What is religion? and other student questions; talks to college students

Preface

The enormous change which has taken place during the last generation in the attitude of educated men toward the questions of formal religious authority and tradition is nowhere so evident as in the generation now entering manhood. The college student of to-day has not in most cases had the formal religious training which his father received. He lacks the intimate knowledge of the Scriptures which all well-trained boys of the last generation had; traditional authority means less to him and he has grown up in an intellectual atmosphere in which the scientific generalizations of the last fifty years form a part of the every-day philosophy of life. He is not less religious than his father was at his age nor less ready to think of service and of noble things ; but there are

PREFACE

fewer influences in his life to draw his attention to those everlasting questions which have to do with human aspirations and human destiny. His life is less rich in the things which create a religious sense. His danger is the same as that which confronts the American in all business life : that the pressure of the commonplace and the utilitarian may crowd out the thought of the larger and deeper questions of philosophy, of religion, and of service. However narrow may have been the theology of the last century, the religious training which went with it brought continually before men's minds the things which are spiritual and eternal. In the adjustment of men's thoughts to the changes of the last half-century much has been done to impair the influence of the religious leadership which comes from systematic teaching and formal church organization. No one can be brought into close contact to-day with large bodies of students viii

PREFACE

— alert, clear-minded, enthusiastic young men — without a deep sense of the lack in their lives of spiritual and religious influences. They are not less quick to respond to such influences than their fathers; but the old traditional voices of authority no longer appeal to them, and in the hurry of modern life the things which are tender and deep and spiritual seem to have less and less opportunity to be considered in comparison with the pressing occupations of the present. Men's souls are overwhelmed by the great current of the commonplace, the material, the utilitarian, and the student is in that current. If his attention and his interest are to be drawn to higher things it must be through a leadership which faces frankly the philosophy of his time and which deals with the facts of science and of religion in a spirit of intellectual sincerity. No cold and formal rationalism will suffice, but a leadership which shall be tender, hopeful, spiritual, ix

PREFACE

and fearless ; in a word, a religious leadership, but one free of dogma. Whence such a leadership is to come is one of the difficult questions which to-day confronts the church and humanity.

The addresses here brought together arose out of questions coming to the front in the day by day college life. They were talks to different groups of students at various times and places, sometimes before a whole class, sometimes before smaller bodies. There are throughout expressions of a somewhat personal bearing, sentences addressed ad hominem. These have been left unchanged in the printed form, since they serve to explain, in a measure, the circumstances under which the talks were

given.

H. S. P.

December, 1905.

Contents

I. What is Truth ? l

II. What is Religion? .... 29

III. The Science of Religion . . 49

II What Is Religion?

WHAT IS RELIGION?

But this I confess unto thee, that after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers. — St. Paul.

The most significant thought in all the universe is the idea of God and of our relation to Him. And yet I suppose there is no other fact of fundamental importance to which we bring so little of our individual thinking. Most of us accept our conceptions of God and of this relation exactly as our fathers handed them down to us ; and if we begin to think for ourselves about them our very first feeling is one of unfaithfulness and of disloyalty to the religion of our fathers.

You have come from religious homes.

Some of you have come for the first time

to share the complexities of a city life.

You are being trained under a system of

WHAT IS RELIGION?

thinking whose fundamental condition is intellectual sincerity. In your scientific work you are taught to question any result and to prove and test it. It is impossible that this training should not have its influence upon your religious ideals if you think at all about such matters. A man said to me, some time ago, " I send my boy to a scientific school because I feel that here neither his religion nor his politics will be affected." I want to say to you that such a school does not exist, or, if it does exist, it ought not. A school whose intellectual current is so feeble that it does not set an intelligent man to thinking about his relations to God and to his country is no place to stimulate a man to right thinking in chemistry or in physics or in mathematics.

