Some thinkers have made a substitute “religion of humanity.” They find solace in action tending to make the world a better place; they have been gratified by an imaginative conception of a future heaven on earth. As a religion of morality and action this is magnificent. Yet its dogma does not satisfy. A heaven on earth is no more conceivable than a heaven anywhere else. If we find our happiness in action, how shall our descendants find happiness when there are no more evils to conquer? Though a static condition of blessedness be the goal of humanitarian endeavor, it is the progress toward it which furnishes the joy.
The Oriental thinker has looked for his answer in a different direction. Though the individual is partial and unsuccessful, life as a whole is always triumphant. Cannot the individual by contemplation identify himself with the world-soul? Can he not tack himself on to this all-inclusive life by denial and forgetfulness of himself? Brahmin saints have done so imaginatively. But such an answer is no answer. We are individuals, after all, and thinking of Nirvana will not rob us of our separate bodies and minds. Contemplation is not a substitute for living.
The doctrine of transmigration is equally unsatisfying. If an individual never succeeds in any single life, innumerable chances will be mere repetitions of tragedy. The only hope of such a process would be a final “heaven on earth,” which is just as inconceivable as that of the humanitarians.
We cannot now be satisfied with theological answers. Nor will the world ever find an answer permanently satisfactory. Is not this as it should be? A fixed system of thought which answers every spiritual craving must be a shell around the individual, preventing growth. It finally ceases to be a dynamic and becomes a wall in the way of the feelers which mankind is constantly sending into his spiritual environment. It forces him to rest. It eventually turns all his expansion into the lower planes of life. It is deadening, suffocating, as soon as he reaches its limits.
Of what nature, then, must be the religion of the modern man and woman? First of all, it must not be imposed from without; it must grow through the personality and find its being there. It must not only square with every known fact of science and thought; it must stimulate to a fervent desire for new understanding. It must not deny or destroy life; it must be life’s essence. It must ring with a call to the individual to assume his proper dignity of life. It must harmonize with the laughter of children and with the bitter beauty of a winter sea. It must flame with emotion, yet be keen and hard as a sword. And it must be not a self-constituted standard with which every other thing is arbitrarily compared, but a principle of growth making necessary in us vision, strength, freedom, and fearlessness.
It is my feeling that Tagore will suggest to the modern man such a religion. He gives expression, though not, of course, perfect expression, to a synthesis of many latent instincts of the modern mind. He glories in understanding, not only facts and truth, but emotions and all manifestations of life. He calls us to see vivid beauty wherever it is found. He acclaims the aid of science in extending man’s personality throughout the universe. He sees the oneness of all life, and bids man stand erect on account of this eternal and timeless force coursing through him. He sees the oneness of humanity, and the necessity of perfecting human relations. He depicts purity without asceticism, vigor without brutality. He emphasizes joy and action. He does not blink the fact of death, but robs it of horror by showing it as the natural end of a victorious life. While he encourages by the idea of an ultimate goal, he inspires by the conception of a real connection with infinity here and now. Revering the universal life, he sees that it finds expression only in individuals, and that the law of our being must be to live as completely as possible.
Many before Tagore have said these things partially. But it remained for a poet who combines the intelligence of the Orient with that of the Occident to say them all, and to say them with such beauty and simplicity that a large part of the world listens. If he succeeds in making us conscious of such a religion, he will have quickened life and made it potent as few artists can.
Ethel Sidgwick’s “Succession”
Margaret C. Anderson
Succession: A Comedy of the Generations, by Ethel Sidgwick. (Small, Maynard and Company, Boston.)