fast days. Sacrifices come to be held less as offerings to jealous gods than as sacrificial feasts, in which the worshipers themselves partake, as opportunities for communal rejoicings and for friendly fellowship with divinity. At sacrificial feasts it is as if the gods themselves were at table.

Dance and song are a regular accompaniment of primitive religion. Students of Greek drama, such as Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray, trace Greek tragedy back to the choruses and dances of early Dionysiac festivals. Throughout the history of religion not only have man’s sorrow and need been expressed, but also his sympathetic gladness with vitality, fertility, and growth, his rejoicings over the fruitions and glad eventualities of experience. Man has felt the decay and evanescence of human goods. He has felt also the exuberance of natural processes, the triumph of life over death when a child is born, the renewal of life by food, the recurrence of growth and fertility in the processes of the seasons, of sowing and of harvest. And for all these enrichments and enlargements of life, he has rejoiced, and found rituals to express his rejoicings. He has had the impulse and the energy to sing unto the Lord a new song.

THEOLOGY. Thus far we have discussed the religious experience as an experience, as normal, natural, and inevitable as are love and hate, melancholy and exaltation, joy and sorrow. Like these latter, the religious experience is subjected to rationalization. Like all other emotions, that of religion finds for itself a logic and a justification. But so profoundly influential is “cosmic emotion” on men’s lives that when it is reasoned upon, the results are nothing less than an attitude taken toward the whole of reality. Theology arises as a world view formulated in accordance with a reasoned interpretation of the religious experience. It must be noted again that the experience is primary. If men had not first had the experience of religion, they would not have reflected about it. Every contact of the individual with the world to some degree arouses emotion and provokes thought. It is not different with religion. That theologies should differ and conflict is not surprising. No two individuals, no two groups or ages have precisely the same experiences of the world, and their reasonings upon their religious feelings are bound to differ, overlap, and at times to conflict. The variety of world views are testimony to the genuineness of the religious experience as it fulfills the different needs, emotions, and desires of different ages, groups, and generations of men.

THE DESCRIPTION OF THE DIVINE. Reasonings upon religion exhibit, like the religious emotions, certain recurrent features. There is, in the first place, a certain universality in the description of the objects of veneration. These are nearly always regarded as self-sufficient in contrast with man. Man seeks, strives, desires, has partial triumphs and pitiful failures, is always in travail after some ideal. His life is incomplete; at best it is a high aspiration; it is never really fulfilled. But divinity has nearly always been regarded as seeking nothing, asking nothing, needing nothing. This is what infinity in practical terms means. And, with certain exceptions presently to be noted, the divine power has always been regarded as infinite. Thus Aristotle says that in man’s best moments, when he lives in reflection a life of self-sufficiency, he lives just such a life as God lives continually. And Plato describes the philosopher as a man who because he can live, at least temporarily, amid eternal, changeless beauty and truth, “lives in recollection among those things among which God always abides, and in beholding which God is what he is.” Lucretius also gives a simple picture of the even calmness and still, even security of the life of the gods as he and all the Epicureans conceived it. Tennyson paraphrases the picture:

“...The Gods, who haunt
The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm!"

Divinity has, again, quite universally been recognized as exerting over the individual a compelling power, and of insistently arousing his veneration. The psychological origins of this phenomenon have already been noted. Men fear, need, feel themselves dependent on the gods. But further than this many religious thinkers hold that man cannot even be aware of the divine power without wishing to adjust himself harmoniously to it. And they hold, as did Immanuel Kant, that man is born with an awareness of the divine.

The attributes of divinity have been differently assigned at different times in the history of religion. In general two qualities have been regarded as characteristic: power and goodness. In primitive belief, the first received the predominant emphasis; the higher religions have emphasized the second. For savage man, as we have seen, the divine personages were conceived in effect as human beings with superhuman powers. They were feared and flattered, needed and praised. Adjustment to them was a practical, imperative necessity. They combined infinite capacity with human and finite caprice. The attention they received from humans was distinctly utilitarian in character. These forces of wind and sun and rain might be brutal or benignant. Primitive man established, therefore, a system of magic, sacrifice, and prayer, whereby he might minimize the precariousness of existence, and keep the gods on his side.

In the more spiritualistic monotheistic religions, while the power of God has been insistently reiterated, there has been an increasing emphasis upon the divine goodness. The Psalmist is continually referring to both:

Praise ye the Lord. O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good:
for his mercy endureth forever.
Who can utter the mighty acts of the Lord?
. . . . .
Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his
wonderful works to the children of men!
For he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in
sunder.

