The sphere of religion; a consideration of its nature and of its influence upon the progress of civilization

Front matter

l^N'JW'^

The Sphere^^^

-' OF Religion

Preface

This book is written for the express purpose of interesting thoughtful young men and women, especially those in our colleges, in the study of religion. It is the author's firm conviction that no other study offers to the student so many and such varied attractions, or exerts such a broadening and uplifting influence upon his mind and life.

Anthropologists of to-day are unanimous in the opinion that religion came into the world with the very dawn of history, and that in all lands it originated the first signs of a civilized life. It has always in the past been a dominating factor in human development, and there is every reason to believe that it will continue to be so in all time to come.

No man or nation can dispense with religion, or keep it in the background. For every person is so made that when he has progressed far enough to distinguish himself from the world about him, he must recognize the existence of a power above himself and manifest some feeling of dependence upon that power. No human beings have yet been discovered upon this planet who do not possess a religion of some sort, and the only serious question any man has left to ask himself on the matter is this : How can I so improve the religion I already have as to make it of the highest possible worth ?

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a subiv Preface

ject that in recent years has undergone greater or more radical modifications as to its nature and mission than the subject of religion. President Harris of Amherst College put it none too strongly when he said in his baccalaureate sermon to the class of 1907, *' I venture to say that the Protestant Reformation itself did not work a greater, though, perhaps, a more violent change, than the last quarter of a century has marked in religious thought, belief, and life.''

No person in our day has any right to consider himself a fairly well-educated individual who is ignorant of these changes, or has intentionally ignored them as of slight account. For no other matter so vitally affects his own welfare and that of the community .at large.

In trying to elucidate in some degree the present-day position regarding the sphere and significance of religion, the author has endeavored to give an impartial hearing to the different forms of religion that have attained any special prominence in the course of history. He assumes that the reader will have little difficulty in selecting the one that, by its own inherent reasonableness and adaptation to actual human needs, is most worthy of the acceptance of his intellect and the service of his life.

Two of the chapters, the first and the ninth, have already appeared in the North American Review, and two others have been printed wholly or in part in the Proceedings of the associations before which they were read and discussed. They are here reproduced with the consent of the publishers and at the suggestion of fiiends.

If the readers of this book secure from its perusal even a fraction of the pleasure and profit that the author

Prefc ace experienced while investigating the topics discussed, he will feel himself amply repaid for his eflforts in trying to compress the treatment of so great a theme into so small a compass.

F. S. H.

Union Coi^lege,

January, 1908.

CHAPTER I What is Rkugion ?

CHAPTER n Stkps in thk Evolution of Religion

CHAPTER in Sacrkd Books and How They Originate

a. The Sacred Tablets of the Baby-

lonians

b. The Egyptian Book of the Dead

c. The Vedas of the Hindus

d. The Chinese Classics

e. The Iliad and the Theogony oi

THE Greeks ....

/. The Avesta of Zoroaster

g. Buddha's Tripitaka .

h. The Bible of the Jews

i. The Christian Sckipturks

j. The Koran of Mohammed

k, Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon

/. Mrs. Eddy and "Science and

Health" .... m. Madamk Blavatsky's *'Isls Un

veiled"

vii

107 131 150 165

188 210 viii Contents

CHAPTER IV

The RKI.ATION of thk Fine Arts to Religion 232

CHAPTER V REI.IGION THE Key to History . . . 256

CHAPTER VI What Rei^igion has to Do with Education . 278

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER viii The Church and the Modern State . 320

chapter IX The Scientific Method in Theoi^ogy . . 338

chapter X Human Immortai^ity and its Rei^ation to

ReIvIGion 352

chapter XI The Present- Day Conception of God . . 368

Index 389

CHAPTER I.

WHAT IS REI.IGION? (First published in the North American Review, Feb., 1908.)

No one at all acquainted with the tendencies of thought at present can fail to be impressed with the greatly increased interest now being taken in the study of religion. Thinkers of every shade of opinion upon other subjects are fast coming to recognize the fact that religion has always held a vitally important place in the development of every race and individual, and, whether we like it or not, is certain to remain a most potent factor in the civilization of the future.

