The Religious Sentiment Part 18

"He who flagged not in the earthly strife From strength to strength advancing--only he, His soul well knit and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life."

Not only has the received doctrine of a "soul," as an undying something different from mind and peculiar to man, received no support from a closer study of nature,--rather objections amounting to refutation,--but it has reacted injuriously on morals, and through them on religion itself. Buddha taught that the same spark of immortality exists in man and brute, and actuated by this belief laid down the merciful rule to his disciples: "Do harm to no breathing thing." The apostle Paul on the other hand, recognizing in the lower animals no such claim on our sympathy, asks with scorn: "Doth G.o.d care for oxen?" and actually strips from a humane provision of the old Mosaic code its spirit of charity, in order to make it subserve a point in his polemic.

(4.) As the arrogance of the race has thus met a rebuke, so has the egotism of the individual. His religion at first was a means of securing material benefits; then a way to a joyous existence beyond the tomb: the love of self all the time in the ascendant.

This egoism in the doctrine of personal survival has been repeatedly flung at it by satirists, and commented on by philosophers. The Christian who "hopes to be saved by grossly believing" has been felt on all hands to be as mean in his hope, as he is contemptible in his way of attaining it. To center all our religious efforts to the one end of getting joy--however we may define it--for our individual selves, has something repulsive in it to a deeply religious mind. Yet that such in the real significance of the doctrine of personal survival is granted by its ablest defenders. "The general expectation of future happiness can afford satisfaction only as it is a present object to the principle of self-love," says Dr. Butler, the eminent Lord Bishop of Durham, than whom no acuter a.n.a.lyst has written on the religious nature of man.

Yet nothing is more certain than that the spirit of true religion wages constant war with the predominance or even presence of selfish aims.

Self-love is the first and rudest form of the instinct of preservation.

It is sublimed and sacrificed on the altar of holy pa.s.sion. "Self,"

exclaims the fervid William Law, "is both atheist and idolater; atheist, because it rejects G.o.d; idolater, because it is its own idol." Even when this lowest expression of the preservative instinct rises but to the height of s.e.x-love, it renounces self, and rejoices in martyrdom. "All for love, or the world well lost," has been the motto of too many tragedies to be doubted now. By the side of the ancient Roman or the soldier of the French revolution, who through mere love of country marched joyously to certain death from which he expected no waking, does not the martyr compare unfavorably, who meets the same death, but does so because he believes that thereby he secures endless and joyous life?

Is his love as real, as n.o.ble, as unselfish?

Even the resistless physical energy which the clear faith in the life hereafter has so often imparted, becomes something uncongenial to the ripened religious meditation. Such faith brings about mighty effects in the arena of man's struggles, but it does so through a sort of mechanical action. An ulterior purpose is ahead, to wit, the salvation of the soul, and it may be regarded as one of the best established principles of human effort that every business is better done, when it is done for its own sake, out of liking for it, than for results expected from it.

Of nothing is this more just than religion. Those blossoms of spiritual perfection, the purified reason, the submissive will, the sanctifying grace of abstract ideas, find no propitious airs amid the violent toil for personal survival, whether that is to be among the mead jugs of Valhalla, the dark-eyed houris of Paradise, or the "solemn troops and sweet society" of Christian dreams. Unmindful of these, the saintly psyche looks to nothing beyond truth; it asks no definite, still less personal, end to which this truth is to be applied; to find it is to love it, and to love it is enough.

The doctrine I here broach, is no strange one to Christian thought. To be sure the exhortation, "Save your soul from h.e.l.l," was almost the sole incentive to religion in the middle ages, and is still the burden of most sermons. But St. Paul was quickened with a holier fire, that consumed and swept away such a personal motive, when he wrote: "Yea, I could wish that I myself were cast out from Christ as accursed, for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh."[274-1] St.