Wrath and terror gradually give place to mercy and benevolence as the primary attributes of the divine. The power of God, in Christianity, for example, is still regarded as unlimited, but it is completely expended in the loving salvation of mankind. Where the divinity has ceased to be a willful power and has become instead the God of mercy and loving kindness, it is no longer necessary to placate him by material sacrifice, to win his favor by trivial earthly gifts. Divine favor is sought rather by aspiration after and the practice of a better life. The mighty but capricious deity gives place to the God of unfailing charity and love. One earns God’s mercies by walking in the ways of the Lord. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.... Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” In both Christianity and Judaism, God’s grace and mercies go always to the pure in heart, and the righteous in spirit. “What doth the Lord require of thee,” proclaims Micah, “but to do justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?”

THE DIVINE AS THE HUMAN IDEAL. There has been in certain latter-day philosophies, a tendency to interpret the divine as the objectification of human ideals. That is, according to this theory, men have found in their imagined divinities the fulfillment of ideals that they could never have realized on earth. Men, says this theory, long to be immortal, so they imagine gods who are. Finite man has infinite desires. In God is infinite fulfillment through eternity. No men are all good; some desire to be. Such fulfillment they find in the divine. Our conception of God is an index of our own ideals. When men were savages, their divinity was a jealous monster. In the refinement and spiritualization of the human imagination, divinity becomes all-beautiful and all-benevolent as well as the wielder of infinite power. John Stuart Mill gives possibly the clearest expression to this attitude which is, if not in the strictest sense religious, at least deeply spiritual:

Religion and poetry address themselves, at least in one of their aspects, to the same part of the human constitution; they both supply the same want, that of ideal conceptions grander and more beautiful than we see realized in the prose of human life. Religion, as distinguished from poetry, is the product of the craving to know whether these imaginative conceptions have realities, answering to them in some other world than ours. The mind, in this state, eagerly catches at any rumors respecting other worlds, especially when delivered by persons whom it deems wiser than itself. To the poetry of the supernatural, comes to be thus added a positive belief and expectation, which unpoetical minds can share with the poetical. Belief in a God or gods, and in a life after death, becomes the canvas which every mind, according to its capacity, covers with such ideal pictures as it can either invent or copy. In that other life each hopes to find the good which he has failed to find on earth, or the better which is suggested to him by the good which on earth he has partially seen and known. More especially this belief supplies the finer minds with material for conceptions of beings more awful than they can have known on earth, and more excellent than they probably have known.

In his religion, Mill maintains, man thus finds the fulfillment of unfulfilled desire. Religion is thus conceived as an imaginative enterprise of a very high and satisfying kind. It peoples the world with perfections, not true perhaps to actual experience, but true to man’s highest aspirations. It gives man companionship with divinity at least in imagination. It enables him to live, at least spiritually, in such a universe as his highest hopes and desires would have him live in, in fact. It must be pointed out, however, that the devoutly religious do not regard their God as a beautiful fiction, but as a dear reality whom they can serenely trust and love, and whose existence is the certain faith by which they live.

THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, THEOLOGY, AND SCIENCE. It has already been pointed out that theology is the reasoned formulation of the religious experience which comes to men with varying degrees of intensity, or the revelation by which some man, a Moses or a Mohammed, has been inspired. Such a formulation has a dual importance. For the individual it brings clarity, order, and stability into his religious experience. For the group, it makes possible the social transmission of religious conceptions and ideals.

Reason in a man’s religion, as in any other experience, introduces stability, consistency, and order. It makes distinctions; it resolves doubts, confusions, and uncertainties. It is true that there have been in religion, as in politics and morals, rebels against reason. There have been mystics who preferred their warm ecstatic visions to the cold formulations and abstractions of theology. But there have been, on the other hand, those gifted or handicapped, according to one’s point of view, by an insistence on reason as well as rapture in their religion. These have not been satisfied with an intuition of God. They have wished to know God, as the highest possible object of knowledge. Thus in the Middle Ages philosophy and science were regarded as the Handmaids of Theology. All was dedicated to, as nothing could be more important than, a knowledge of God. So we have, in contrast with ecstatic visions of God, the plodding analysis of the scholastics, the subtle and clean-cut logic by which such men as Saint Anselm sought to give form, clarity, and ultimacy to their sense of the reality of God. There has possibly nowhere in the history of thought been subtler and more thoroughgoing analysis than some of the mediaeval schoolmen lavished upon the clarification and demonstration of the concept of God. The necessity for reasoning upon one’s sense of the reality of the divine, as it was felt by many mediaeval schoolmen, is thus stated by one historian:

Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury ... is the true type of the schoolman; firmly convinced of the truth of the dogmas and yet possessed of a strong philosophical impulse, he seeks to prove to reason what has to be accepted on authority. He bravely includes in his attempt to rationalize the faith not only such general propositions as the existence of God, but the entire church scheme of salvation, the Trinity, and Incarnation, and the Redemption of man. We must believe the Catholic doctrine that is beyond cavil but we should also try to understand what we believe, understand why it is true.

But theology has public as well as purely private importance. It must not be forgotten that religion is a social habit as well as a personal activity. From primitive life down to our own day, religion has been intimately associated with the other social activities of a people, and has indeed been one of the chief institutions of moral and social control. Ethical standards have been until very recent times in the history of Christian Europe almost exclusively derived from religion. Where the religious experience is of such crucial importance, it has been necessary to give it a fixed form and content which might be used to initiate the young and the outsider.

Theology, though essentially a product of reflection upon the religious experience itself, tends to incorporate extra-religious material into its system. In its demonstration of the divine order and of man’s relationship to the divine, it incorporates both science and history. Science becomes for it the manifestation of the divine arrangements of the universe; history becomes a revelation of the divine purpose and its realization. In primitive belief science and religion are practically indistinguishable from each other. The way of the gods is the way of the universe. The attribution of personal motives to the gods was primitive man’s literal and serious way of conceiving the government of the cosmos. He believed himself actually to be living in a world governed by living and personal powers, an animistic world. The myths which describe the birth and life of the gods, the creation of man, the bestowing of the gift of fire are conceived as the literal and natural history of creation.

Christianity affords a striking example of how theology incorporates science and natural history into its world view. For the early Christian Fathers, natural science was interesting and useful in so far as it illustrated, which it did, the ways of God upon earth.

“The sole interest [of the Fathers] in natural fact,” writes Henry Osborn Taylor, “lay in its confirmatory evidence of Scriptural truth. They were constantly impelled to understand facts in conformity with their understanding of Scripture, and to accept or deny accordingly. Thus Augustine denies the existence of Antipodes, men on the opposite side of the earth, who walk with their feet opposite to our own. That did not harmonize with his general conception of spiritual cosmogony."

All the natural science current, as represented, for example, in the compilation called the Physailogus, is used as symbolical of the ways of the Lord to man.

The Pelican is distinguished by its love for its young. As these begin to grow they strike at their parents’ faces, and the parents strike back and kill them. Then the parents take pity, and on the third day the mother comes and opens her side and lets the blood flow on the dead young ones, and they become alive again. Thus God cast off mankind after the Fall, and delivered them over to death; but he took pity on us, as a mother, for by the Crucifixion He awoke us with His blood to eternal life.

History is treated in the same way. Nearly all the histories written by the early Christian Fathers were written in deliberate advocacy of the Faith. It was to silence the hérésies of those who attributed to the Church the entrance of Alaric into Rome that Augustine wrote his famous City of God. The whole of history is a revelation of the divine purpose which is eventually to be fulfilled. Orosius, again, a disciple of Augustine, wrote his Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans to prove the abundance of calamities which had afflicted mankind before the birth of Christ. He gathers together all the evidence he can to exhibit at once the patience and the power of God. “Straitened and anxious minds” might not be able to see the purpose always, but all was ordained for one end. Thus he writes at the beginning of his seventh book:

The human race from the beginning was so created and appointed that living under religion with peace without labor, by the fruit of obedience it might merit eternity; but it abused the Creator’s goodness, turned liberty into wilful license, and through disdain fell into forgetfulness; now the patience of God is just and doubly just, operating that this disdain might not wholly ruin those whom He wished to spare ... and also so that He might always hold out guidance although to an ignorant creature, to whom if penitent He would mercifully restore the means to grace.

History thus comes to reveal the fulfillment of the divine purpose, as science reveals the divine arrangements of the universe.