For a number of years the most persistent eflForts have been put forth by a small army of able investigators to find out the actual facts of man's religious life in all times and countries. Not only have the sacred books and rites of the nations of the earth been subjected to the most rigid scrutiny, but the folk-lore of all lands and even the crudest superstitions and most repulsive practices of savages have been carefully studied. Every possible means has been taken to discover what ideas man has had in all conditions of his existence concerning the powers that rule over this universe, and also to determine to what extent these ideas have afiected his thought and life.

But nothing is more apparent in this awakened interest in the subject of religion than that the old view of what constitutes religion has undergone, in some respects at least, an actual revolution. The narrow sectarian position of a generation ago has been shown to be wholly untenable ; and religion, instead of being the possible acquisition of a few, we now see reaches its roots deep down into the very subsoil of humanity, and cannot help giving itself some sort of expression, for good or for ill, in the experiences of every individual. Hence the chief inquiry of our time on this subject is not any longer whether a man has any religion, but whether the religion that he does have is of any real value ; whether it is a help or a hindrance to his own progress and the ultimate triumph of truth and right.

But before this question can properly be taken into consideration, we must make a careful scrutiny of another, namely, what exactly is to be meant by religion ? On this point there is still great confusion, and in the present state of the study of religion no need is more imperative than to have this confusion cleared away, or at least reduced to a minimum.

We may be greatly helped to the attainment of this end by observing in the first place that religion is not to be confounded with religions. Religion is that out of which different forms of religion grow or develop. It stands related to religions about as the first man stands related to the whole human race. It is the germ or principle which lies at the foundation of all religions and out of which they all proceed.

No error can be greater than to begin our present investigation with such a definition of religion as excludes by its very terms all other religions than the

What is Religion f one that we ourselves most approve. This error is not an uncommon one among writers on the subject even in our own day. A distinguished Oxford professor, Sir Monier Monier- Williams, recently maintained that **a religion, in the proper sense of the word, must postulate the existence of one living and true God of infinite power, wisdom, and love, the Creator and Designer and Preserver of all things visible and invisible," besides other doctrines which he specified. Then he proceeded to exclude at once Buddhism from the list of religions as *'no religion at all." Manifestly, a definition of religion should have in it what is applicable to all forms of religion from the lowest to the highest, and not merely what is true only of one.

In the second place, religion should not be identified with a belief in the existence of superhuman spirits. We are not here concerned with the question as to whether the first known variety of religion actually took on this form. It may be admitted at once, however, that most of the religions now current in the world do make a great deal of this belief. But what we maintain is that if the belief should turn out to be unfounded, religion would not be destroyed thereby.

It was formerly held that the wind is an immaterial spirit; that the sun, moon, and stars are gods and goddesses with their own separate ambitions and whims; that the tides ebb and flow and that plants grow and decay in direct obedience to spiritual powers. But everybody at all acquainted with the physical science of to-day is of course well aware of the fact that no such supernatural beings exist, and that these objects and their activities are satisfactorily accounted for on quite other grounds.

The untutored savage, when he awakes from a dream, believes that lie has been away on a journey, or that other people have visited him. But as he takes it for granted that his bod}^ does not make these excursions, he naturally concludes that his phantom or image makes them ; and when he beholds his shadow on the ground or sees it reflected on still water, he naturally infers that his double self is following him about. But no psychologist of to-day would of course admit the validity of such an explanation for these or any similar mental states that might come within the range of human experience.

The realm of alleged superhuman spirits is constantly being lessened by modem research, and we have no way of telling at present where exactly this lessening process is going to end. Our point is that it is immaterial to our inquiry after the essential thing in religion as to where it does end. Many existing varieties of religion may have to go as many have gone already, but religion will remain. The doctrine of the existence or non-existence of superhuman spirits is not fundamental to its continuance.

One of the ablest advocates of this view of religion is Prof. E. B. Tylor. In his Primitive Culture (vol. i., pp. 424-5), after very properly insisting that the first requisite in a s^'stematic study of the religions of primitive men is to lay down a rudimentar}- definition, he proceeds to criticise those generally in vogue. He finds the chief error of them all to consist in identifying religion with particular developments, rather than with the deeper motive which underlies them, and concludes by saying, *'It seems best to fall back at once on this essential source, and simply to claim as a minimum definition of religion the belief in Spiritual Beings."

What is Religion ?

Now it is admitted that this belief may be a characteristic of all primitive religions ; and, if we were merelytreating of the histoiy of religion, we might find this definition of much use. But we are looking for the germ or common principle of all religions, and that is something for which this conception of religion does not adequately suffice.

