Passing now to a particular description of the Religious Sentiment, it may roughly be defined to be the feeling which prompts to thoughts or acts of worship. It is, as I have said, a complex product, made up of emotions and ideas, developing with the growth of mind, wide-reaching in its maturity, but meagre enough at the start. We need not expect to find in its simplest phases that insight and tender feeling which we attribute to the developed religious character. “The scent of the blossom is not in the bulb.” Its early and ruder forms, however, will best teach the mental elements which are at its root.
The problem is, to find out why the primitive man figured to himself any gods at all; what necessity of his nature or his condition led him so universally to assume their existence, and seek their aid or their mercy? The conditions of the solution are, that it hold good everywhere and at all times; that it enable us to trace in every creed and cult the same sentiments which first impelled man to seek a god and adore him. Why is it that now and in remotest history, here and in the uttermost regions, there is and always has been this that we call religion? There must be some common reason, some universal peculiarity in man’s mental formation which prompts, which forces him, him alone of animals, and him without exception, to this discourse and observance of religion. What this is, it is my present purpose to try to find out.
In speaking of the development of mind through organism, it was seen that the emotions precede the reason in point of time. This is daily confirmed by observation. The child is vastly more emotional than the man, the savage than his civilized neighbor. Castren, the Russian traveller, describes the Tartars and Lapps as a most nervous folk. When one shocks them with a sudden noise, they almost fall into convulsions. Among the North American Indians, falsely called a phlegmatic race, nervous diseases are epidemic to an almost unparalleled extent. Intense thought, on the other hand, as I have before said, tends to lessen and annul the emotions. Intellectual self-consciousness is adverse to them.
But religion, we are everywhere told, is largely a matter of the emotions. The pulpit constantly resounds with appeals to the feelings, and not unfrequently with warnings against the intellect. “I acknowledge myself,” says the pious non-juror, William Law, “a declared enemy to the use of reason in religion;” and he often repeats his condemnation of “the labor-learned professors of far-fetched book-riches.”[49-1] As the eye is the organ of sight, says one whose thoughts on such matters equal in depth those of Pascal, so the heart is the organ of religion.[49-2] In popular physiology, the heart is the seat of the emotions as the brain is that of intellect. It is appropriate, therefore, that we commence our analysis of the religious sentiment with the emotions which form such a prominent part of it.
Now, whether we take the experience of an individual or the history of a tribe, whether we have recourse to the opinions of religious teachers or irreligious philosophers, we find them nigh unanimous that the emotion which is the prime motor of religious thought is fear. I need not depend upon the well-known line of Petronius Arbiter,
Primus in orbe deos fecit timor;
for there is plenty of less heterodox authority. The worthy Bishop Hall says, “Seldom doth God seize upon the heart without a vehement concussion going before. There must be some blustering and flashes of the law. We cannot be too awful in our fear.”[50-1] Bunyan, in his beautiful allegory of the religious life, lets Christian exclaim: “Had even Obstinate himself felt what I have felt of the terrors of the yet unseen, he would not thus lightly have given us the back.” The very word for God in the Semitic tongues means “fear;”[50-2] Jacob swore to Laban, “by Him whom Isaac feared;” and Moses warned his people that “God is come, that his fear may be before your faces.” To venerate is from a Sanscrit root (sêv), to be afraid of.
But it is needless to amass more evidence on this point. Few will question that fear is the most prominent emotion at the awakening of the religious sentiments. Let us rather proceed to inquire more minutely what fear is.
I remarked in the previous chapter that “the emotions fall naturally into a dual classification, in which the one involves pleasurable or elevating, the other painful or depressing conditions.” Fear comes of course under the latter category, as it is essentially a painful and depressing state of mind. But it corresponds with and implies the presence of Hope, for he who has nothing to hope has nothing to fear.[51-1] “There is no hope without fear, as there is no fear without hope,” says Spinoza. “For he who is in fear has some doubt whether what he fears will take place, and consequently hopes that it will not.”
We can go a step further, and say that in the mental process the hope must necessarily precede the fear. In the immediate moment of losing a pleasurable sensation we hope and seek for its repetition. The mind, untutored by experience, confidently looks for its return. The hope only becomes dashed by fear when experience has been associated with disappointment. Hence we must first look to enjoy a good before we can be troubled by a fear that we shall not enjoy it; we must first lay a plan before we can fear its failure. In modern Christianity hope, hope of immortal happiness, is more conspicuous than fear; but that hope is also based on the picture of a pleasant life made up from experience.