It has already been noted that theology, certainly Christian theology, maintains that God is all-good. In consequence the natural world which scientific inquiry reveals must be all-good in its operations and its fruits. The history of the universe must be a steady and unfaltering fulfillment of the divine, of the beneficent eternal purpose. The ways of the Almighty, so theology tells us, are just ways, and the universe in which we live, so theology tells us, is a revelation of that justice. The eighteenth century “natural theologians” spent much energy in demonstrating how perfectly adapted to his needs are man’s natural environment and his organic structure. They pointed to the eye with its delicate membranes so subtly adapted to the function of sight. All Nature was a continuous and magnificent revelation of God’s designs, which were good. Christian Wolff, for example, a rationalistic theologian of the late eighteenth century, writes:

God has created the sun to keep the changeable conditions on the earth in such an order that living creatures, men and beasts, may inhabit its surface.... The sun makes daylight not only on our earth, but also on the other planets; and daylight is of the utmost utility to us; for by its means we can commodiously carry on those occupations which in the night-time would either be quite impossible, or at any rate impossible without our going to the expense of artificial light.

MECHANISTIC SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY. With the rise of mechanistic science there has come about a sharp collision between the conception of the goodness of the universe as theology declares it, and of its blindnesses and indifference as science seems to unfold it to us. Contrast the picture of a cosmos which was deliberately and considerately made by God to serve every exigency of man’s welfare, with the picture earlier quoted from Bertrand Russell as the natural scientist gives it to us. It is no longer easy to say the Heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork. As far as we can see natural processes go on without the slightest reference to the welfare of man, who is but an accidental product of their indifferent forces. The universe is a system of blind regularities. “Omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.” Nature is thoroughly impersonal, and indeed, were it to be judged by personal or human standards, it could with more accuracy be maintained that it is evil than that it is good. As Mill puts it in a famous passage:

In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are Nature’s everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives, and in a large proportion of cases, after protracted tortures such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures.... Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations.... A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts or an inundation desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million of people.

The theology which insists on the patent and ubiquitous evidences of God’s beneficent purpose, attempts, as already pointed out, to demonstrate that purpose in the history of mankind. Orthodox Christian doctrine, for example, insists that man has been especially created by God, as were the other animals each after their kind, and that man’s ultimate and unique destiny is salvation through God’s grace. Man was created in perfection in the Garden of Eden, sinned, and will, through God’s mercy, find eventual redemption.

Following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, in 1859, the rapid spread of evolutionary doctrine aroused violent opposition on the part of Christian thinkers and devout Christians generally. In the first place it conflicted sharply with the orthodox version of special creation. Secondly, it made more difficult the insistence on marks of design or purpose in Nature. These two points will be clearer after a brief consideration of the nature of Darwinian evolution, with whose thoroughgoing mechanical principles nineteenth-century theology came most bitterly in conflict. The theory explains the origins of species, somewhat as follows:

The variety of species now current developed out of simpler forms of animal life, from which they are lineally descended. Their present forms and structures are modifications from the common forms possessed by their remote ancestors. These modifications are, in the stricter forms of Darwinian evolution, explained in mechanical terms by the theory of the “survival of the fittest.” That is, those animals with variations adapted to their environment survive; those without, perish. In consequence when any individual in a species happens to be born with a variation specially adapted to its environment, in the sharp “struggle for existence” that characterizes animal life in a state of nature, it alone will be able to survive and reproduce its kind. All the variations of species current are, therefore, examples of this continuous process of descent with adaptive modifications. The origin of the human species came about through just such a variation or mutation from one of the higher mammals (we have reason to believe, a species similar to that of the anthrapoid ape). Man’s ancestry, it seems, from the scientific evidence which has been marshaled, may be traced back biologically, in an almost unbroken chain to unicellular animals.

This theory profoundly affected theological thinking. In the first place, the evolutionary account not only of the origin of man, but of the origin of all species, as a descent with modification from simpler-animal forms, conflicts with the account of special creation, certainly in the literal form of the Biblical story. Secondly, the arguments from design which had been drawn from the adaptation of organic life to environment were, if not disproved, at least rendered dubious. Although evolution did not account for the first appearance of life on earth, it did account for the processes of adaptation, and without invoking design or purpose.

The eye, for example, as explained by the theory of evolution, came to its present perfection through a series of fortunate and cumulative variations through successive generations. Even in its imperfect form, it was a variation with high “survival value.” Even when it was no more than a pigmented spot peculiarly sensitive to light, so the theory holds, it was a variation that enabled a species to survive and perpetuate its kind. Those not possessing these fortunate variations were wiped out. The process of Nature, certainly, in the development of biological life thus appears to be no economical convergence of means upon an end. Nature has been recklessly prodigal. Millions more seeds of life are produced than ever come to fruition. And only animals perfectly adapted to their environment survive, while an incomparably greater number perish.

