found the way for himself. But Christian Science deserves praise for doing more than any other contemporary force to turn human lives to the sunlight and banish the shadows from their hearts. The therapeutic value of this sunnier attitude is great. But Christian Science is more than a method of bodily healing, it is a way of bringing inward unity and peace into distracted and restless human nature. Its insight must be incorporated into the catholic and inclusive Christianity of the future.

Charity, Piety, Service: A. Harnack, Mission and Expansion of Christianity, bk. II, chap. III. F. J. Peabody, Jesus Christ and the Christian Character, chaps. IV-VI; Jesus Christ and the Social Question. H. Drummond, Greatest Thing in the World (in Essays). Harnack and Herrmann, The Social Gospel. J. H. Newman, Love, The One Thing Needful (in Parochial and Plain Sermons). J. Royce, Problem of Christianity, vol. 1, pp. 74-105. E. A. Edghill, The Spirit of Power, chap. VII.

Religious Joy and Peace: J. H. Newman, Religious Joy, Religion Pleasant to the Religious (in Parochial and Plain Sermons). G. M. Stratton, Psychology of the Religious Life, pt. 1. G. B. Cutten, Psychological Phenomena of Christianity, chaps III-IV. G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, chap. XVI; Orthodoxy, chap. v. W. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, chaps. XVI-XVII. E. Underhill, The Mystic Way; Mysticism. W. R. Inge, Christian Mysticism. W. M. Scott, Aspects of Christian Mysticism. O. Kuhns, Sense of the Infinite.

1 Cf. Emerson, History, in Essays, vol. 1, “To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine."

CHAPTER XIV

THE ESSENCE OF RELIGION

How shall we determine the essence of religion?

WITH this hasty outline of the salient phenomena of religion, historical and psychological, before us, we may approach the question, What is the essence of religion, and how shall we define it?

We must at the outset realize the impossibility of framing a definition of religion that shall cover all of its historic aspects. There lie here before our eyes a confused and everchanging mass of emotions, beliefs, rites, and acts; there is no common factor that runs through them all, no one thing that all phases of religion have had in common that is not also to be found in other spheres of human activity. The religions are bound together by a historic development; but our contemporary civilized religion is as different from the religion of some barbarous tribe as it is from our own æsthetic life or our patriotism. For the matter of that, religion is apt to be so bound up with morality, with superstition, art, politics, all the other phases of man's life, that it is exceedingly difficult to sift out the elements to which its name should be given. This is particularly true, of course, of primitive life, where the differentiation of activities has not progressed far; 1 but even in our modern life other emotions and activities so interpenetrate and blend here and there with religion that it is a perplexing problem to draw boundaries and mark out its distinctive field. To attempt, then, to make our defi

1

1 Cf. F. de Coulanges, The Ancient City: "Law, government, and religion in Rome were three confused aspects of one thing." See, for an elaboration of this thought, Shotwell, chap. I.

nition inclusive would be, not only to make it so long and cumbersome as to be practically useless, but to include elements which are not present in all religions, and elements which religion shares with other human interests.

66

It is easy enough to point out, in the case of any of the familiar definitions of religion, that the formula, on the one hand, omits much that is conspicuous in historic faiths, or, on the other hand, covers acts or attitudes not usually thought of as religious. If, for example, we define religion, with Mr. Fielding Hall, as “the recognition and cultivation of all our highest emotions,"1 we seem to include in it love, patriotism, appreciation of beauty, and the rest. If we define it, with Reinach, as a sum of scruples,' we seem to include all of our morality, customary and individual. If we define it, with Menzies, as "the worship of higher powers," we seem to include a mass of barbarous superstitions and empty observances which had no value that we should usually call religious. And no one of these, or of the thousands of other definitions that have been proposed, connotes all of the aspects that have in this religion or that been most strikingly prominent.

