The passing and the permanent in religion, a plain treatment of the great essentials of religion, being a sifting from these of such things as cannot outlive the results of scientific, historical and critical study,--so making more clearly seen "the things which cannot be shaken"

Front matter

THE PASSING

AND _THE

THB PERMANENT IN RELIGION .,^.

Preface

RELIGIONS die, while religion is universal, perftianent and progressive : theologies change and pass, but so long as man thinks, he will think and theorise, though imperfectly, about the greatest of all themes : man has always speculated about the universe and, in later times, has studied it, and his theories about it always have been and always must be intimately associated with both his religion and his theology : man at first regarded himself as made suddenly by fiat power, but he has learned that he has evolved from lower forms of life, while his religions and his theologies have kept step with his own advance : bibles have been the natural expression of man's hopes, fears and aspirations at the different stages of his advance, not creating religion, but being created by it : gods have been the best ideals which man has been able to imagine, at different steps of his advance, of the one Eternal, of whose life all things are only the changing iv Preface

and passing expression : saviours have taken shape in accord with man's thoughts of the evils from which he supposed he needed to be delivered, and all are entitled to that name who have helped to deliver the race from any of its evils, though this may not interfere with the supremacy of one : worship has taken shape according to man's changing theories of the powers he has thought of as being able to help or hurt him, and it is essentially admiration for that which man thinks of as above him, and so is the condition of all growth and progress : prayer is the universal instinct which leads man to try to get into helpful relations with the powers thought of as able to control his destiny, and since the conditions out of which it springs are permanent, it cannot pass away, though it must slough off its superstitions and become rational : the Church is the voluntary and natural organisation of men as religious beings, and it seeks- the highest spiritual ends of which those who constitute it can dream : hells are the more or less horrible dreams which have haunted the imaginations of men as the outcome of evil in another life, and they have generally been crude and libellous parodies on the truth that in all worlds men reap what

Preface v

they have sowed : heavens have taken shape in accordance with the same human fancy which has created its hells, and, in essence, they are the kernels of all the fair and good things which are to blossom and bear fruit for the good : men pass into the resurrection life the kind of beings which they have become here, and wltile there will be opportunity for moral advance, there will also be field for the activity and development of all the great powers and faculties and tastes which pertain to the essential nature of man in this life : — to set forth, develop, and establish, so far as possible, the positions above suggested, is that which is attempted in this book.

**

Contents

II. — Theologiks and Theology

• 25

III. — The Universe ....

Appendix

• 317

• 33^

The Passing and the Permanent IN Religion

THERE is a wide-spread impression abroad that religion may not be a permanent element in human nature. Many are telHng us that it is a phase of thought, of feeHng, of Hfe, pecuHar to the early and comparatively uncultivated stages of man's career ; that it is something which the civilised man will progressively outgrow and at last leave behind. Many philosophers, many scientific men, have held this position, and have done what they could to disseminate it amongf their readers. And there is a popular feeling in the community that in some way the churches, which are res^arded as standino- at least for religion, are gradually losing their hold upon the people. And some are wondering as to whether by and by they may not all become empty, and human life be simply secular.

There are persons who rejoice over this prophecy. They are not evil-minded people : among them are some of the noblest that you will find in the world. They believe in all sincerity that religion is the last remnant of a once universal superstition that held the minds of men in slavery, and that the subjection to religious ideas is only tyranny exercised over the human mind and heart by the shapes which the imagination has projected against the background of the Unknown.

On the other hand, there are large numbers of people who are troubled over the possible decay of religion. They are afraid of science, afraid of philosophical speculation, afraid of criticism, afraid of asking too many questions concerning the foundations of things in religion, lest the great reason for its existence shall be seen to be no adequate reason, only a persuasion that is to pass away.

I do not think we need be specially troubled over this problem. We ought to be able to look at it dispassionately, because, if religion is only superstition, why then, of course, it ouorht to be outc^rown. If religion be not divine, it cannot be eternal ; and, surely, it is better for the world that it s^iould know and face the truth of things.

If, on the other hand, religion be divine, if it be essential to the highest and noblest human life, why then criticism and question will only verify this fact by and by and make us surer of that ^vhich many of us regard as a grand and noble heritage, the grandest, the noblest conceivable.