Theology, when it incorporates science and sets itself up as a direct and factual description of the universe, thus comes sharply in rivalry with modern mechanistic science. The conflict is crucial with regard to the purpose which theology holds to be evident in the universe, and the lack of purpose, the purely blind regularity, which science seems to reveal. The mechanical laws by which natural processes take place exhibit a fixed and changeless regularity, in which man’s good or ill counts absolutely nothing. The earth instead of being the center of the solar system, is a cosmic accident thrown out into space. Man instead of being a little lower than the angels is revealed by science as a little higher than the ape.

There is no space in these pages to trace the various reconciliations that have been made between theology and science. It must be pointed out, however, that Christian theology has increasingly accepted modern mechanistic doctrines, including the doctrine of evolution. But it has attempted to show that, granting all the facts of physical science, the universe does still exhibit the divine purpose and its essential beneficence. The very order and symmetry of physical law have been taken as testimony of divine instigation. Mechanism was set in motion by God. In answer to this, it is pointed out by the non-theologian that then God’s goodness cannot be maintained. Mechanical processes are indiscriminate in their distribution of goods and evils to the just and the unjust:

All this Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest, indifferently with the meanest and worst; upon those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts; and it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them. She mows down those on whose existence hangs the well-being of a whole people; perhaps the prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence.

Modern theology sometimes grants the apparent reality of the evils which are current in a mechanistic world, but insists that they are making for goods which we with our finite understanding cannot comprehend. Were our intelligence infinite, as is God’s, we should see how “somehow good will be the final goal of ill.”

Evolution has also been explained as God’s method of accomplishing his ends. By some evolutionists, Driesch and Bergson for example, evolution itself, in its steady production of higher types, has been held to be too purposive in character to permit of a purely mechanical explanation. The process of evolution has itself thus come to be taken by some theologians as a clear manifestation of God’s beneficent power at work in the universe.

But theology, in the more spiritualistic religions, has always insisted on the primacy of God’s goodness. There has been, therefore, in certain theological quarters the tendency to surrender the conception of divine omnipotence in the face of the genuine human evils that are among the fruits of blind mechanical forces. The idea of a finite God who is infinitely good in his intentions, but limited in his powers, has been advocated by such various types of mind as John Stuart Mill, William James, and H. G. Wells. The first mentioned of these writes:

One only form of belief in the supernatural one theory respecting the origin and government of the universe stands wholly clear both of intellectual contradiction and of moral obliquity. It is that which, resigning irrevocably the idea of an omnipotent creator, regards Nature and Life not as the expression throughout of the moral character and purpose of the Deity, but as the product of a struggle between contriving goodness and an intractable material, as was believed by Plato, or a principle of evil as was believed by the Manicheans. A creed like this ... allows it to be believed that all the mass of evils which exists was undesigned by, and exists not by the appointment of, but in spite of the Being whom we are called upon to worship.

RELIGION AND SCIENCE. While there have thus been genuine points of conflict between theology and science, these are essentially irrelevant to the religious experience itself. Man is still moved by the same emotions, sensations, needs, and desires which have, from the dawn of history, provoked in him a sense of his relationship with the divine. There comes to nearly all individuals at some time, not without rapture, a sudden awareness of divinity.

It is the terror and beauty of phenomena, the “promise” of the dawn and of the rainbow, the “voice” of the thunder, the “gentleness” of the summer rain, the “sublimity” of the stars, and not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the religious mind continues to be most impressed; and just as of yore, the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his room or of the fields he still feels the divine presence, that inflowing of help come in reply to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with security and peace.

Modern man, just as his savage ancestor cowering before forces he did not understand, realizes sometimes some persons realize it always how comparatively helpless is man amid the magnificent and eternal forces in which his own life is infinitesimally set. Even when one has been educated to the sober prose of science, one feels still the ancient emotions of joy, sorrow, and regret. Birth and death, sowing and harvest, conquest or calamity, as of old, evoke a sympathetic feeling with the movement of cosmic processes. All of these emotions to-day, as in less sophisticated times, may take religious form.

Nor does the universe because we understand it better seem, to many, less worthy of worship. The most thorough-going scientific geniuses have felt most deeply the nobility and grandeur of that infinite harmony and order which their own genius has helped to discover. It has been well said the “undevout astronomer is mad.” And it is not only the student of the stars who has intimations of divinity. As Professor Keyser puts it: “The cosmic times and spaces of modern science are more impressive and more mysterious than a Mosaic cosmogony or Plato’s crystal spheres. Day is just as mysterious as night, the mystery of knowledge is more wonderful and awesome than the darkness of the unknown." It is significant that such men as Newton, Pasteur, and Faraday, giants of modern physical inquiry, were devoutly religious.