So surely as you and I live you will go from your work in college with your religious conceptions changed by your life here ; it may be quickened and deepened, 32

WHAT IS RELIGION?

with new visions of truth and tenderer realization of your relations to other men, it may be with these conceptions repressed or distorted. As your study here is to give a new orientation with respect to truth, so also will it give you a new orientation with respect to that part of truth which has to do with religion. Now my concern is that in this inevitable search of your conceptions of truth, in this orientation of yourself with respect to all thinking, you should not lose perspective. The mistake which many a student makes is the conclusion that when he begins to do his own thinking he is no longer religious, no longer worshiping the God of his fathers. So closely is our social life interwoven with certain religious forms and customs that to change the one seems like breaking with all the rest. And yet it is true to-day that a vast body, perhaps the great majority, of college men worship the God of their fathers after the way which a generation ago was universally called 33

WHAT IS RELIGION?

heresy, and which is to-day considered by many devout men and women, some of them your fathers and your mothers, little better than heresy. Into this company of scientific men you have come. You are to learn their methods of reasoning, which are to become your methods. In the transformation which this is sure to make in your intellectual life there is not the slightest danger to your religion or to religious truth. But there is danger that you may mistake for religion something which is not religion at all. There is a strong probability that you may think you no longer worship the God of your fathers when in fact you are worshiping Him more truthfully, more sincerely, more effectively than ever before. My brothers, there is no fact in all your life which is laden with such momentous consequences to you as the fact of religion ; therefore I have thought we could spend a half-hour in no better way at the beginning of a school year, and the beginning 34

WHAT IS RELIGION?

for many of you of your college life, than to ask ourselves frankly the question, What is religion? For if one has once clearly understood what religion is he has gone far on the path which takes him out of the region of doubts and apprehensions and uncertainties as to his own future and his relation to the religion of his fellow-men.

And what is Religion as the man of science apprehends it? Stripped of all forms of conventional language, laying aside the imagery and the traditions which cling about the very word itself, religion presents itself to the man trained in science as nothing other than the divine life in the human soul, a life which manifests itself as all life manifests itself, by the growth which it brings forth, the divine flowers of the human heart, unselfishness, love, fearlessness, serenity, patience, service.

I do not know that this brings to your mind any clear notion of what I am trying 35

WHAT IS RELIGION?

to describe. Let us see if I can illustrate what I mean by a comparison drawn from one of the most common of scientific conceptions; for we men are so close to the relations and laws of matter that we are constantly forced to illustrate our spiritual conceptions by material processes.

To us men living on the earth there is only one source of energy : the sun. Darken the sun and all motion would stop, all life would disappear, every engine would cease to turn, for the coal whose burning supplies the energy for the engine is itself only stored energy of the sun. And every mill, every engine, every dynamo, every human body, merely transforms solar energy and turns it to the work of the world.

Now according to the thinking of men of science, behind all nature, behind all life, behind all our visible forms of energy, stands an infinite and eternal energy whom we call God. Just as from the sun the 36

WHAT IS RELIGION?

energy of sunlight streams down upon the earth and is transformed into all living things, all forms of beauty, all flowers, all motions and all the life of our planet, so also the infinite and eternal energy radiates into all the universe, the source of all energy, whether of the body, of the mind, or of the spirit. Into every human soul this divine energy falls, just as the sunlight falls upon the flowers, and every human soul becomes a transformer of that energy. To receive this divine energy into one's soul and to transform it effectively into those spiritual forms which make for justice, mercy, joy, unselfishness, serenity of mind and of life, this is true religion. If in your heart this divine transformation is not going on day by day and year by year you are not a religious man, no matter what your denominational connections or your formal professions may be. And if, on the other hand, in the soil of your heart these flowers are growing it matters 37

WHAT IS RELIGION?

very little whether you call yourself Catholic or Protestant, Episcopalian or Unitarian, Methodist or Christian Scientist, or if you belong to no religious organization whatsoever. It is the life in your own soul which determines whether you are a religious man, not the things that you believe or the name that you call yourself.

When the man of science who believes himself a religious man expresses this view of religion he finds himself confronted at once by at least three questions which are addressed to him by those who have approached religion from the traditional historical pathway, questions which are accompanied oftentimes with uneasiness and apprehensions. For there are few human experiences more unsettling than those which an earnest man is called upon to undergo when he reviews the grounds of his own faith and that of his fathers.

