Add that inspiration nowadays, and forever more, lacks and will lack its appropriate environment. Intensity of religious emotion in a people, an intensity which sometimes rises to the height of fanaticism, depends, in a great measure, upon ignorance and upon the level of intelligence achieved by average human life. When problems of the origin and destiny, and reason of things, are suddenly presented to an ignorant people, it experiences profound terrors, ecstasies, a general heightening of the sensibility which is due to the fact that a state of metaphysical and philosophical curiosity is utterly unfamiliar to it, constitutes a positive revolution in its ordinary habits of mind. When the average level of intellectual activity is once raised, metaphysical emotion loses its revolutionary character precisely because the whole extent of human existence has become imbued with it. A calm, high, continuous enjoyment takes the place of a brief, stormy ecstasy; people who pass their lives on the shore of the ocean cease to fear it, or at least do not experience so violent an emotion in its presence as they did at the sight of their first tempest. If we had never looked upon the starry heavens, the first time we lifted our eyes to them we should be filled with fear; the spectacle of them to-day calms us, gently inspires us. To appease the violence of religious sentiment, it must, when it has been purified, be permitted to permeate the whole of human existence, be always present with us, and domesticate us in the infinite.
A new religion must be both novel and significant.
A final condition precedent to the success of a new religion would be that it should be really new, that it should contribute a new idea to the treasury of the human mind. Among the wretched attempts at starting a new faith which have been made from one end of the world to the other in our days, nothing original has made its appearance. In America a religion new in appearance, Mormonism, has had some success; it is, of all modern attempts, the only one which has relied upon miraculous prophecy and revelation, such as are indispensable to a genuine dogmatic religion: it has also its book, its Bible, and even includes in its legend some prosaic tale of marvellous pair of spectacles destined for the deciphering of the book. The God of Mormonism, who is rather better educated than the God of the Bible, possesses some notion of optics. But at bottom Mormonism is simply a modern edition of Jewish ideas and customs: the whole religion is a bit of plagiarism, a resuscitation of superanuated legends and beliefs, to which it has added nothing but what is trivial; it is a religious anachronism. It seems also to have reached the limit of its development, the number of its adherents is not increasing. Hindu Brahmaism is an eclectic and mystic spiritualism without one really new idea. Comtism, which consists of the rites of religion and nothing else, is an attempt to maintain life in the body after the departure of the soul. The spiritualists are charlatans, or empirics, who have been impressed with certain, as yet obscure, phenomena of the nervous system which they themselves are unable to explain scientifically. But charlatanism has never founded anything durable in the domain of religion. To compare American Mormonism or spiritualism to nascent Christianity is to make one’s self ridiculous. Humble as the beginnings of Christianity were one must not be the dupe of historical illusion, nor believe that Christianity owed its triumph to a simple concurrence of happy events; that the world, for example, according to M. Renan’s hypothesis, might quite easily have become Mithraic. The disciples of a certain Chrestus, mentioned for the first time by Suetonius, could present, as the basis of their as yet vague beliefs, two incomparable epic poems, the Old Testament and Gospels; they introduced into the world a new system of morality, which was admirable even in its errors, and original at least for the mass of mankind; and they contributed, finally, to the common stock of ideas a great metaphysical conception, that of the resurrection, which, combined with current philosophical conceptions, necessarily gave birth to the doctrine of personal immortality. Christianity conquered by its own weight, it was inevitable that it should find its St. Paul; the Old Testament and the Gospels were too eminent to be forgotten, or to remain without influence on human life. There is not a single example in the history of the world of a great masterpiece, at once literary or philosophical, which has gone its way unperceived, without exerting an influence upon the progress of humanity. Every work which is sufficiently endowed with beauty or virtue is sure of the future.
No great religion could nowadays take its rise among the masses.
It is among the masses that religious movements have hitherto begun. But a new religion could not come to us to-day from the ignorant masses of an Oriental people nor from the lower classes of any country of Europe. In heathen antiquity, all social classes were united in a belief in naïve superstitions. Marcus Aurelius himself was obliged to preside in great pomp over a ceremony in honour of the serpent of Alexander of Abonoteichos which numbered believers among his friends. To-day a bishop in Australia can refuse to order a prayer for rain, and declare that atmospheric phenomena are regulated by inflexible natural laws, and persuade the believers in his diocese, if they want a remedy against drought, to ameliorate their system of irrigation. These two facts indicate the thorough-going difference between the ancient and modern world. The contemptuous title of Barbarians, which the Greeks and Romans applied to all other peoples, was less than exact, for the Hebrews and the Hindus at least possessed a more profound religion than the Greeks and Romans and even in certain respects a superior literature. Greek and Roman civilization is a rare historical example, which proves that religion is not necessarily the measure of the intellectual development of a people. Greece excels principally by her art and science; but the superiority which she conceived herself to possess in other respects was a pure illusion founded on ignorance. The superiority that we attribute to ourselves is demonstrated by our knowledge; we are better acquainted to-day with the religion of most Oriental peoples than they are themselves; and we have earned a right to sit in judgment on them, and admire them, and criticise them, that the ancients did not possess. The distinction between those who know and those who do not is to-day the sole really serious line of demarcation between classes and nations. And the line is one that religion cannot pass, for every complete religion involves a general conception of the world, and no such naïve conception of the world as a man of the people is capable of can ever find acceptance by a cultivated mind. No great religion can germinate and achieve complete development in modern society.