Augustine reveals the touch of the same inspiration in his pa.s.sionate exclamation: "Far, O Lord, far from the heart of thy servant be it that I should rejoice in any joy whatever. The blessed life is the joy in truth alone."[274-2] And amid the paeans to everlasting life which fill the pages of the _De Imitatione Christi_, the medieval monk saw something yet greater, when he puts in the mouth of G.o.d the Father, the warning: "The wise lover thinks not of the gift, but of the love of the giver. He rests not in the reward, but in Me, beyond all rewards."[275-1] The mystery of great G.o.dliness is, that he who has it is as one who seeking nothing yet finds all things, who asking naught for his own sake, neither in the life here nor yet hereafter, gains that alone which is of worth in either.

Pressed by such considerations, the pious Schleiermacher threw down the glaive on the side of religion half a century ago when he wrote: "Life to come, as popularly conceived, is the last enemy which speculative criticism has to encounter, and, if possible, to overcome." The course he marked out, however, was not that which promises success. Recurring to the austere theses of Spinoza, he sought to bring them into accord with a religion of emotion. The result was a refined Pantheism with its usual deceptive solutions.

What recourse is left? Where are we to look for the intellectual moment of religion in the future? Let us review the situation.

The religious sentiment has been shown to be the expression of unfulfilled desire, but this desire peculiar as dependent on unknown power. Material advantages do not gratify it, nor even spiritual joy when regarded as a personal sentiment. Preservation by and through relation with absolute intelligence has appeared to be the meaning of that "love of G.o.d" which alone yields it satisfaction. Even this is severed from its received doctrinal sense by the recognition of the speculative as above the numerical unity of that intelligence, and the limitation of personality which spiritual thought demands. The eternal laws of mind guarantee perpetuity to the extent they are obeyed--and no farther. They differ from the laws of force in that they convey a message which cannot be doubted concerning the purport of the order in nature, which is itself "the will of G.o.d." That message in its application is the same which with more or less articulate utterance every religion speaks--Seek truth: do good. Faith in that message, confidence in and willing submission to that order, this is all the religious sentiment needs to bring forth its sweetest flowers, its richest fruits.

Such is the ample and satisfying ground which remains for the religion of the future to build upon. It is a result long foreseen by the clearer minds of Christendom. One who more than any other deserves to be cla.s.sed among these writes: "Resignation to the will of G.o.d is the whole of piety. * * * Our resignation may be said to be perfect when we rest in his will as our end, as being itself most just and right and good.

Neither is this at bottom anything more than faith, and honesty and fairness of mind; in a more enlarged sense, indeed, than these words are commonly used."[277-1]

Goethe, who studied and reflected on religious questions more than is generally supposed, saw that in such a disposition of mind lie the native and strongest elements of religion. In one of his conversations with Chancellor Muller, he observed: "Confidence and resignation, the sense of subjection to a higher will which rules the course of events but which we do not fully comprehend, are the fundamental principles of every better religion."[277-2]

By the side of two such remarkable men, I might place the opinion of a third not less eminent than they--Blaise Pascal. In one part of his writings he sets forth the "marks of a true religion." Sifted from its physical ingredients, the faith he defines is one which rests on love and submission to G.o.d, and a clear recognition of the nature of man.

Here I close these studies on the Religious Sentiment. They show it to be a late and probably a final development of mind. The intellect first reaches entire self-consciousness, the emotions first attain perfection of purpose, when guided by its highest manifestation. Man's history seems largely to have been a series of efforts to give it satisfaction.

This will be possible only when he rises to a practical appreciation of the ident.i.ty of truth, love and life.

FOOTNOTES:

[236-1] _Essay on the use of Anthropomorphism._ Mr. Spencer's argument, in his own words, is this:--"From the inability under which we labor to conceive of a Deity save as some idealization of ourselves, it inevitably results that in each age, among each people, and to a great extent in each individual, there must arise just that conception of Deity best adapted to the needs of the case." "All are good for their times and places." "All were beneficent in their effects on those who held them." It would be hard to quote from the records of theory-making an example of more complete indifference to acknowledged facts than these quotations set forth.

[239-1] _De Veritate_, p. 216.

[241-1] August Neander, _Geschichte der Christlichen Religion und Kirche_, Bd. i., ss. 160, 346. (Gotha, 1856.) St. Clement's description of Christ is ??? ???? a?s????. Tertullian says: "Nec humanae honestatis corpus fuit, nedum celestis claritatis."

[243-1] Novalis, _Schriften_, B. i., s. 244.