The questions are these : Does not such a conception take from religion the 38

WHAT IS RELIGION?

idea of a personal God and our relations as men with God our Father? Does it not wipe out the distinction between religious and irreligious men, between good and wicked men, for as recipients of the divine energy would not all men be religious men % And if this conception is true what is the practical lesson which it brings concerning the method by which a human soul may become an efficient transformer of the divine energy and therefore truly religious'? I shall try to answer these questions as frankly as they can be asked, and in the same spirit in which you are taught to face the conclusions of scientific truth in scientific problems.

That this conception of religion and of God is inconsistent with the idea of a divine omnipotent person interfering directly in the affairs of our lives and of our world seems to me clear. The whole conception of the universe as the man of science sees it leads him to recognize the presence of 39

WHAT IS RELIGION?

God in the working of steadfast and unchanging laws. So far as his observations go, and so far as his researches into the history of mankind throw light upon the question, no instance of such interference has ever been known. On the other hand, it is against his whole conception of the orderly and just development of the universe.

But this does not mean that God has in any way been changed by the change in our conception. Nor does it follow that, because we no longer think of Him as an omnipotent person, our relations with Him as the author and sustainer of the universe have been changed. Whether we think of God as the infinite and eternal energy which is immanent in the universe, or whether we think of Him as God our Father, it is still true that the way to know Him is the same, and that He is not far from every one of us. The method by which we are to establish and freshen our 40

WHAT IS RELIGION?

acquaintance, and even our communion with Him, is a matter in which each human soul must seek its own way, just as each human soul must be its own transformer of the divine energy. Of what this communion is I shall hope to speak to you again. What I wish to say now is that the man who finds that his reason leads him to accept the scientific view of God does not truly accept a spiritual relationship less rich, less sincere, less helpful than he who thinks of God as a Father and as governing directly and arbitrarily the affairs of his own life and of his own world. Do not for one moment let yourself believe that, if you find the traditional historical conception of religion impossible, you have thereby ceased to be a religious man. Millions of devout souls have found Him, some with joy and some with pain, in the older way, and millions more are to find Him, it may be with greater joy and less anguish of mind, with a heartier optimism, in the newer way. 4i

WHAT IS RELIGION?

As to the second objection, that such a conception wipes out the distinction between religious men and those who are not religious, my reply is that this distinction ought to be wiped out. There is no such dividing line amongst men. No greater wrong has been done to human kind than that by which a tradition has been gradually built up, under which certain men are recognized as religious because of belonging to an organization, while others are counted as lacking religion because they do not belong to an organization. Into all human souls the divine energy is poured freely and impartially; all men are religious in greater or less degree, and no dividing line separates one from another. We are all God's creatures.

As the radiant light of the sun falls upon our earth each plant takes up the waves of vibrant energy after its own ability. In one plant this energy is transformed into the beauty of the rose, in another into the fruit- 42

WHAT IS RELIGION?

fulness of the corn, and in still another this same energy is transmuted into the deadly poison of the nightshade. In some such way the spiritual energy radiated into each human soul is there transformed into human character and human action. In one heart it is transmuted into justice and mercy and truth, in another into selfishness and greed and lust. Or, rather, in most human hearts these flowers of love and hate, of service and greed, of mercy and cruelty, grow side by side just as the rose and the strychnos in the same soil are transmuters of the same sunlight. There is no human heart so black but that some flower of religion will grow there.

I remember many years ago, in trying to find my way across a wild range of the Rocky Mountains, coming suddenly, near the summit, upon one of those singular and dangerous quagmires which are sometimes found in that region even at high altitudes. The place seemed dry and safe 43

WHAT IS RELIGION?

enough to the eye, and presented the only ready egress from a mass of fallen timber. My horse hesitated to try it, for the mountain horses have good reason to dread those terrible black pits in which a man or an animal is sometimes entirely swallowed in an astonishingly brief time. On my urging, however, he plunged forward, and at the first step the dangerous nature of the bog was evident. In an instant he had sunk to the shoulders, and the treacherous character of the place could be seen by the shaking of the whole mass for yards around like a huge bowl of ugly black jelly. How he got out I have never quite known, but three minutes later we stood on firm ground, gazing down at the black muck of the pit from which we had just escaped. As I looked I saw growing out of the very heart of the ruck a mountain flower, white, innocent, pure. It was a type of the human heart. For there is no human heart so black, so foul, so bar- 44

WHAT IS RELIGION?

ren, that in its soil some divine flower of love or devotion does not grow. There is no human soul which is so poor a transformer that it does not convert into love or service some of the spiritual energy whose vibrations it receives. As we are all God's creatures, so truly are we all religious men.

