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 Hell,” 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 passionate 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 pæans 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 God 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 godliness 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 God” 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 God.” 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 classed among these writes: “Resignation to the will of God 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 Müller, 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 God, 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 identity of truth, love and life.
[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.