I do not wonder, as I look down the ages of the past towards the beginning and see what has happened, that men get the impression that religion is not an eternal thing. A thousand religions have already died. They have dropped from the tree of human life like leaves scattered by the winds in November. Away down towards the beginning, each tribe out of the many had its own religion, the ideas of which — at any rate the theories of which — have proved to be only temporary, something to be outgrown as intelligence has advanced. Religion after reunion wliich troubled the ancient Hebrew, as we read the record of his history in the Old Testament, has ceased to exist. The religions of Amnion, of Amalek, of Moab, of Philistia, of a hundred others, have passed away. There were many religions in the Euphrates Valley before Babylon became a city, which have all vanished. The great religions of Babylon itself are to us only names. We spell out a fragment here and there of some inscription on a brick or a cylinder, and try to resurrect the forms of the gods that have passed even from the imaginations of the memory of man. Where are to-day the gods of Memphis and Thebes, those who dominated that mighty civilisation on the banks of the Nile for so many hundreds of years? They are only words to be interpreted by the curious and the learned. Where are the religions of Greece and Rome, the mighty gods who used to sit above the clouds on Olympus and shake the earth with their tread as they came down to visit the children of men? Where are the gods that used to drive in their chariots across the sky or ride the foaming waves of the sea or rule over the inhabitants of the underworld ? They are part of a ctirious story which we are fascinated by as we read the record of the past. But they no longer exist as realities for human thought or as in any practical way touching human life. The religion of the Druids is something to' be guessed at as we look at the dolmens and the rows of stones which they

Relieions and Reliction have set up, while we wonder precisely what they may have meant and what they were for. So Odin and Thor and the gods of our Norse forefathers are now only names in their Sagas, or in the traditions, the stories that have degenerated into folk-lore, and which pleased us as children, — or as grown-up people, if we keep the sympathies of our childhood.

There are, indeed, survivals of these in names, in customs, in habits, in states of feeling, just as there are survivals of all the past out of which we have developed. Our sevenday week, for example, runs back at least to the Accadians, older than Babylon ; and the names of some of these days still remind us of the divinities of our forefathers of the North.

But these religions, and hundreds of others, have passed away. Of course, those who believe that Christianity is the one revealed religion, and that all the others are the natural products of the human mind, find sufficient reason for making Christianity an exception to the rest of these. But let us note some of the things which have happened to Christianity itself, so that we may see that it is not so very strange that the students, the philosophers, the scientists, should wonder whether it is to live.

Christianity once dominated Europe. Its political power overshadowed empires and kingdoms. It was able to setup and overturn thrones. It held in its hands the destinies of peoples. It could bring a nation by its anathema to its knees. Where is this power? Since the days of the Renaissance it has gradually waned and dwindled away. There is no nation in Europe or on the face of the earth that as a nation to-day stands in awe of the Church. Even Spain, which is the most subject of them all, dares now and then to assert itself as against the decrees of the Vatican. Education, political action, many of the interests of men, are wrenched from the grasp of ecclesiastical power ; and the people stand up at last free.

Then, again, the whole intellectual realm used to be dominated by the Church. Philosophy and science and art were all only provinces in the Church's universal domain. One after another they have revolted. To-day art goes its own way, asking no permission of any power, following its own ideals. Education has asserted its independence. Philosophers do not any longer ask whether the pope is to agree with their systems when they have completed their work. They follow what they believe to be true. Science at last is free.

About three hundred years ago Bruno was burned in Rome for daring to utter his opinions. To-day no man asks for liberty to express his beliefs on any subject whatsoever. All these thinofs are taken out of the hands of ecclesiastical authority, of the official religion ; and men are free.

Then what « change has come, through the progress of science, over the way in which men look at the government of the world ! Kepler, who was born in the sixteenth century, believed, even after he had discovered the three orgeat laws of planetary motion, that the planets were ruled and guided in their courses through the heavens by deputy angels whose business it was to superintend their affairs. He knew of no power except this delegated divine power by which to account for the motion of the heavenly bodies. When Newton discovered the law of gravity, demonstrated it to be true, the Church rose in alarm, and said that he was taking the universe out of the hands of God and putting it into the keeping of a law.

