We have said that religion must be catholic in its count of values. Moral souls may still be comparatively starved souls. One of the great mistakes religion has made in the past has been this very lack of sympathy for values of all kinds. For this very reason, religion has often displayed a certain narrowness and harshness. Its loyalty has frequently been a one-sided loyalty which prided itself on its asceticism. But the day of an irrational asceticism has passed. Intensity is good, but intensity and breadth are better still. A humane religion will preach loyalty to many values, harmonized together by the work of a concrete reason and a living art. When religion did not consider itself of this world, it was passive and acquiescent toward many features of human life. But a truer idea of the nature of the spiritual, united with a decay of the old supernaturalistic sanctions, will change all that. Religion will become active and militant, intensely concerned with everything human, a loyal enthusiasm for all the significant phases of life. It will cease to be a matter of taboos, of ritual, of rather conventional routine and become a spirit of vigorous search for whatever elevates and ennobles human beings in their day of life. Into the service of such a religion reason and art will gladly enter.
But this interpretation of religion has its obverse side. It is in part directed against the age-old, supernaturalistic perspective which has done so much to render religion a hindrance to the growth of spirituality. The growth of my own thinking has led me to see, ever more clearly, the harm done in this day and age by that emphasis on sanctions for conduct which are not justified by the vital and concrete needs of human life. The appeal to tradition and authority abstracted religion from that fresh contact with the movement of events which makes the great causes of history so vivid and appealing. This abstraction divided the spiritual life of man against itself and led to inefficiency and confusion. What the world needs to-day is a rational enthusiasm for human values. The thought of another world with its melodramatic last judgment encouraged individualism, withdrew attention from social problems and aspirations, made the conception of the spiritual anæmic and vague. The official spirituality of the Church lacked the happy stimulus of a social setting.
Bad as this division of man's spiritual life against itself was, it was not all. Man had been taught to despise reason, almost his highest quality. The consequence was, that reason passed into the service of the mere technical arrangements of life. Man rationalized nature and left himself irrational, as can be seen in the Great War. Because religion ignored reason and slighted many sides of man's nature, it paid the penalty of abortiveness. It is not a mere accident that Christianity has been so helpless in the present crisis.
In times of darkness, it is natural for the individual to seek ways of escape from the crushing load which has fallen upon him. The student of the history of religion knows that the most popular way of escape has been in terms of spiritualism and supernaturalism. But the thinker knows that this is a search for a sedative rather than a remedy. Moreover, the growth of human knowledge has made such a refuge more strained and artificial than it used to be. Those few men of standing in the physical sciences who have lent the prestige of their name to fields in which they have little competence have done a grave disservice to mankind. Man must conquer his problems; he cannot find salvation in a cowardly flight from them. The teaching of this book is that supernaturalism has prevented man from finding himself, and that the spiritual task of the present generation is a re-interpretation of the spiritual to take in all the significant features of human life. We want a religion of present use, a religion not concerned with mythological objects and hypothetical states of existence but with the tasks and needs of human beings in society. Will not the next step in religion be the relinquishment of the supernatural and the active appreciation of virtues and values? It is my hope that the present sincere discussion will assist, in some small measure, the coming of such a religion.
[[1]] McGiffert, The Rise of Modern Religious Ideas, p. 272.