| IX. Ethical Religion and the Religion of Future | Title page | XI. Christianity and the Religion of the Future |
[ p. 97 ]
Any attempt at detailed description of the coming religion must be set down as futile and chimerical. Rather would I touch upon certain features of the historic religions that the religion of the future may be expected to improve upon. Reserving Christianity for separate consideration, let us note some particulars in which it is safe to assume advance upon the historic religions will be achieved. To begin with, all seven of them are based on the principle of authority. All alike appeal to a recognized founder as having “the words of eternal life,” as having revealed all that is required for faith and practice. But the religion of the future we may well believe will have the principle of freedom for its basis, holding that no one founder (or all founders together) has [ p. 98 ] revealed the totality of moral and religious truth. Never yet has a complete and final code of ethics or a universally satisfying “breviary” been compiled. Nor can we believe they ever will be, seeing the diversity of spiritual taste that will ever obtain and the ever recurring rise of new social and economic conditions generating new problems for the solution of which the old formulas prove insufficient. Nor, again, can any one founder serve as the perfect exemplar for mankind; none can include within his own personality the totality of perfections possible to all persons, involving, as this does, opposite qualities like those that differentiate the sexes. Thus, while gratefully acknowledging and cherishing the moral and religious contributions made by these founders to the advancement of the spiritual life and while reverently recognizing the sublime character of each and the qualities with which each peculiarly shone, the religion of the future will deem it treason to the infinite moral ideal to bend the knee to any one prophet exclusively, or to bind the reason [ p. 99 ] to any one book exclusively. To all sacred scriptures, of the present as of the past, the religion of the future will turn, seeking in each book that which may serve to inspire and enrich the religious life. To all the great masters of religions will it bow, yet refuse to become the disciple of any one exclusively, evaluating each according to the truth he has to teach and the inspiration to be derived from the record of his life.
Once more, the fellowship of each of the great religions is exclusive in that it sometimes explicitly and more often tacitly admits to membership only those who accept its founder and its book. To enter the Mohammedan communion one must accept Mohammed as the Prophet of God and the Koran as the divinely revealed standard of faith and conduct—a test that excludes all but two and a half millions of the people of the earth. To come into the Christian communion of the orthodox type one must accept Jesus as Savior and God; if the heterodox type be sought, one must accept Jesus as, at least, an [ p. 100 ] all-sufficing guide to the moral life—tests that shut out two-thirds of the human race. But the fellowship of the religion of the future will be cosmopolitan and free, refraining from the requirement of assent to any doctrine or belief whatsoever; uniting men on the only basis that is truly universal, namely, the desire to live upward toward the triple ideal of truth, love, and duty, let their theology be what it may. Assuredly, it is not enough for men and women to be brothers and sisters in Christ, or in Moses, or in Mohammed; Christian exclusiveness is just as intolerable as any other. We must be brothers and sisters in Humanity with all the rest of mankind; that is what a true fellowship requires, what democracy in religion means. With no lesser ideal can the modern spirit, educated in catholicity and in appreciation, be permanently satisfied. Christian unity, toward which so many noteworthy attempts are now being made, is to be welcomed indeed and, above all, as a step toward that nobler, more inclusive unity which the presence among us of millions of Jews [ p. 101 ] and an ever increasing number of Mohammedans, Buddhists, and Hindus calls for as never before. For the consummation of that sublime ideal the religious world is far from prepared. But when, in the distant future, the sects, great and small, as a result of practice in organic morality, shall have become thoroughly ashamed of their sectarianism and of their puerile claims of supremacy and universality shall have been set aside; when all shall have unfeignedly acknowledged themselves merely parts of a whole, organs of an organism in which the party are all coordinated and simultaneously subordinated to the whole, then and not till then will the noble dream of a fellowship of faiths be fulfilled.
| IX. Ethical Religion and the Religion of Future | Title page | XI. Christianity and the Religion of the Future |