Not a great many years ago an eclipse was a divine and special sign sent with some religious meaning to men. You remember that in the Old Testament the rainbow was the pledge and promise of God that he would not send another flood upon the earth. The whole domain of nature used to be looked upon as the scene of the divine interference, with special peculiar activity at every turn. It was supposed that God, for the sake of reading the world a religious lesson, would make the sun stand still in the heavens, would make the shadow go back on the dial of a king, would move a star from its orbit and send it wandering through the sky to direct the attention of men to some particular spot over which it should stand. God was the one who, in answer to prayer, sent rain ; He blighted the harvest as a token of His displeasure with the people.

Science has changed all this ; and now there is no one who has any question that the universe, in every department, is governed in accordance with universal and unchanging law. There are those who think that this is a step towards taking religion out of the minds, the beliefs, the convictions of man.

One of the finest of English essayists, who died within a few years, has a chapter devoted to this thought. He thinks that just as fast and as far as we discover that the universe is governed in accordance with laws, and not by a system of arbitrary interferences, so far religion is dying and science is taking its place.

There is another change going on. We dare now to study and criticise church history. We trace the orio;in and orrowth of relictions. We criticise the books which used to be supposed to be above all question. We examine -^ the very foundation stones on which religious ideas and theories have been supposed to rest. ^

Now all these changes — and this is the only point I have in mind — go to make the general impression that religion is losing its universal sway over the intellect and the heart and the life of the world ; that we are tending to become more and more secular ; that we are being emancipated from the rule of the invisible powers in the sky and are coming to manasfe our own affairs.

I wish to note now two thinijs which can be used as indicating either that religion is dying or that simply a change is going on in its development.

President J. G. Schurman, of Cornell University, has called our attention to the fact that all religions pass through three stages of growth. First, the emphasis is placed upon the cult, the ceremony, the sacrifices, the ritual. Those are important. The gods are not supposed to care much how people believe or how lo Religions and Religion

they behave. So long as they bring the sacrifices and go through the ceremony with exact punctiliousness, all is well and the gods are satisfied. By and by humanity reaches the next stage in religious development. The cult still remains, perhaps, the ceremony, the ritual ; but people pay less attention to it. The emphasis is not there any longer. The principal thing comes to be the belief, the creed.

It was only a few years ago that the emphasis of the religious life was placed on the creed. It was what men believed which turned the scale as they were being weighed in the divine balances. Now, President Schurman tells us, we are outgrowing that phase of religious development. People keep their creeds on record in their books, their manuals ; but they no longer feel bound by them. They are coming at last to say that the only essential thing in religion is the spiritual attitude, how we stand as related to the life of God.

In one way it may be said that this indicates that religion in the old sense is dying. The ceremonial, the temples, the worship, the creeds, being no longer of great importance, if comes to be merely a matter of how one feels and thinks. And one can feel and think without any religious institutions at all. But these

Religions and Religion ' ii

facts may be interpreted to mean that, as the world advances and becomes more and more civilised and developed, religion comes to be more a matter of the heart and the life, — comes to be what it ouoht to be.

Take as an illustration a side glance at government. Government is not supposed to be better or stro»2fer on account of larcjer armies and more numerous police, more judges and courts and jails. When people outgrow the need of an army, when no longer compelled to have a police force, when courts of justice find no more business to employ them, and jails are not needed, government has not died : it merely means that the laws of conduct and of life have been transferred to the heart ; and the people are living out the most perfect ideals of government when the appearance of the government has passed away.

So the external forms, the creed and the ritual of religion, may pass, may conceivably cease to exist at all ; and it may mean only that the world has become more profoundly and more livingly religious than it has ever been in the past.

Then there is another way of looking at the story which science has to tell. It is said in some directions that it is gradually eliminating

God from His world. A famous French astronomer— Lalande — once said that he had swept the skies with his telescope and had found no trace of God. Very impressive and wise at first sight it may appear ; very silly and crude, if you examine the statement. Suppose a man should say that he had scanned the human form from one end to the other with a microscope, and found no trace of a thought or a mind. That would not be wise : it would simply be foolish. We do not discover God or mind in that way.