Impossibility of improving on existing religions in their kind.
The impossibility of finding anything new in the domain of mythical religion might almost be demonstrated a priori; nothing more attractive will ever be discovered in the way of a metaphysical myth than the sovereign happiness obtained in this life in the Buddhists Nirvâna, or obtained in the life after death in Christian immortality. In these two conceptions, the metaphysical imagination of humanity has once for all achieved its masterpiece, as the plastic imagination once for all achieved its masterpiece in Greek statuary. Something may be demanded in another order of ideas, one may exact less naïve hypotheses, hypotheses more neighbour to the truth; but these hypotheses will never seduce humanity nor pass over the world like a wave of light, nor become transfigured in the form of a revelation. The multitude never listens to a revelation that does not announce some glad tidings, some salvation in this world, or the next; to be a prophet, and to be listened to, imperatively requires one to be a prophet of good augury. Religious metaphysics, after its two immense efforts in Buddhism and Christianity (Mohammedanism is simply a vulgarization of these two), is condemned in the future to sterility or repetition, so long as severe and truly philosophical hypotheses, based on scientific generalization, engage the attention of mankind. Infantine hypotheses, which resolve the problems of the destiny of mankind and of the world in a manner altogether consoling to human vanity, are condemned to uniformity and banality. To discover anything new in the realm of metaphysics, the religious spirit will have to abandon the conditions which have hitherto existed; will have to deal with ideas that lie beyond the primitive intellectual range of a Hottentot, and even abandon all notion of universality, of Catholicity, in the sphere of speculation.
Impossibility of improving existing religious morality as such.
The same is true in the sphere of morals. So far as an exalted and attractive system of morality is concerned, can one go farther than Christianity and Buddhism, both of which preach exclusive altruism, absolute self-abnegation? All that one can do is really to take a few steps backward to moderate certain exaggerated outbursts of devotion in the void, to fit Christian and Buddhistic morality to the real world, to supply this beautiful mysticism with a material body; but for such a task a new Messiah would be powerless, simple good sense does not charm humanity; the cold, humble, commonplace duties of everyday life cannot be made the basis of a great popular movement. Common-sense is not contagious after the fashion of religious exaltation, which passes from man to man like wildfire. Moral sentiment may well, in the course of time, filter into us, pass slowly from man to man, rise like a rising tide, but so gradually as scarcely to be perceptible. The most lasting approaches to perfection are often the most unconscious. It is a difficult matter by a simple impulse of faith to climb sheer up on the ladder of civilization. True moral perfection is often the precise opposite of heroic paroxysm. As the passion for goodness becomes triumphant, it ceases to be a passion: it becomes, and must become, a portion of our normal life, of the flesh that the mystics curse; the man must become good from the roots of his hair to the soles of his feet. Thus Buddhism and Christianity, in many respects, have miscarried. If the first apostles, who preached these religions, should return among men, how unchanged and untransmuted they would find humanity, after so many thousands of years! There has been, no doubt, an intellectual progress which has confirmed a certain number of moral ideas, but this very complex intellectual progress has not entirely been effected by religions. There was as yet no sign of it in the small number of simple-hearted people gathered about the “new word” in which the apostles saw their moral and religious ideal realized. As the primitive virtues of this small knot of wholly religious and not at all scientific people overspread humanity, they necessarily became corrupt: and a morality of exalted self-abnegation could not succeed beyond a small group, a family, a convent, artificially sequestered from the rest of the world it necessarily failed when it undertook to appeal to all mankind. The great world is too inhospitable and shifting a soil; one does not sow seed in the sea. A revival or a repetition of the religious epics of Christianity or of Buddhism would to-day meet with an immediate check; for it is the very essence of their influence to develop the heart disproportionately to the brain, and, such an effect being a sort of disturbance of equilibrium, a sort of natural monstrosity, can be produced in individuals indeed, but not in races. The investigator to-day, who adds the least item of truth to the mass of scientific and philosophic knowledge already acquired, performs a much less brilliant but probably more definitive work than the purely religious work of a Messiah. He is of those who construct not in three days, but during successive ages, the sacred edifice which will not fall.
Growing antagonism to externals of worship.