The symmetry of the individual, as understood in the religion of culture, is likewise a cherished article of true religion. Thus only can it protect personality against the pitfalls of self-negation and absorption, which communism and pantheism dig for it. The integrity and permanence of the person is the keystone to religion, as it is to philosophy and ethics. None but a false teacher would measure our duty to our neighbor by a higher standard than our love to ourselves. The love of God alone is worthy to obscure it.
Professor Steinthal has said: “Every people has its own religion. The national temperament hears the tidings and interprets them as it can.”[246-2] On the other hand, Humboldt—perhaps the profoundest thinker on these subjects of his generation—doubted whether religions can be measured in reference to nations and sects, because “religion is altogether subjective, and rests solely on the conceptive powers of the individual.”[247-1] Whatever the creed, a pure mind will attach itself to its better elements, a base one to its brutal and narrow doctrines. A national religion can only be regarded as an average, applicable to the majority, not entirely correct of the belief of any one individual, wholly incorrect as to a few. Yet it is indubitable that the national temperament creates the ideal which gives the essence of religion. Races like the Tartar Mongols, who, as we are informed by the Abbé Huc, not unfrequently move their tents several times a day, out of simple restlessness, cannot desire the same stability that is sought by other races, who have the beaver’s instinct for building and colonizing, such as the Romans. Buddhism, which sets up the ideal of the individual, is an acceptable theory to the former, while the latter, from earliest ages, fostered religious views which taught the subordination of the individual to the community, in other words, the idea of the perfected commonwealth.
This is the conception at the base of all theocracies, forms of government whose statutes are identified with the precepts of religion. Instead of a constitution there is the Law, given and sanctioned by God as a rule of action.
The Law is at first the Myth applied. Its object is as much to propitiate the gods as to preserve social order. It is absolute because it is inspired. Many of its ordinances as drawn from the myth are inapplicable to man, and are unjust or frivolous. Yet such as it is, it rules the conduct of the commonwealth and expresses the ideal of its perfected condition.
All the oldest codes of laws are religious, and are alleged revelations. The Pentateuch, the Avesta, the Laws of Manu, the Twelve Tables, the Laws of Seleucus, all carry the endorsement, “And God said.” Their real intention is to teach the relation of man to God, rather than the relations of man to man. On practical points—on the rights of property, on succession and wills, on contracts, on the adoption of neighbors, and on the treatment of enemies—they often violate the plainest dictates of natural justice, of common humanity, even of family affection. Their precepts are frequently frivolous, sometimes grossly immoral. But if these laws are compared with the earliest myths and cults, and the opinions then entertained of the gods, and how to propitiate them, it becomes easy to see how the precepts of the law flowed from these inchoate imaginings of the religious sentiment.[249-1]
The improvement of civil statutes did not come through religion. Experience, observation and free thought taught man justice, and his kindlier emotions were educated by the desire to cherish and preserve which arose from family and social ties. As these came to be recognized as necessary relations of society, religion appropriated them, incorporated them into her ideal, and even claimed them as her revelations. History largely invalidates this claim. The moral progress of mankind has been mainly apart from dogmatic teachings, often in conflict with them. An established rule of faith may enforce obedience to its statutes, but can never develop morals. “True virtue is independent of every religion, and incompatible with any which is accepted on authority.”[249-2]
Yet thinkers, even the best of them, appear to have had difficulty in discerning any nobler arena for the religious sentiment than the social one. “Religion,” says Matthew Arnold, “is conduct.” It is the power “which makes for righteousness.” “As civil law,” said Voltaire, “enforces morality in public, so the use of religion is to compel it in private life.” “A complete morality,” observes a contemporary Christian writer, “meets all the practical ends of religion.”[250-1] In such expressions man’s social relations, his duty to his neighbor, are taken to exhaust religion. It is still the idea of the commonwealth, the religion of morality, the submission to a law recognized as divine. Whether the law is a code of ethics, the decision of a general council, or the ten commandments, it is alike held to be written by the finger of God, and imperative. Good works are the demands of such religion.
Catholicism, which is altogether theocratic and authoritative, which pictures the church as an ideal commonwealth, has always most flourished in those countries where the Roman colonies left their more important traces. The reformation of Protestantism was a reversion to the ideal of the individual, which was that of ancient Teutonic faith. In more recent times Catholicism itself has modified the rigidity of its teachings in favor of the religion of sentiment, as it has been called, inaugurated by Chateaubriand, and which is that attractive form seen in the writings of Madame Swetchine and the La Ferronnais. These elevated souls throw a charm around the immolation of self, which the egotism of the Protestant rarely matches.
Thus the ideal of the commonwealth is found in those creeds which give prominence to law, to ethics, and to sentiment, the altruistic elements of mind. It fails, because its authority is antagonistic to morality in that it impedes the search for the true. Neither is morality religion, for it deals with the relative, while religion should guide itself by the absolute. Every great religious teacher has violated the morality of his day. Even sentiment, attractive as it is, is no ground on which to build a church. It is, at best, one of the lower emotional planes of action. Love itself, which must be the kernel of every true religion, is not in earthly relations an altruistic sentiment. The measure and the source of all such love, is self-love. The creed which rejects this as its corner stone will build in vain.
While, therefore, the advantages of organization and action are on the side of the faiths which see in religion a form of government, they present fewer momenta of religious thought than those which encourage the greater individuality. All forms and reforms, remarks Machiavelli, in one of his notes to Livy, have been brought about by the exertions of one man.[251-1] Religious reforms, especially, never have originated in majorities. The reformatory decrees of the Council of Trent are due to Martin Luther.