Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White — Volume 2

by Andrew Dickson White

As a beginning, I would answer that, having for many years supplemented my earlier observations and studies by special researches into the relations between science and religion, my conviction has been strengthened that religion in its true sense—namely, the bringing of humanity into normal relations with that Power, not ourselves, in the universe, which makes for righteousness—is now, as it always has been, a need absolute, pressing, and increasing.

As to the character of such normal relations, I feel that they involve a sense of need for worship: for praise and prayer, public and private. If fine-spun theories are presented as to the necessary superfluity of praise to a perfect Being, and the necessary inutility of prayer in a world governed by laws, my answer is that law is as likely to obtain in the spiritual as in the natural world: that while it may not be in accordance with physical laws to pray for the annihilation of a cloud and the cessation of a rain-storm, it may well be in accordance with spiritual laws that communication take place between the Infinite and finite minds; that helpful inspiration may be thus obtained,—greater power, clearer vision, higher aims.

As to the question between worship by man as an individual being, face to face with the Divine Power, and worship by human beings in common, as brethren moved to express common ideas, needs, hopes, efforts, aspirations, I attribute vast value to both.

As to the first. Each individual of us has perhaps an even more inadequate conception of "the God and father of us all" than a plant has of a man; and yet the universal consciousness of our race obliges a human being under normal conditions to feel the need of betterment, of help, of thankfulness. It would seem best for every man to cultivate the thoughts, relations, and practices which he finds most accordant with such feelings and most satisfying to such needs.

As to the second. The universal normal consciousness of humanity seems to demand some form of worship in common with one's fellow-men. All forms adopted by men under normal conditions, whether in cathedrals, temples, mosques, or conventicles, clearly have uses and beauties of their own.

If it be said that all forms of belief or ceremonial obscure that worship, "in spirit and in truth," which aids high aspiration, my answer is that the incorporation, in beliefs and forms of worship, of what man needs for his spiritual sustenance seems to me analogous to the incorporation in his daily material food of what he needs for his physical sustenance. As a rule, the truths necessary for the sustenance and development of his higher nature would seem better assimilated when incorporated in forms of belief and worship, public or private, even though these beliefs and forms have imperfections or inadequacies. We do not support material life by consuming pure carbon, or nitrogen, or hydrogen: we take these in such admixtures as our experience shows to be best for us. We do not live by breathing pure oxygen: we take it diluted with other gases, and mainly with one which, if taken by itself, is deadly.

This is but a poor and rough analogy, but it seems a legitimate illustration of a fact which we must take account of in the whole history of the human race, past, present, and future.

It will, in my opinion, be a sad day for this or for any people when there shall have come in them an atrophy of the religious nature; when they shall have suppressed the need of communication, no matter how vague, with a supreme power in the universe; when the ties which bind men of similar modes of thought in the various religious organizations shall be dissolved; when men, instead of meeting their fellow-men in assemblages for public worship which give them a sense of brotherhood, shall lounge at home or in clubs; when men and women, instead of bringing themselves at stated periods into an atmosphere of prayer, praise, and aspiration, to hear the discussion of higher spiritual themes, to be stirred by appeals to their nobler nature in behalf of faith, hope, and charity, and to be moved by a closer realization of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, shall stay at home and give their thoughts to the Sunday papers or to the conduct of their business or to the languid search for some refuge from boredom.

But thus recognizing the normal need of religious ideas, feelings, and observances, I see in the history of these an evolution which has slowly brought our race out of lower forms of religion into higher, and which still continues. Nowhere is this more clearly mirrored than in our own sacred books; nowhere more distinctly seen than in what is going on about us; and one finds in this evolution, just as in the development of our race in other fields, survivals of outworn beliefs and observances which remain as mile-stones to mark human progress.

Belief in a God who is physically, intellectually, and morally but an enlarged "average man"—unjust, whimsical, revengeful, cruel, and so far from omnipotent that he has to make all sorts of interferences to rectify faults in his original scheme—is more and more fading away among the races controlling the world.