When it is remembered that this remark was made by an unlettered Boer woman, who could neither read nor write, I think it will be allowed that the learned, philosophic, modern thinker may sometimes not have much to teach "the ignorant Boer" with regard to the true basis of philosophic religious toleration.
The third indictment which is made against the Boer with regard to religion is that he is superstitious, that he allows his religion to dominate every concern in his life, instead of confining it to that small sphere in which alone in modern life conformably with respectability its influence is allowed.
It may be at once stated that, in a certain sense, the statement that the African Boer is dominated by his religion is true, but in how far this indictment is one from which he suffers will vary with the standpoint of the individual considering it. We, in this latest phase of the nineteenth-century civilization, are so habituated to seeing men and women walking about, carrying with them wholly dead or more or less moribund religions which, like decaying flesh, corrupt the atmosphere, and render putrid the whole environment of those who bear it, that large numbers of us have reached a point at which we are unable to conceive of religion as anything but dead, a thing to be restricted within the narrowest possible limits, if life is to remain livable.
But the difference between a dead and a living religion is vital; the first weighs down the man who carries it; the living religion up-bears him. There is perhaps no life quite worth living without a living religion, under whatever name or form it may be concealed, vivifying and strengthening it. The Boer's religion is alive, it is in harmony with his knowledge, his ideals, and his aims. Therefore it is his strength.
Theoretically, so far as its dogmatic clothing is concerned, his religion is a form of Christian Protestant Calvinism, and differs in no way from that still professed by the majority of Scotchmen, from the Aberdeen grocer to the Edinburgh professor. Actually, it differs very materially from that held by the large bulk of any truly modern population.
It is often said of the lives of men congregated in vast cities, under more or less completely artificial conditions, that they suffer from these or those disadvantages—that the de-oxygenated air of cities retards muscular development, that it renders persons continually exposed to it anæmic; that the continual noise, vibration, and lack of direct sunlight have an injurious effect upon the nervous system and that a debilitated physical condition is bound to arise. But the most serious loss entailed by life in vast cities under artificial conditions, whether in the modern or the ancient world, is seldom directly referred to.
The story of the small modern child, born and brought up in a modern town, where her father, an electrical engineer, had installed all the lights in the street and houses, and who, when at four years old was taken to the country for the first time and allowed to see the stars, said: "Did my father set them up too?" may or may not be true; but it illustrates with force the terrible vacuum in knowledge and experience of the most profound aspects of existence which a life walled in amid artificial conditions tends to produce. That which the Buddha left his kingly palace and sat beneath his Boh-tree to seek; that which Zoroaster found in his solitary sojourn on the mountain top, and Mohamed in his secret cave, which the Hebrew leader discovered in the deserts of Sinai, and the teacher of Galilee in the wilderness and on the mountain tops; that which, having perceived, they strove to give voice to in the world's bibles, and which has become symbolized in the world's temples, from the rock-hewn cave temples of India to the Holy of Holies of the Jew; from the Greeks' Parthenon on the hill-top bathed in light and air, to the Gothic cathedral with its forest of shafts—that of which all the religions and all the dogmas are but the tentative attempts of the struggling human spirit to give voice to—this reality is not easily perceived as present and always over-arching when the individual is swathed in by conditions of life, the result of man's small labours, and seemingly having no root beyond his own will; and when the tumultuous sounds and minute details forced on it at every moment almost blind and deafen the individual to the consciousness of anything beyond the fragmentary and present.
This is the serious danger and almost certain loss to which the spirit of man exposes itself, when he severs himself from all contact with the living and self-expanding forms of nature beyond himself, and surrounds himself purely by those which have a relation to himself, and have been modified by his action. It is an inverted view of the universe, with accompanying narrowness and blindness, which, far more than any danger of physical asphyxiation and nervous muscular deterioration, constitutes the evil attendant on the ordinary life of men in great cities, or wherever immersed in purely artificial conditions.
Undoubtedly there are lofty and powerful spirits who have reached a deep and calm clear-sightedness which no aspect in the world immediately about them can obscure, to whom the city and the petty sights and sounds of our little human creation are seen abidingly to be as much the outcome and mere passing development of the powers beyond and behind them as the silent plain and the mountain top—