Of what sort are these philosophers? Are they, as they claim to be, the cream of mankind, those who have the pure reason? Are they such as the world admires? I think not. For pure reason does not appeal to mankind. It is too cold, too hard, too arid. It is barren and produces nothing. What has philosophy given the world but unending words? It is the denial of emotion, and emotion is life. It is the reduction of living to the formula of mathematics—a grey world. Those who, rejecting religion, rely on pure reason, are those who have lost the stronger emotions, who have heads but no hearts, while the enthusiasts have hearts but no heads. And in between these lie the great mass of men who are religious but not fanatics, who reason but who do not look to reason to prove their religion, the men and women who live large lives, and are lost neither in the tumult of unrestrained emotion, nor bound in the iron limits of a mental syllogism.
"Do you infer," it will be asked, "that religion is in inverse ratio to reason? But it is not so. Many men, most men of the highest intellectual attainments, have been deeply religious, great soldiers, sailors, statesmen, discoverers; the great men are on our side, the thinkers have been with us." I am not sure of that. The great doers have always been religious, the great thinkers rarely so. No man has ever, I think, sat down calmly unbiassed to reason out his religion and not ended by rejecting it. The great men who have also been religious do not invalidate what I say. Newton was a great thinker, perhaps one of the greatest thinkers of all time. He could follow natural laws and occurrences with the keenest eye for flaws, for mistakes, for rash assumption. He could never accept until he had proved. But did he ever apply this acumen to religion? Not so; he accepted at once the chronology of the Old Testament unhesitatingly, blindly, and worked out a chronology of the Fall much as did Archbishop Usher.
Indeed, I think it is always so. There is no assumption more fallacious than that because a man is a keen reasoner on one subject he is also on another, that because one thing is fair ground for controversy other things are so also. Men who are really religious, who believe in their faith whatever that faith may be, consider it above proof, beyond argument. It is strange at first, it is to later thoughts one of the most illuminating things, to hear a keen reasoner who is also a religious man talk, to note the change of mental attitude as the subject changes. In ordinary matters everything is subject to challenge, to discussion, to rules of logic. But when it is religion that comes up, note the dropped voice, the softened face, the gentle light in the eye. It is emotion now, not reason; feeling, not induction. It is a subject few religious men care to discuss at all, because they know it is not a matter of pure reason. True religion, therefore, that beautiful restrained emotion which all who have it treasure, which those who have not envy and hate, lives among the men who are between these extremes. Those who with strong emotions have but narrow outlets for it become unduly religious, narrow sectarians.
Those with uncontrolled religious emotions become fanatics, those with none but brute emotions remain brutes. Those whom the cult of sensual desires has overcome follow Horace and Omar Khayyam. Those in whom reason has overpowered and killed the emotions become those most arid of people, philosophers. True and beautiful faith is to be found only amongst those who lie between all these extremes. They have many and keen emotions, but they find many outlets for them all, so that the stream of feeling is not directed into one narrow channel. And they employ reason not as a murdering dissecting power, but as an equaliser and balancer of the living. Reason is not concerned with what religion is, but only with the relative position religious emotions shall occupy in life. Too little lets it run wild, too much kills it.
But religion is never reason. It is a cult of certain of the emotions. What these emotions are I hope to explain further on.
CHAPTER XV.
ENTHUSIASM.
Such are the qualities and such the circumstances that increase and nourish religious feeling, of such are the more religious of all peoples. What is the result in their lives? Does their religion cause them to live more worthy lives? Are the more deeply religious those whom the world at large most deeply respects? What is the effect of their religion in their lives?