I am as much impressed with the eloquence of this passage as with its truth. I reserve more particular views of religion for comments on the letter upon the subject. I wish to present in this place, as consonant with the spirit of this passage, one view of religion which has long been one of my most fixed and undoubting conclusions. It is, that man is a religious being, by the organic constitution of his frame, still more than by any intellectual process of reasoning. I have no doubt, that a rightly organized and well endowed man, born and reared in a desert isle, without ever being brought into contact with man or any discipline to call forth reason or speech, would be subject to precisely the same emotions as, varied and moulded by the circumstances of birth and education, constitute the substance of all the religions in the world; in other words, that man is constituted a religious animal in the same way as he clearly is an animal with other instincts and passions. I am aware, that divines and moralists do not often insist upon the religious instinct, as one of the most conclusive and convincing arguments (to me, at least,) of the soul’s immortality. It seems with them the favorite view to consider religion a science that may be taught, like geometry or chemistry.
To me, this absorbing subject presents a very different aspect. I see man everywhere religious in some form. The sentiment takes the molding of his accidental circumstances. It is poetry, enthusiasm, eloquence, bravery; but in every form an aspiration after the vast, illimitable, eternal, shadowy conceptions of an unknown hereafter, that the senses have not embodied. It is rational or fanciful, it is respectable or superstitious, it is a pure abstraction or a gorgeous appeal to the senses, according to one’s country, training and temperament. But man, whether he be a dweller in the far isles of the sea, or in the crowded mart, whether christian or savage, is everywhere found, in some form, invoking a God and reposing the hopes and affections of his worn heart in another and a better world; and extending his faith to an immortal life and an eternal sphere of action.
Instead of searching for this universal principle with metaphysicians, pronouncing upon it with dogmatists, or deducing it from creeds, or creeds from it, I behold in it the same unwritten revelation which we call instinct. Vague and undefined as is this law, and questioned by some as is even its existence, it announces to us one of the most impressive and beautiful homilies upon the truth and goodness of the Author of our being. It may be called the scripture of the lower orders, guiding them, with unerring certainty, to their enjoyments and their end. Beasts feel it, and graze the plain. Birds feel it, and soar in the air. Fishes feel it, and dart along their liquid domain; each feeding, moving, resting, playing and perpetuating its kind, according to its organic laws. Winter comes upon the gregarious tribes of water fowls enjoying themselves in the Canadian lakes. They listen to this call from heaven, and mount the autumnal winds; and without chart or compass, by a course to which that of circumnavigators is devious, they sail to the shores of the south, where a softer atmosphere and new supplies of food await them. It leads the young one of these animals, scarcely yet disengaged from the shell, to patter its bill in the dry sand, impatiently to search for water before it has yet seen it. It creates in the new born infant a purpose to search for its supplies in the yet untasted fountains of the maternal bosom. It guides all the lower orders of being through the whole mysterious range of their peculiar habits and modes of life. Under its influence, animals and men exercise powers which transcend the utmost efforts of our reason. Who can tell me why the duckling plunges into the water with the shell on its head? Who can inform me how the affectionate house dog, blindfolded and conveyed in utter darkness in a carriage to a distance of fifty leagues, the moment he is emancipated, returns by a more direct route than that by which he came? There would be no use in presenting the most extended details of these developments of instinct through the whole range of animated nature. Every one knows that wherever we discern them, either in the structure or habits of the animal, or both, they are indications of unerring guidance, the voice of eternal and unswerving truth, which, as soon as promulgated, is received as the parental counsel of the Author of nature.
He who could interpret the language and the gestures of the lower orders would see in the structure and manifested wants of fishes, that water was provided as a home for them, had he seen them in the air. When he had noted the movements and heard the cries of the new born infant, he would be in no doubt, that the nutriment in the maternal bosom was stored for it somewhere. Seeing the structure, the starting pinions and plumage of the unfledged bird in its nest, he could be at no loss in reasoning, that as these indications of contrivance for other modes of life were lost in its present manner of existence, it was intended for movements, where pinions and plumage would avail it.
As certain as these instincts and indications are the pledged verity of the Author of nature, that a sphere is provided for the exercise of these undeveloped powers, and a corresponding gratification for these instinctive desires, so sure as they point out, in a language, which can neither deceive nor be mistaken, the aim and end of the animal to which they belong, so sure, if religion be an instinctive sentiment, and the hope, and the persuasion of another existence result from the organic constitution of our nature, there must be another life. That it is so, the usages and modes of all people that have yet been known, the people of the first ages, and the last, the people of the highest refinement, and those, who scarcely know the use of fire, have concurred to prove to us. Superficial travellers, indeed, have told us of newly discovered tribes, who had no visions of a God—a worship, or an hereafter. Other travellers have followed them, and observed better, and discovered, that their predecessors based the fact on their own ignorance. They have been found to belong to the general analogy, and to look to
‘Some happier land in depth of woods embraced;
Some lovelier island in the watery waste.’
It seems to me, that this universal agreement of religious ideas is the most unequivocal manifestation, that the sentiment of religion is an instinct, that is exhibited in the whole range of animated nature. If so, it is the offered pledge of the divine veracity, that the soul is immortal; and that as certain as the instinct of migrating birds is proof, that the milder skies which they seek, exist, and are prepared for them, so surely the undeveloped powers of the spirit, which have no range on the earth, have a country prepared also for them. Our aspirations, our longings after immortality, every mode of worship, and every form of faith—are the rudiments, the germs, the starting pinions of the embryo spirit, which is to escape from its nest at death, and fly in the celestial atmosphere, in which it was formed to move.
To me these universal religious manifestations are proofs, that religion springs not, as some suppose, from tradition; or, as others think, from reasoning. It is a sentiment. It is an inwrought feeling in our mental constitution, an unwritten, universal, and everlasting gospel, pointing to God and immortality. Bring the most uninstructed peasant, who has seen nothing of the earth, but its plains, in sight of Chimborazo. The thrill of awe and sublimity, that springs within him at the view, and lifts his spirit above the blue summits to the divinity, is one of the forms, in which this sentiment acts. The natural mental movements, in view of the illimitable main, of the starry firmament, of elevated mountains, of whatever is vast in dimension, irresistible in power, terrible in the exercise of anger, in short, all those emotions, which we call the sublime, are modified actings of the religious sentiment. Justly has the author pronounced the universality of these ideas the highest testimony to the elevation of human nature. It is the most impressive and interesting attribute of the soul, that it is subject to these impulses. It is a standing index, that the godlike stranger, imprisoned in clay, has, inwrought in its consciousness, indelible impressions of its future destiny.