It would appear indeed that the objects which men revere are not the subject-matter of science. Physics and chemistry can tell us what Nature is like; they cannot tell us to what in Nature we shall give our faith and our allegiance. Religion remains, as ever, “loyalty to the highest values of life.” Science instead of making the world less awesome has made it more mysterious than ever. Origins and destinies are still unknown. Science tells how; it describes. It does not tell why things occur as they do; or what is the significance of their occurrence. Worship can never be reduced to molecules or atoms. While man lives and wonders, hopes and fears, feels the clear beauty, the infinite mystery, and the eternal significance of things, the religious experience will remain, and men will find objects worthy of their worship.

THE CHURCH AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION. Religion being so crucial a set of social habits, institutions arise for the perpetuation of its traditions, and for the social expression of the religious life. The churches perpetuate the religious tradition in a number of ways. Fixed ecclesiastical systems, recitals and definitions of creeds, the regular and meticulous performance of rites and ceremonies, become powerful instruments for the transmission of religious ideas and standards. Rites frequently performed by men in mass have a deep and moving influence. They have at once all the pressure and prestige of custom, confirmed by the mystery and awe that attends any expression of man’s relationship to the divine. The church, moreover, by the mere fact of being an institution, having a hierarchy, an ordered procedure, a definite assignment and division of ecclesiastical labor, becomes thereby an incomparable preserver and transmitter of traditional values.

Churches, ecclesiastical organizations in general, may be said to arise because of the necessity felt by men for intermediaries between themselves and the divine. We have already seen of what vast practical moment in savage life was communication with the gods. Upon the success of such addresses to deity, depended not only the salvation of the soul, but the actual welfare of the body shelter, harvest, and victory. The gods among many tribes were held to be meticulous about the forms and ceremonies which men addressed to them. In consequence it became important to have, as it were, experts in the supernatural, men who knew how to win the favor of these watchful powers. The priests were originally identical with medicine men and magicians. They knew the workings of the providential forces. In their hands lay, at least indirectly, the welfare of the tribe. Their principal duties were to administer and give advice as to the worship of the gods. Often it was necessary for them to point out to the lay members of the tribe which gods to worship on special occasions. The priests being accredited with a superior knowledge of the ways of the gods, they were required to influence the wind and rain, to cause good growth, to ensure success in hunting and fishing, to cure illness, to foretell the future, to work harm upon enemies.

There is more than one criterion by which men may be set apart as priests. Sometimes they are those who in a mystic state of ecstasy are supposed to be inspired by the gods. During their trance such men are questioned as to the will of the divine. Sometimes they become renowned through their reputed performance of an occasional miracle. Again, as magical and religious ceremonies become more complicated, there is a deliberate training of an expert class to perform these essential acts. And, whatever be the source of the selection of the priestly class, the immense influence which their functions are regarded as having on the welfare of the tribe causes them to be particularly revered and often feared by the lay members of the tribe. In more civilized and spiritual religions, the priestly or professional ecclesiastical class is no longer regarded as possessed of magical powers by which it can coerce divinity. It is the official administrator of the ceremonies of religion, is especially trained, versed and certificated in doctrine, is empowered to receive confession, fix penance, and the like. It is still an intermediary between man and the divine, although itself not possessing any supernatural powers.

Where ecclesiastical organization is highly developed and has become controlling in the life of a people, it may be one of the most powerful forces in social life. Such, for example, might be said of the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages:

A life in the Church, for the Church, through the Church; a life which she blessed in mass at morning and sent to peaceful rest by the vesper hymn; a life which she supported by the constantly recurring stimulus of the sacraments, relieving it by confession, purifying it by penance, admonishing it by the presentation of visible objects for contemplation and worship this was the life which they of the Middle Ages conceived as the rightful life of Man; it was the actual life of many, the ideal of all.

Churches may also come to acquire political functions. The history of the Church is for many centuries the leading factor in the political history of Europe, nor is it only in Christendom that political institutions have been inextricably associated with religion.