Again, we should not regard religion as primarily resting upon a belief in human immortality. Even so great a philosopher as Kant maintains that " without a belief in a future hfe no religion can be conceived to exist" ; and John Fiske in his very helpful book, Through Nature to God^ asserts that the "belief in the unseen world in which human beings continue to exist after death" is essential to religion. Both these thinkers forget that the early Jewish religion was without such belief, and that in many religions where it does exist it forms no important part of either belief or practice. Among the ancient Greeks immortality meant the immortality of the family or state rather than that of the individual.

In many religions whole classes are formally excluded from it and the doctrine is by no means universally held to-day. As Howerth well says in a recent article {Internat, Jour, of Ethics, Jan., 1903, p. 190): "What has the conception of immortality to do with the religious philosophy of those who hold, with the late Prof. Huxley, that religion is reverence and love for the ethical ideal, and the desire to realize that ideal in life? or with that of the philosopher Herbart, who considered sympathy with the universal dependence of men as the essential natural principle of religion? *'

Important as this doctrine may be to some conceptions of the ultimate nature of tlic universe, religion would not perish if it should turn out to be erroneous. For what may happen in eternity cannot be the determining cause of the existence of a thing here and now. If the doctrine of conditional immortality, advocated by so many in our day, should become a general view, the universal acceptance of the doctrine would not annihilate religion. The idea of immortality cannot therefore be regarded as its final basis or ground.

Nor can we clear up this subject of religion by making it primarily dependent upon the belief in one personal God. This belief is, to be sure, the dominant form of thought on the subject of religion in all civilized lands, and that much must be admitted in its favor. But by holding to this as a satisfactory definition of religion we should exclude the vast majority of the human race from the category of religious beings. For many maintain that no primitive races have this idea, and the Buddhistic religion with its almost untold number of adherents teaches just the opposite doctrine. Of course, we are not concerning ourselves with the truthfulness or the value of this belief Our only contention now is that those who deny this doctrine do not destroy religion.

What man in history was ever more sincerely religious to the very core of his being than the philosopher Spinoza ? His whole life was devoted to the advocacy of the doctrine that the only thing in this world worth striving for was to love and know God. ' ' Our salvation,'' he says, *' or blessedness, or liberty, consists in a constant, or eternal love towards God." Yet he distinctly and deliberately rejected the personality of God as wholly out of harmony with a sound philosophy. Nature, or the World- Force, was the object of his reverence and love.

What is Religion ? 7

As a matter of fact, belief in the existence of many g'ods has been far more prevalent in the history of mankind than the belief in one. Suppose polytheism should ultimately prevail over all lands, or pantheism should become the universal doctrine. That would not do away with the existence of religion. It would only be changing its form of manifestation.

If the positions already taken are sound, we have gone far enough to see that religion in the truest and most profound sense of the term is not primarily dependent upon any specific set of beliefs. It does not rise and fall with these beliefs, or go out of existence if they cease to be. The greatest variety of beliefs have been held by the religious leaders of the world from Confucius and Zoroaster and Socrates down to our times and ntry, but few, if any, specific articles of belief are taught by them in common. No one of the creeds, even among Christians, is established beyond critical investigation, and many of them may yet be set aside or at least greatly modified by advancing thought.

E. Ritchie, after a very satisfactory discussion of the relation of creeds to religion in a late number of the Philosophical Review (January, 1901), clearly states the true position in these words : '* We must conclude, then, that there is no particular belief as to what the ultimate reality of things is, or as to man's relation to that reality, which is either essential to, or incompatible with, the possession of religion." This position does not imply, however, that religion has nothing at all to do with belief ; for the opposite is true, as we shall see a little later.

Nor are we to find the ultimate ground of religion is some particular feeling or set of feelings. In the system of the famous theologian, Schleiermacher, religion was regarded as neither a knowing nor a doing, but a feeling ; and it was made to rest fundamentally on ' * a feeling of absolute dependence. * * Several able modern writers seem to hold this view, of whom Prof. Lester H. Ward may be taken as an example. In an able article in the Internat, Jour, of Ethics (January, 1898), he says : *' It is this sense of helplessness before the majesty of the environment which if it is not religion itself, is the foundation upon which all religion is based.'' The error here is not in holding that religion has to do with feeling, but in maintaining that it is grounded primarily on feeling alone. For it is psychologically untrue to fact that any human feeling springs up of itself. It is always preceded by some act of knowing of at least some degree of clearness and force.

