| VIII. The Bahai Movement and Its Mission | Title page | X. The Historical Religions and the Religion of the Future |
[ p. 92 ]
At the very outset let it be understood that nothing is further from my purpose than an attempt to forecast the content of the religion of the future. That would seem a brazenly presumptuous and a pitifully profitless task. In his magnum opus, An Ethical Philosophy of Life the founder of the Ethical Movement has presented conceptions of God, worship, prayer, immortality, and consolation that may perchance become the theological substance of the religion of the future, though, of course, he makes no such claim for them; conceptions radically at variance with those current in the great religions. Incidentally, it should be remarked that these conceptions are by no means to be regarded as constituting the faith of the Ethical Movement, but rather as representative of no one but Professor Adler himself. The connotation he gives the word God, when he uses it, is that of a “commonwealth of [ p. 93 ] spirits,” as against the popular monarchical idea; a spiritual organism composed of individual organs; “the godhead an infinite host of beings, a vast community of spiritual life of which each human being is, in his inmost self, a citizen.” The object of Professor Adler’s worship is just this transcendental personality, this “infinitesimal component of the infinite God,” this “member of the spiritual universe,” that is, his fellow man; “not indeed his earthly self, not the clay form, but the perfect godhead in him, the veiled figure, veiled by the form of flesh and blood which is often an object of loathing.” This innermost essential spiritual self in his fellow man, this “infinitesimal component of the infinite God” as against “an imaginary figure floating somewhere above the clouds” is the object of Professor Adler’s worship. With reference to prayer he would not slight its uses, but in so far as it is “utterance” it is for him “silenced in the presence of the Unutterable.” “Any one who can pray,” he says, “does not fully realize the ineffableness of the divine life.” But prayer [ p. 94 ] as “a way of putting before one the moral ideal is needed”; such prayer “makes us feel ashamed and stirs to moral effort.” Instead of “addressing a God beyond the sky,” the new rule of prayer would be (in his judgment) to respond to “the call of the godhead in your neighbor” eliciting the latent best in him and thereby in yourself. And when, at death, this object of worship seems to have gone, consolation is to be found by realizing that it is “only the clay form that has gone, the earthly self into which a stellar ray descended.” The earthly form “crumbles into a little heap of dust but the star remains, one in the endless constellation of the spiritual universe.” We have not lost our mate, for, “the invincible self is unbegotten and imperishable and that which is best in us is inseparably united to that which is best in him.” [1]
Such, in bare outline, are the ideas dominant in the ethical religion of Professor Adler. Whether or not they will have a place in the pp95 religion of the future remains to be seen. They have not become and may never become part of the common belief of all members of the Ethical Movement. Never can they become part of a creed of the Ethical Movement for it has no creed, nay, it is fundamentally opposed to the formation and establishment of a creed, aiming to protect religion from the danger of becoming petrified and the Movement from becoming stagnant and succeeding in this aim just to the degree that it continues to be a Movement rather than an Attainment, leaving to the particular group devoted to the cultivation of religion (as to every other group) the privilege and opportunity freely to take whatever religious position it will, provided it refrain from committing the Movement thereto.
Whatever the content of the religion of the future may be, we are warranted in believing that it will spring from spiritual anguish even as did the Ethical Movement and each of the historical religions. [2] Nay, it will be a two-fold [ p. 96 ] anguish, if we mistake not, from which the religion of the future will originate—social and spiritual. Social, in so far as it relates to the maladjustments of society, the painfully distorted relations that obtain, for example, between parent and child, husband and wife, the various social classes, nation and nation. Spiritual, also, will the anguish be in the sense that it will relate to religious beliefs which once satisfied spiritual needs but which can serve no longer because out of accord with the best thought of the day; beliefs for which no adequate substitutes have as yet been found. For all who find themselves unable to fellowship with one or another of the historical religions and who can no longer accept the current teaching with regard to God, prayer, and worship, there exists a genuine sense of loss, a consciousness of real, spiritual suffering. From this anguish the religion of the future will, in part, originate and seek to supply the lack of the historical religions. Just how it will fulfill this function, obviously no one can now say.
| VIII. The Bahai Movement and Its Mission | Title page | X. The Historical Religions and the Religion of the Future |