Religious institutions may, as pointed out in the case of primitive tribes, acquire educational functions. The initiation ceremonies in Australian tribes have a markedly religious character. In the higher and more modern religions educational functions still persist. The Catholic Church has been regarded as the educator of Europe. Charlemagne’s endowment and encouragement of education was largely made effectual through the Church. The grammarians and didactic writers, the poets, the encyclopaedists, the teachers whom Charlemagne endowed and gathered about him, the heads of the schools which he founded, were all churchmen. Until very recently in the history of Europe the universities and education in general were nearly all under the domination of the Church. The secularization of primary education in England took place only late in the nineteenth century, and it is not yet a generation since the battle over the secularization of education was waged in France. All religious sects maintain on a smaller or larger scale educational functions. Parochial and convent schools and denominational colleges are contemporary examples.

THE SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF INSTITUTIONALIZED RELIGION. The consequences of institutionalized religion in social development have been very marked. The mere association of large groups in a common faith and a common religious interest has been a considerable factor in their integration. There is to be noted in the first place the common emotional sympathies aroused by the participation of great numbers in identical rites and ceremonies. Any widespread social habit becomes weighted with emotional values for its members. Particularly is this true of religious habits, the mystery and magnificence associated with which deeply intensify their emotional influence. Again religious habits are given a unanimous and high social approval, especially where the prohibitions and commands enforced by religion are conceived intimately to affect the welfare of the tribe. The prophets reiterated to the people of Israel that their calamities were the result of their having ceased to follow in the ways of the Lord. The possession of a common religious history and tradition may also give a people a deepened sense of group solidarity. The national development of the ancient Hebrews was undoubtedly promoted by their sense of being the chosen people, of possessing exclusively the law of Jéhovah.

Again religious sanction is given to codes of belief, modes of conduct, and to institutions, thus at once strengthening them and making change difficult. It is not merely customs that are obeyed and disobeyed, but the sacred commands. A premium is put upon the regular and traditional because of the divine sanction associated with them. To violate a prohibition, even a slight one, becomes thus the most terrible sacrilege. Customs that, like the hygienic rules of the Mosaic code, may have started as genuine social utilities are maintained because they have become fixed in the religious traditions as enjoined by the Lord. In consequence there may be a Pharisaical insistence on the performance of the letter of the law, long after its practical utility or spiritual significance is forgotten. It is this persistence in the literal fulfillments of religious commands at the expense of the spirit, that the Hebrew prophets so vehemently condemned. Thus proclaims Isaiah:

To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? Saith the Lord: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts....

Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me....

Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them....

Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil;

Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.

Institutions and modes of life, even when they are not, strictly speaking, part of the religious tradition proper, are given tremendous sanction and confirmation when they become embodied in the religious tradition. The institution of the family, for example, through the strong religious sanctions and values implied in the marriage ceremony and relationship (especially the marriage sacrament of the Catholic Church), comes to be strongly fortified and entrenched. Change in the form of an institution so hallowed by religion is something more than change; it is sacrilege. Governments and dynasties, again, when they have a religious sanction, when the King rules by “divine right,” acquire a strong additional source of persistence and power. The imperial character of the Japanese government to-day, for example, is said to be greatly enhanced in prestige by the widespread popular belief that the Emperor is lineally descended from divinity.

Sometimes religious sanctions have inspired and promoted zeal for social enterprise. The Crusades stand out as classic instances, but in the name of religion men have done more than build cathedrals and go on pilgrimages. In the Middle Ages, bridges and roads were constructed, alms were given, pictures were painted, books illuminated, encyclopaedias made, education conducted, all under the auspices and inspiration of the Church. The mediaeval universities started as church schools. In our own day, the expansion of the churches in the direction of welfare work and social reform, the use of the church as a community center, are examples of this development. Men have found justification by good works as well as faith.

INTOLERANCE AND INQUISITION. The influence of religious tradition over the minds of its followers has had, among many noble and beautiful consequences, the dark fruits of intolerance, persecution, inquisition, and torture. Part of the bitter narrow-mindedness which has characterized the history of ecclesiastical institutions is not to be attributed specifically to religion. It is rather to be explained by the general uneasiness which the gregarious human creature feels at any deviation from the accustomed. In addition men have felt frequently that any divergence from the divinely ordained would bring destruction upon the whole group. In the Christian tradition there was an additional reason for intolerance: the heretic was willfully losing his own soul, and it was only humane to compel him to come “into the fold, to rescue him from the pains he would otherwise suffer in Hell.”