Finally, for the negative side of our inquiry, religion is not primarily a doing. It is not based alone upon the will. There are no acts the performing of which makes a man religious. Even '* being good and doing good," though a good thing in itself, will not account for religion. Nor is it adequately defined as obedience to the commandments of God or as the subjection of our fallible wills to a higher will. All these positions contain an element of truth ; but they do not lead us to the essence of religion as in the Ught of modern knowledge it ought to be considered. The apostle James was evidently not speaking of the ultimate foundations of religion, but of a local and temporal condition, when he made pure and undefiled religion to consist of this : **to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world."

We must look for a satisfactory definition of religion, therefore, not to any specific belief, or kind of feeling,

What is Religion ?

or set of voluntary acts, but to the whole of man as a knowing, feeling, and willing being. We should not identify religion with any one of these three kinds of mental phenomena, but with them all. The psychology of to-day teaches that these phenomena in all probability never occur separately ; that the unit of consciousness includes in some measure the activity of all three. Every act of perception is accompanied by a feeling, and every feeling by an act of will. Nor can the order of their occurrence be changed. Every volition is preceded by a feeling, and every feeling by some sensation or intellectual act. Pfleiderer is right when he insists that in every religious act the whole personality participates.

Hence a correct definition of religion must be determined by the way we put these three elements together. Our problem is a problem in psychology. It is not in the study of theology or ethnology, but of this science that we shall find the data for the proper solution of it. Religion exists because man exists. It grows up out of the normal development of his powers, and in tr^-ing to define it no basal element in his nature should be left out of account.

Religion shows itself just as soon as man has developed beyond the mere satisfaction of his animal appetites and begins to exercise his higher powers. There is a partial truth at least in Prof. Ward's position that '' religion is the substitute in the rational world for instinct in the sub-rational.*' No new-born babe or full-grown idiot has any religion, but every normally developed human being has. WhenevxT a man knows enough to distinguish the outside world from himself, and tries to act in accordance with this knowledge, he begins to be religious.

lo The Sphere of Religion

The first element, therefore, in religion is the recog- V nition of the existence of a power not ourselves pervadl|. ing the universe. And another is the endeavor to put ^ ourselves in harmonious relation with this power. Of course the feeling or aflFective element is presupposed as coming in between the other two. For without it the endeavor would lack a motive, and could therefore have no existence whatsoever. Every sane man believes at least that he is only a fraction of the sum-total of things. He also feels some dependence upon this sum-total, and he is obliged to put himself in some sort of accord with it. This is what Caird has condensed into the statement, ^'a man's religion is the expression of his ultimate attitude to the universe" {Evolution of Religion, vol. i., p. 30).

Every growing man is continually changing in some degree his conception of the universe and the mysterious power that it manifests, but at no time in his career does he arrive at a final and completed conception of it. This is due of course to the fact that his experience is limited and can never be anything else. One of the greatest reflections upon a man's character in this age when so much is being added to our knowledge of the universe is that his views about religion never change.

Still, we must not forget that religion is a great permanent reality. It is not something that comes to-day and goes to-morrow. So long as man endures, it will endure ; and as man advances it will grow in importance and power.

Here we need to note the fact that the permanence and reality of religion can never be afiected in the least by the teachings of any science. For science is only one of man's imperfect ways of looking at his knowledge. It can never make or break any reality. Re-

What is Religion f 1 1

ligion was in the world long before any of the sciences came into being, and it will stay here whatever may be their future development.

For science is a means to an end, and when the end is attained, when a perfect comprehension of the truth, such as we might suppose a god to possess, is arrived at, there will be no need of science. But so long as man remains finite, science will have a great deal to do with the various forms of religion that from time to time make their appearance in history. For it is the business of science to investigate and criticise all kinds of beliefs, and particularly all beliefs that are proposed for the acceptance of mankind concerning the nature and attributes of the supreme power that pervades the universe. Not infrequently science has had to combat with vigor such beliefs, for they have often been out of all accord with carefully ascertained truth.