Another famous scientist has said that, in the study of the universe, God is an unnecessary hypothesis. True in one way. If I wish to explain, as a botanist, the development and growth of a tree, I do not need to think anything about God ; for I am only tracing and discovering laws. If, however, I wish to find the ultimate thing, that out of which the tree originally sprang, then I must ask a question that goes deeper than all that.

So science, rightly interpreted, instead of eliminating God from His world, may simply be giving us a new conception of the method' of the divine government. Instead of its being a matter of arbitrary interference, we have learned to expect the divine faithfulness to be manifested in methods and according to laws which never change.

We are comintr to think of the forces of the universe, as they act in accordance with a certain changeless order, as being only the habits, the methods, of the divine working.

Science and its lesson may only teach us a higher and grander thought of the universe and of God, instead of being interpreted as a power which has gradually elbowed God out of His world.

I wish now to turn to the positive side. I have been giving you some of the reasons which perhaps excuse the superficial thought of the time and explain it. Let us turn now, and see if we can find some reasons for believing that religion is the central, essential, eternal thino- in human life.

Mr. George J. Romanes, the famous scientist, the friend of all the leaders of scientific thought and life in England, has recently died. Some years ago he published a book called A Cafidid Examination of Theism. It was published anonymously. He wished to find out whether his theory could be successfully attacked and refuted, and therefore let it stand on its own merits ; so it did not go out in connection with his name. In it he took a pronounced position as a scientific atheist. He said there was no need of God to scientifically explain the universe. He had in preparation at the time of his death another book, which was to have been called " A Candid Examination of Religion." A friend of his has published a little volume called Thoughts on Religion, being merely hints as to what this book was to have been if he had lived to complete it. This editor is a Church canon, and has probably given an ecclesiastical colour to his work in some places.

What I wish to call your attention to is that he had completely reversed his attitude, and, as a scientist, had come to take the position that religion is one of the central and eternal things in life. One point I will suggest to you, which he uses as a scientific argument. He says that religion may be regarded as one of the fundamental instincts of the world. And just as any animal instinct anywhere is justified by the fact that it is a development of the life of the race of beings that it characterises, called out by its environment, fixed under the law of heredity, and so a necessary part of the order' of things, so, he says, religion may be regarded. It isimiversal ; it reaches back to the very beginning of the human race. It is one of the instincts of humanity, ineradicable, created by the nature of things, called out by man's environment. And though there may be certain individuals in whom it may not have developed, and though it may need education and training to bring it to its best, this is only what you will find in regard to any instinct in an animal or a^bird. There are cases where it is weak or almost non-existent ; and if you place a bird or an animal in a new environment, where there is no use for the faculty or instinctive power with which you are dealing, it will be held in abeyance for the time. But this does not militate against the fact that the instinct is an instinct, and so is a part of the nature of things. This is a very strong scientific argument for the perpetuity of religious thouorht and feelino- and life.

I wish now to mention another name, and hint to you another scientific attitude. Mr. John Fiske, of Cambridge, a personal friend and disciple of Herbert Spencer, is one of the most notable scientific men of the modern world. In a little book called Through Nature to God he develops what he believes to be a new argument, and yet one which he believes cannot be set aside. He says that Herbert Spencer defines life as "the contini6 Religions and Religion

uous adjustment of inner relations to outer relations," Anything that is alive is being acted upon by its environment and is responding to this action. A tree, for example, played on by the air, the sun, the rains, — all the things that surround it, — responds to this appeal and grows, puts forth leaf and bud and flower. There is a constant series of actions and reactions going on between every living thing and its surroundings. A dead thing, on the other hand, is acted upon by the environment, and a series of changes may be set up in it, just as the process of decay goes on in the tree after it has been cut down ; but there is no reaction that we call life, readjustment, on the part of the dead thing as related to its environment.

Now Fiske calls attention to the fact that, wherever there is action and reaction between the livinof thine and its environment, it has always been that the living thing has re^ sponded .to something real outside that has touched it and called out the change. There is not a case in the whole history of life on the earth, dating back millions of years, where the living thing has responded to an unreality. Now man from the very beginning has been responding to the supposed reality of God and of a spiritual environment, a spiritual universe surrounding us and acting uppn us ; and Fiske tells us that, if in the course of evolution there has at this point suddenly come a change and reversal, so that man responds to an unreality, to what does not exist, it is something absolutely new in the history of the universe, and puts all our sq^ence and all our knowledge to intellectual confusion.