[244-1] A. Bain, _The Senses and the Intellect_, p. 607.

[245-1] Dr. T. Layc.o.c.k, _On some Organic Laws of Memory_, in the _Journal of Mental Science_, July, 1875, p. 178.

[246-1] Speaking of the mission of the artist, Wilhelm von Humboldt says: "Die ganze Natur, treu und vollstandig beobachtet, mit sich hinuber zu tragen, d. h. den Stoff seiner Erfahrungen dem Umfange der Welt gleich zu machen, diese ungeheure Ma.s.se einzelner und abgerissener Erscheinungen in eine l'ungetrennte Einheit und ein organisirtes Ganzes zu verwandeln; und dies durch alle die Organe zu thun, die ihm hierzu verliehen sind,--ist das letzte Ziel seines intellectuellen Bemuhen."

_Ueber Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea_, Ab. IV.

[246-2] _Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie_, B. I. s. 48.

[247-1] _Gesammelte Werke_. Bd. VII., s. 63.

[249-1] See this forcibly brought out and abundantly ill.u.s.trated in the work of M. Coulange, _La Cite Antique_.

[249-2] W. von Humboldt, _Gesammelte Werke_. Bd. VII., p. 72.

[250-1] H. L. Liddon, Canon of St. Paul's. _Some Elements of Religion_, p. 84.

[251-1] The Chevalier Bunsen completed the moral estimate of the one-man-power, thus acknowledged by Machiavelli, in these words: "Alles Grosse geht aus vom Einzelnen, _aber nur in dem Ma.s.se, als dieser das Ich dem Ganzen opfert_." _Gott in der Geschichte_, Bd. I., s. 38.

[252-1] W. von Humboldt, _Ideen zu einem Vorsuch, die Granzen der Wirksamkeit des Staats zu bestimmen_, Breslau, 1851. Auguste Comte, _Systeme de Politique Positive_, Paris, 1851-4. The former was written many years before its publication.

[256-1] _Lectures on Metaphysics_, Vol. I., p. 23.

[256-2] _The Koran_, Suras xi., xvi.

[258-1] _The Myths of the New World_, Chap. IX.

[259-1] Jacob Grimm quite overlooked this important element in the religion of the ancient Germans. It is ably set forth by Adolf Holtzmann, _Deutsche Mythologie_, s. 196 sqq. (Leipzig, 1874).

[260-1] The seemingly heartless reply he made to one of his disciples, who asked permission to perform the funeral rites at his father's grave: "Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead," is an obvious condemnation of one of the most widespread superst.i.tions of the ancient world. So, according to an ingenious suggestion of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, was the fifth commandment of Moses: "Ne parentum seriem tanquam primam aliquam causam suspicerent homines, et proinde cultum aliquem Divinum illis deferrent, qualem ex honore parentum sperare liceat benedictionem, docuit." _De Veritate_, p. 231.

Herbert Spencer in his _Essay on the Origin of Animal Wors.h.i.+p_, calls ancestral wors.h.i.+p "the universal first form of religious belief." This is very far from correct, but it is easy to see how a hasty thinker would be led into the error by the prominence of the ancient funereal ceremonies.

[262-1] Dhammapada, 21.

[263-1] _La Vie Eternelle_, p. 339.

[264-1] _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, Vol. I., ch. XV.

[264-2] _Address to the Clergy_, p. 16.

[267-1] "Toute religion, qu'on se permet de defendre comme une croyance qu'il est utile de laisser au peuple, ne peut plus esperer qu'une agonie plus ou moins prolongee." Condorcet, _De l'Esprit Humain_, Ep. V.

[274-1] _Romans_, ch. ix., v. 3.

[274-2] "Beata quippe vita est gaudium de veritate." Augustini _Confessionum_, Lib. x., caps. xxii., xxiii.

[275-1] "Prudens amator non tam donum amantis considerat, quam dantis amorem. n.o.bilis amator non quiescit in dono, sed in me super omne donum." _De Imitatione Christi_, Lib. iii., cap. vi.

[277-1] _Fifteen Sermons_ by Joseph Butler, Lord Bishop of Durham.

Sermon "On the love of G.o.d."