The profound conviction that those who did not believe in its doctrines would be damned eternally, and that God punishes theological error as if it were the most heinous of crimes, led naturally to persecution. It was a duty to impose on men the only true doctrine, seeing that their own eternal interests were at stake, and to hinder errors from spreading. Heretics were more than ordinary criminals, and the pains that man could inflict on them were as nothing to the tortures awaiting them in hell.

In fevered zeal for the Faith began that long hunting and punishment of heresy, which has done so much to darken the history of religion in Western Europe. There were, as in the Albigensian Crusade, wholesale burnings and hangings of men, women, and children. Heresy was hunted out in secret retreats. “It was the foulest of crimes; to prevail against it was to prevail against the legions of Hell.” The culmination of intolerance was, of course, the Inquisition. One need not pause to recall its espionage system, its search for the spreaders of false doctrine, its use of any and every witness against the suspect, its granting of indulgences to any one who should bear witness against him, its “relaxing of the criminal to the secular arm,” which unfailingly punished him with death. It must be pointed out that in the instance of the Inquisition, just as in the case of all religious persecution, the motives were most frequently of the noblest. “In the Middle Ages and after, men of kindly temper and the purest zeal were absolutely devoid of mercy when heresy was suspected.” Nor are intolerance and persecution to be laid exclusively at the door of any one religion. In Protestant countries, in England and Scotland, the persecution and torture of alleged witches is one of the most painful instances of the cruelties into which men can be led by loyalty to their religious convictions. And Mohammedanism vividly taught men how a faith might be spread by fire and sword.

QUIETISM AND CONSOLATION OTHER-WORLDLINESS. Many religions, including Christianity, have emphasized “other-worldliness.” This has most frequently taken the form of emphasis on the life to come. This world has been conceived, as it were, as a prelude to eternity. In the Christian world scheme, as most clearly expounded and universally accepted during the Middle Ages, man’s chief imperative business was salvation. All else was trivial in comparison with that incomparable eternal bliss which would be the reward of the virtuous, and that unending agony which would be the penalty for the damned. “Salvation was the master Christian motive. The Gospel of Christ was a gospel of salvation unto eternal life. It presented itself in the self-sacrifice of divine love, not without warnings touching its rejection."

Where interest is centered on a world to come, there not infrequently results a loss of interest and discrimination in the goods of earthly life. “For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” The beauties, goods, and distinctions of this world coalesce into an indiscriminate triviality in comparison with that infinite glory hereafter to be attained. One does not trouble one’s self about the furniture of earthly life any more than one would take pains with the beautification of a room in which one happens to be lodged for a night.

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.

But lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal.

Though on earth you may live in squalor, poverty, and disease, yet “in my Father’s house are many mansions.”

Poverty, indeed, became in the Middle Ages one of the vows of monastic orders. In the New Testament it is prescribed, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and the doctrine was in many cases literally accepted.

If any one of you will know whether he is really poor in spirit, let him consider whether he loves the ordinary consequences and effects of poverty, which are hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, and the denudation of all conveniences. See if you are glad to wear a worn-out habit full of patches. See if you are glad when something is lacking to your meal, when you are passed by in serving it, when what you receive is distasteful to you, when your cell is out of repair. If you are not glad of these things, if instead of loving them you avoid them, then there is proof that you have not attained the perfection of poverty of spirit.

Contempt for this world’s goods, when generalized, promotes an attitude of indifference to the social conditions in which men live. The history of the saints is filled with references to their endurance of pain, ill health, poverty, and disease. And the “world, the flesh, and the devil” are for some types of religious mind all one. For such, to be engaged in social betterment is an irrelevant business, it is to be lost in the world. People’s souls must be saved; not their bodies.

Religions, on the other hand, have frequently emphasized man’s social duty. In Christianity this is largely a derivative of the highly regarded virtue of Charity. Interest in one’s own well-being was a prerequisite for the devout, but interest in the welfare of others was equally enjoined. To help the poor and the needy, the widowed and the fatherless, to bring succor to the oppressed and justice to the downtrodden, have been part of the religion whose Founder taught that all men were the children of their Father in Heaven. The mendicant orders of the Middle Ages were devoted to philanthropic works; and with religious institutions, throughout their history, have been associated works of philanthropy and social welfare. Very recently urban churches in this country have been showing a tendency to reorganize with emphasis on the church as an instrument of social cooeperation rather than as an aloof exponent of dogmatic theology. It is the ideal of some liberal theologians to use the churches chiefly as instruments for giving social effectiveness to the religious impulse and at the same time for making social betterment a spiritual enterprise.