Here, then, is scientific demonstration, or something very near it, that the universe contains some reality that has called out the religious thoughts and feelings and activities of man.

I venture to say that years ago, before I knew anything about these teachings of either Romanes or Fiske, I put forward and developed an idea which seems to me, though in another way, to include both of theirs and to be something that is intellectually inescapable. The universe stands related to us, I have said, as the die stands related to the coin that it stamps. If you find some mark on the coin, if you find it on every one of the coins, you feel perfectly certain that there is some reality in the die that stamps the coin, that accounts for that mark. It was not there for nothingr : it did not simply happen.

This kind of argument is like what we accept in scientific matters everywhere. The lungs have been created progressively by the air. The eye has been progressively created by the light. The ear has been progressively created by sound. In saying these things I am using language in a popular sense and not with technical accuracy ; but the idea conveyed is correct. In other words, the universe pressing upon us has developed us and created us what we are. So wherever you find any universal or permanently characteristic quality in human nature, or any other nature for that matter, you may feel perfectly certain that there is somethinof in the universe that is real, that corresponds to it, that called it out, that made it.

You find man, then, universally a religious being. You find him everywhere believing that he is fronted with an invisible universe. On any theory you choose to hold of this universe, it has made us what we are ; and there must be-^unless the universe is a lie — a reality corresponding to that which is universal and permanent and real in ourselves, because this universe has called these things into being, has made them what they are.

Now I must run rapidly, if I may trust to your patience for it, over another line of thought, that will confirm thi$ contention and make it, it seems to me, valid beyond all possibility of contradiction. Let us look at religion for a moment, and define it.

What is religion ? Not yours, not mine, not Christianity, not Paganism of any kind ; but what is rcligio4i ? There are three or four constituent elements. First, it is man's thought, his theory concerning the relation which exists between himself and the Power that is not himself, the Power manifested in the universe around him : that is the first element of religion. Every thought, however, every theory of man that touches practical life, is accompanied by feeline ; and so the second element of the religious life is the emotional. Man is a worshipping, hoping, fearing, trusting being as towards the Unseen ; and the emotions will naturally follow after and be governed by the quality of the thought. If you have high and noble thoughts, high and noble feelings go along with them. If you have thoughts degraded and low, you will have feelings of fear and dread matching them.

Then, in the third place, man's theory, his thought and his feeling being permanent and universal, will naturally incarnate themselves, express themselves, in outward institutions and actions ; and so you have altars, temples, sacrifices, priesthoods, hymns, songs, — all the ritual of the world, all the prayers, all that makes up the external form of religion. And these are the natural and necessary expression of the thought and feeling of the time.

Then there is something beyond the thought and the emotion and the ritual. These all exist for the sake of what ? What is it that man is trying to do in his religious life ? He is trying to get into right relations with God : with the gods, if he is a polytheist ; with God, if he is a monotheist. So from the very beginning of human history man has been trying to find God and get into right relations with Him; and this is what religion has always and everywhere meant.

Whatever man's theory about his gods or his God may have been, or about himself, he has felt the certain conviction that the secret of his life depended on his getting into right relations with this infinite and eternal Power ; and so this is what man has been trying to do from the beginning of the world.

If you study the lowest fetich worship and others after' it up to the highest form of Christianity, you will find that everywhere man has been thinking about God and havinir certain emotions concerning Him, and has been expressing; these facts and emotions in the external life, and all these for the purpose of finding God and getting into right or helpful relations with Him. That is what man has been seeking for. ^o, to put it in another way, you may say that religion is man's eternal search for the secret of life.

And now if you go on, — if you call it going ; if you progress,— if it is really progress,— and become an agnostic, you do not escape this relation. If you say, I do not know anything about the universe, that does not touch the question that the universe is still your father, has produced you, and that it is the most vital thing in the world that you understand the laws of the universe, and get into right relations with it.