Again, the moral attitude is equally distinct. The criminal after a successful piece of villainy may feel a thrill of ecstasy. It is indeed well known that criminals in every country are the children of (more or less superstitious) religion. We may regard morality as grounded in the sense of personality, gradually extending by imagination and sympathy to every individual. Or we may regard it as springing, in a sense of adhesiveness, from the family and resulting relationships, and thence growing into a consciousness of the oneness of all human interests, the individuals finding themselves to be, according to that Stoic conception which has moulded European laws and is still a leavening influence in European ethics, members one with another in the same natural body of humanity. In any case, as a moral being the individual finds himself dependent on other individuals, and with a duty, therefore, laid upon him to live harmoniously with those individuals; there being no response forthcoming to the demands of his own nature unless he also responds to the demands of other natures. Religion, however, knows nothing of the scientific “nature” or of the ethical “man;” its impulse is from within and of free grace.
At the dawn of civilization, it is true, religion and morals are inextricably mingled; they only become disentangled by a gradual evolution. The Toda who regards as sacred an ancient cattle-bell is obeying an impulse of adoration whose foundation is, probably, largely ethical, for the bull is intimately connected with the beginnings of civilization. A religious impulse will sometimes have an ethical element; morals will sometimes find an ally in religion. But religion with its internal criterion and morals with its more external criterion remain essentially distinct, sometimes antagonistic: “to reject religion,” Thoreau said, “is the first step towards moral excellence.” That is but a puny religion that is based on morals; on the other hand, the morals that rests on religion will sooner or later collapse with it in a common ruin. That has been too often seen. Religions change: every man is free to have his own, or to have none. No man, scarcely even a Crusoe, is free to have no morals, and the ideal morality cannot widely vary for any two societies.
Yet religion cannot live nobly without science or without morals. It is only by a strenuous devotion to science, by a perpetual reference to the moral structure of life, that religion—so made conscious of its nature and its limits—can be rendered healthful.
“None can usurp this height....
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest;”
so spake Moneta to Keats, among all English poets the purest artist.
A man takes sides with religion, or with science, or with morals; oftener he spends the brief moments of his existence in self-preservation, fighting now on one side, now on the other. But for a little while we are allowed to enter the house of life and to gather around its fire. Why pull each other’s hair and pinch each other’s arms like naughty children? Well would it be to warm ourselves at the fire together, to clasp hands, to gain all the joy that comes of comradeship, before we are called out, each of us, into the dark, alone.
The other elements fall away from religion, leaving the emotional, deeper and more fundamental than either of the others; just as the brain itself is controlled by the sympathetic system which outlives it and holds in its hands the centres of life. That element underlay the crude imaginings of the primitive man who first created a spiritual world out of the stuff of his dreams and his primitive delight in the most marvellous object he saw, the sun, that as he truly divined is the source not only of light but of life; just as it underlies also our more complex imaginings to-day. In religion, we are appealing not to any narrow or superficial element of the man, but to something which is more primitive than the intellectual efflorescence of the brain, the central fire of life itself.
Our supreme business in life—not as we made it, but as it was made for us when the world began—is to carry and to pass on as we received it, or better, the sacred lamp of organic being that we bear within us. Science and morals are subservient to the reproductive activity; that is why they are so imperative. The rest is what we will, play, art, consolation—in one word, religion. If religion is not science or morals, it is the sum of the unfettered expansive impulses of our being. Life has been defined as, even physically and chemically, a tension. All our lives long we are struggling against that tension, but we can truly escape from it only by escaping from life itself. Religion is the stretching forth of our hands toward the illimitable. It is an intuition of the final deliverance, a half-way house on the road to that City which we name mysteriously Death.