One word, finally, as to the practical influence of this conception upon our individual lives. And here those who accept the scientific conception of the universe come back to join hands with those who are seeking God in another way. For whether one thinks of Him according to the one conception or the other, whether we think of Him as the infinite and eternal energy showing itself in all law, all order, all nature, or whether we think of Him as a Father, the way to Him is the same. There is no way to become a religious man in the truest sense, there is no way to become efficient transformers of the 45

WHAT IS RELIGION?

divine energy except to open our hearts to those forces which make for righteousness, just as the flower turns to the sunlight. The scientific conception contains no new formula, it simply strips away many useless and obsolete ones. He who believes religion to be the most profound interest for him will seek more and more to transmute the divine energy in which he shares into the things which make for spiritual life, and less of this energy into the things which are material. Back of our race stands the long story of the brute ancestry, from which we sprang, with its inherited tendency to selfishness, to savagery, to greed. Very slowly has the spiritual energy, that which makes for righteousness, overcome in the human heart the ancestral tendencies. The best of human souls are far from being efficient transformers of the divine energy. Those of you who are electrical engineers will recall how imperfect is the transformation of energy which is effected in the electric lamp. 46

WHAT IS RELIGION?

We burn coal to make steam, and the energy thus generated by the heat is converted into mechanical energy, and this into electrical energy, and this finally into the energy of the light waves. But less than one per cent, of the original mechanical energy stored in the coal is reproduced in the energy of the light rays. The rest has been dissipated or used up in heat which does no work. The transformation in our individual hearts is akin to this process. Each human soul takes up the spiritual energy which comes so generously to it and transforms the greater part of it into those things which serve self-interest, passion, luxury, the things of to-day. Only the remnant is left for transmutation into those things which are spiritual and eternal. And yet slowly, century by century, the race has risen in spiritual efficiency. And he who knows best the story of this rise will face with renewed courage the problem of his own spiritual life. The practical problem 47

WHAT IS RELIGION?

to which you and I will address ourselves is the problem of greater spiritual efficiency, the problem of transforming more of the divine energy into unselfish things, and less into those things which are material. In proportion as we do this we become religious men. And in just such proportion as we succeed, in just such proportion do we realize that we are coming into relations with that God whom our fathers worshiped, even though we do this after the way which they called heresy. And the man who has come to a realization of this in his own heart and soul has already ceased to fear that he has lost his religion, or that he ever can lose it.

Ill

" I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.' ' — The Apostles' Creed.

One of the singular facts in the history of mankind is that the questions which have divided men in religious matters have been in nearly all cases questions about the science of religion, about the formulse of faith, about the authority of religious organization, not questions about religion itself. And even in our day it is continually necessary to draw attention to the difference between religion and the efforts which men have made to formulate it.

Some time ago I passed through a chemical laboratory where a teacher was explaining to a class a common chemical reaction. The reaction itself was going on in a retort on the table, while on the blackboard was written the conventional for- 5* mula which in the science of chemistry is used to describe the reaction. It so happened that the instructor had made a mistake in writing the formula; instead of C02 he had written COs. But this made not the slightest difference in the reaction which was going on in the flask.

Now the science of religion, which we call theology, has some such relation to religion itself as the chemical formula has to the actual chemical reaction ; some such relation as the science of botany has to the living flowers ; some such relation as the science of astronomy has to the everlasting stars. This science of religion is important. It is of tremendous significance to the race and to the individual that we should formulate clearly and fairly our thinking with respect to God and the life of man with Him, but this science is of very small importance in comparison with the life itself. And it is of the greatest moment that you distinguish between 52 religion, which is the divine life in the soul of man, and theology, which is merely the attempt to formulate our thinking with respect to that life. The great religious quarrels which have rent the world have come in most cases from the attempt of men to impose upon other men, not their religion, but their science of religion. The student of science who concerns himself with any thoughtful philosophy of life will not only question himself as to the religion in his own heart, but he will desire to know the scientific form of thinking with respect to religion. At the beginning of any serious study of the matter there arises a fundamental question. Has the thinking of scholars so far crystallized as to give a fair groundwork of scientific truth which expresses the experience and observation of men in regard to religion1? Is theology a science, in other words, in the sense in which we use that word in speaking of other sciences*? 53

