Modern Religious Cults and Movements

by Gaius Glenn Atkins

New Thought is either a theology with a philosophic basis or a philosophy with a theological bias. It is centrally and quite distinctly an attempt to give a religious content to the present trend of science and philosophy, a reaction against old theologies and perhaps a kind of nebula out of which future theologies will be organized. For a great theology is always the systematic organization of a complex of forces, a massive structure wrought through the years by manifold builders subduing a rich variety of material to their purposes.

The teaching of the Scriptures, old traditions, the needs of worship and organization, political and social circumstances, changing moral ideals, the trend of philosophies and sciences, the challenge of schisms and heresies, the sanctifying power of blind custom and the mystical authority of the Church itself all combine to make a theology. Once a great theology is so constituted it possesses an immense power over life. It shapes character and ideals and gives direction to faith, orders effort and so becomes, as it were, a mould into which souls and societies are cast.

Theologies may be changed, in fact they are always in the way of being changed, but they yield slowly to transforming forces. Nothing is so persistent as organized faith and yet the very strength of a great theology is always its weakness. It is never really anything else than a crystallization of past forces. The experiences which voice themselves in theology have cooled and hardened down; the philosophy which is implicit in theology is past philosophy; the science implicit in theology is senescent science.

There is always in evidence, then, in the regions of theology a disturbing pressure occasioned by the reaction of contemporaneous movements in science and philosophy and understandings of life generally upon these old and solidly established inherited forms. Currents of thought are always, as it were, running past the great formulæ since thought is free and formulæ are rigid, and then returning upon them. From time to time this movement gathers great force. The old has been rigid so long, the new is so insistent that the conflict between them fills an age with its clamour, stresses souls to its travail, breaks down ancient forms without immediately building up their equivalent, and contributes uncertainties and restlessnesses everywhere in evidence.

Now this is exactly what has been happening in the region of religion in the last thirty years. An inherited order, strongly fashioned and organized and long essentially unchanged, has been compelled to take account of the forces about it. Certainly theology is not so static as an earlier paragraph would seem to indicate, none the less the great theological centralities do possess an immense power of resistance. We have already seen how little Protestantism had changed since the Reformation until it met the full impact of modern science and philosophy. We have had really until our own time and still largely continue a theology with the Creation story of the ancient Hebrews, the outlook upon life of the age of the Apostles, the philosophy of the Greek fathers, St. Augustine's conception of human nature and the expectation of the end of the world and the issues of history of the Jewish apocalypse given a Christian interpretation.

True enough, there are in all this precious and timeless qualities but there is also through all the fabric of our formulated faith the interweaving of such understandings as those who shaped our creeds had, of law and history and truth. Any far-reaching change, then, in philosophy or science was bound to profoundly affect religion and even forty years ago far-reaching modifications of the old order were overdue.

New Thought is just one outcome of the tremendous impact of contemporaneous thought upon our inherited theology; a detached fragment or rather group of fragments, for even as a cult New Thought, as has been said, is loosely organized and its varying parts have in common only a common drift. Yet that drift is significant for it has beneath it the immense force of a philosophy which has been gathering head for more than a century. It is to this, therefore, that we ought to address ourselves for any understanding of the changed outlook upon life which is carried, as it were, from the surface of profounder tides.

"The Rediscovery of the Inner Life"

Josiah Royce dismisses the whole of philosophy from Spinoza to Kant in one single pregnant phrase. He calls it "the rediscovery of the inner life." It is along this line that modern philosophy and religion approach each other. Religion has always been the setting forth of the inner life in terms of its relationship to God and the proofs of the reality of religion have always been found in the experiences of the soul. The mystic particularly made everything of the inner life; he lived only in its realities. For the sake of its enrichment and its empowerment he subjected himself to rigorous disciplines. Its revelations were to him all sufficient, for having found God therein he asked for nothing beside.

Wherein, then, is this new mysticism, or better, this new cult of the inner life different from the old? It is not easy to answer that question in a paragraph, though it is easy to feel the answer in any comparison of the great classics of mysticism—which are mostly spiritual autobiographies—and New Thought literature. To turn from St. Augustine to Dresser, or from St. Theresa to Trine is to change spiritual and intellectual climates. There is in the modern literature little reflection of such spiritual struggle as fills the great Confessions with the agony of embattled souls, nor any resolution of such struggle into the peace of a soul "fully awake as regards God but wholly asleep as regards things of this world and in respect of herself." This testimony of St. Theresa is illuminating as a contrasting background for New Thought. There the soul is very much awake, both as regards things of this world and in respect of herself.