At certain periods in the past the greatest enemy of religion has been theology, and in certain localities this is the case at present. For theology is almost always the last science to yield to the incoming of new truths. But whatever may be the teachings of theology or any other science, the essential thing in religion is not destroyed thereby. The germ is always present and is growing with some degree of vigor and bearing some kind of fruit.

If the view of religion taken above be correct, we are led to the observation that every man is by nature religious, and unless he twists his growth out of its normal course of development, he will always remain so. Irreligion is not the state or condition of having no religion at all. It is rebellion against what one really believes to l)e the best religion, and the setting up of vSoine inferior religion in its stead. Ivvcry sane man must have a god of some sort. He is so made that he must worship something. He must put something over and above himself and pay that something homage. Modern students of the subject of religion are now everywhere admitting the great truth contained in the statement of the ancient Psalmist that only a fool can say in his heart, *' There is no God./* They are willing to go much farther and accept without hesitation the recent assertion of President Eliot of Harvard, that the true test of any man's progress in civilization is his idea of God.

CHAPTER II. S,TKPS IN THE EVOI.UTION OF IxEUGION

The most remarkable thing yet discovered about this planet is the fact that human beings exist upon it in large numbers, scattered almost everywhere over its surface, who pay homage to super-terrestrial powers. But this fact, remarkable as it is, is only a portion of the truth. For the most searching and unprejudiced investigation has failed to reveal any time in human history when it was otherwise. However ignorant and forlorn man may have been in the past, we have no evidence that he has ever been so low down in the vScale of being that he did not look upward wdth some degree of reverence and awe to higher powers.

Not many years ago this fact of the universal prevalence of religion among men w^as seriously called in question by no less weighty writers than Sir John Lubbock and Herbert Spencer. They quoted at length from the reports of certain travellers and missionaries among the Eskimos of North Greenland, the Hottentots of South Africa, and the Indians of Lower California, in support of tlieir position; and they stoutly contended that in these documents we have proof positive that there are communities now in existence that have no religion at all. This challenge lead to a careful and thorough study of the status of these tribes by competent anthropologists, and in every case an extensive mythology was discovered among them, together with elaborate religious rites. A false idea of the meaning and scope of religion, a short stay in the countr}% or a lack of knowledge of the native language, had been the cause of the mistaken judgment. Probably no scholar of repute to-day would hesitate to accept the statement of Prof. D. G. Brinton in his work on The Religions of Primitive Peoples (p. 30) that '' there has not been a single tribe, no matter how rude, known in history or visited by travellers, which has been shown to be destitute of religion under some form."

The reason for this historical fact is a psychological one, and has never been more clearly or forcibly expressed than by Dr. Edward Caird. ' ' Man, ' ' he asserts {^The Evolution of Religio7i, vol. i., p. 77), " by the very constitution of his mind, has three ways of thinking open to him : he can look outwards upon the world around him; he can look inwards upon the self within him, and he can look upwards to the God above him. ' ' And he ver)^ appropriately adds, ** none of these possibilities can remain utterly unrealized."

For the fact is that man is a self-conscious being. And inasmuch as he is endowed with some degree of reason and will, he cannot stand still and passively gaze at the objects about him as though he were a mere brute. He must at least exert himself enough to form some kind of a conception of the powers around and above him, and put forth some degree of energy to place himself in harmonious relations with them. But it should not at all surprise us if at the outset of his career as a religious being, he shows the same confusion of ideas about the objects he worships as he does about all the other matters that come within the sphere of his experience. On the contrary, we should naturally expect to find him growing and developing in his religious ideas as he grows and develops in all others.

As a matter of fact, this is actually the case, and it will be our present purpose to trace out in a general way some of the principal steps that he has taken as he has advanced from lower to higher conceptions on this subject in the course of history.

It is now generally agreed by careful students of anthropology that the most primitive form of all religion is best characterized by the word Spiritism. This is the naive and unreflective belief that most objects in this world, especially those that are capable of motion, contain an unseen being, which, for the lack of a better term, we will call a demon, or spirit; that these spirits have superhuman powers and can affect for good or ill everything that concerns the ongoings of nature and the lives and happiness of man. In this stage of development human beings attribute all their pleasant experiences to a friendly demon, and all their disagreeable ones to just the opposite source. Hence they make use of every means in their power to win the favor of the good spirits, and ward off the envy and wrath of the bad.