As one studies the history of the Christian Church he finds that at various epochs in its history and by various bodies of men efforts have been made to reduce to definite form the conclusions of men concerning religion. Amongst the most famous of these are the Nicene and the Apostles' Creeds, both of the fourth century, the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England in 1563, the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647, tne expression of the belief of the Presbyterian Church, and the Twenty-five Articles of the Methodist Church. These are some of the formulae which have been devised by men to explain their religious thinking. They belong to the science of religion.

The student of science is early brought to understand that the term science is used in widely different senses. Sometimes it is qualified by the word exact, as indicating a science in which the laws of the phenomena are so relatively simple and so easy 54 of mathematical demonstration that the problems of the science may be solved with certainty and exactness. For example, in the science of astronomy the laws and the phenomena of planetary motion are so completely known that they may be made the subject of exact calculation, and two astronomers with the same data will eventually reach the same conclusion. A man's results may be for the moment unlike those of his fellow workers, but in such cases differences of opinion are easily adjusted. A renewed testing of observations or of reasoning process will show that somebody was in error.

Again we use the word science to indicate the collection and correlation of facts with regard to a certain set of related phenomena when knowledge of their fundamental laws is still wanting. Meteorology, for instance, is hardly more than a vast collection of undigested observations, from which a few generalizations have been 55 drawn. The difficulty of exact prediction here arises wholly from the extent and complexity of the facts. The day is certainly far distant when meteorology will become a science in the same sense as astronomy or chemistry, but in theory there is no reason why that day should not come.

Finally, the word science is used to cover certain fields of study where the facts are not only complicated but dependent upon the individual point of view. Thus in the study of politics all the data are affected by the personal relations and prejudices of those who furnish them.

Now it requires little consideration to show that the science of religion is not an exact science. The chemist, whether he be English, Italian, or Russian, will describe a chemical reaction by the same formula. The theologians of England, of Italy, and of Russia will use vastly different formulae in their respective sciences of religion. The 56 science of religion can scarcely be compared to meteorology (which is a science in the forming), because in religion the human element enters so powerfully. It is more akin to the group of sciences which deal with the relations of men with each other, the social and political sciences. The formulation of thought in religious science has gone on, at least until a very recent day, under a pressure unknown in any other science : that is, the pressure of a belief on the part of nearly every worker in the science that his own soul's salvation was intimately connected with the formula which he devised and advocated. The discoveries and the formulae of the great scientists like Newton or Pasteur come to us in a form in which any follower who desires to do so may repeat and verify the steps. The work of the great theologians like Athanasius and Augustine has more resemblance to that of the great artists : visions of truth as seen by great souls, but 57 subjective, not such as may be tested and proven by those who follow.

Let us consider for a moment the oldest of these efforts to which I have referred, the Apostles' Creed, which is to-day the formula of Christendom.

The noble sentences of this creed have been in the mouths of most of us from our earliest recollections. It is interwoven with our tenderest memories. And yet it is essentially a scientific rather than a religious paper, for it undertakes to give in formal specific terms the results of man's thinking with respect to God and the relations of men with Him. Perhaps there are few of us who are equipped to examine this paper as a scientific formula. We may at least note that the fundamental conception contained in the first words of the creed is not very far away from the scientific conception of to-day. " I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth," is an expression of man's experience and 58 conviction which is not so very different from Mr. Herbert Spencer's generalization that "We are ever in the presence of an infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed." It is true that in the first expression God is referred to as a Father, but the idea of an Almighty Father, the Maker of the Universe, is scarcely less impersonal than that of the infinite source of all our thoughts and energies. This generalization that God exists and that in Him we live and move and have our being is, I believe, as truly the expression of the scientific thought of to-day as it was of the scientific thought of the fourth century.