3

The search for a common factor tends, moreover, to emphasize what is trivial rather than what is vital. Not by its early and crude forms, not by its sodden and uninspired devotees, is religion to be judged, but by what it becomes in the lives of the prophets and saints. No one who has known the loyalty and peace of a deeply religious life can be content to think of religion as an emotional debauch, or as a set of scruples, or, with Herbert Spencer, as a sense of the ultimate inscrutableness of the universe. Mystery and emotion may be, as Professor Shotwell says, "constant elements"; they may be the connecting links between the primitive welter of 2 Orpheus, p. 2.

1 The Hearts of Men, p. 298.
3 History of Religions, p. 7.

superstition and a religion worthy of the name. But a sense of mystery, or emotional thrills, are not, of themselves, important enough; they give no hint of the vital nature of mature religion and its value for life. Religion is a growing and changing thing; as we think of an oak not in terms of what it has in common with the acorn, and man not in terms of what he has in common with his ape-like ancestor, so we may think of religion not in terms of what it was at this or that stage, but in terms of what it has become and bids fair to become in its ripest development.

In fine, the only purpose of offering a definition of religion is to pick out from this ever-changing and infinitely various segment of human experience what seems most important and destined to be permanent. Our definition will be a valuejudgment, representing what we deem fit to honor with the eulogistic term "religion," what we consider essential, amid all these many-colored experiences, for the best human life, a norm by which to measure a religion's worth. Such a matter is not to be decided by a priori desire or personal prejudice; our decision must be based upon a deep knowledge of the world we live in and the needs and conditions of man's success therein; upon a sympathetic acquaintance with the manifold activities to which the name has been applied, an insight into human nature, and a trained ability to distinguish truth from error. What we shall call the heart of religion, and what its accretions and unessential concomitants, must depend upon what a wide experience teaches us to be needful and what a mature criticism shows us to be true.

What is the relation of religion to theology?

One of the commonest misconceptions is that which thinks of religion as consisting primarily of beliefs beliefs, in particular, about gods, saviors, a future life, or some sort of supernatural world enveloping our human experience. Such

beliefs may have immense power to comfort and inspire; and it is in the midst of them, as its matrix and background, that the religious life has, historically, come into being. But shall we deny the name "religion" to a life that is, in spirit and fruits, the same, when such beliefs are not present? And at what point among these infinitely varying beliefs shall we draw the line between religion and superstition, or between religion and philosophy? Primitive men, and uncultivated men still, are full of supernatural beliefs that have no religious value whatsoever. Philosophers of every stripe have elaborated their convictions upon such matters with no appreciable influence upon their lives. Many a man to-day believes unquestioningly in God, attends church regularly, or fulfills whatever observances he supposes to be required of him, who is no more religious than a courtier who pampers his sovereign's desires. On the other hand, we have one of the greatest of the world's religions, Buddhism, with (in its original purity) no God and no immortal hope. And many an agnostic among us, with no belief in God or a supernatural Christ, and no expectation of heaven, has a truly religious temper and lives a truly religious life.1

1 Cf. Dickinson, op. cit., p. 57, 52: "Religion is an attitude of the imagination and the will, not of the intellect; . . . It is possible, it is common, to believe in God without having religion; it is less common, but it is not less possible, to have religion without believing in God. . . . It is not, in a word, the doctrine that makes religion, it is the spirit; and the spirit may inspire the most diverse and contradictory doctrines."

And Cf. James Martineau, The Godly Man (in Hours of Thought): “If I see a man living out of an inner spring of inflexible right and pliant piety; if he refuses the colour of the low world around him; if his eye flashes with scorn at mean and impure things which are a jest to others; if high examples of honour and self-sacrifice bring the flush of sympathy upon his cheek; if in his sphere of rule he plainly obeys a trust instead of enforcing an arbitrary will, and in his sphere of service takes his yoke without a groan, and does his work with thought only that it be good; I shall not pry into his closet nor ask about his creed, but own him at once as the godly man. Godliness is the persistent living out an ideal preconception of the Right, the Beautiful, the Good."