[ p. 201 ]
One to whom religion is the breath of life is continually astonished at the ideas about it which occupy some people’s minds. I met a man recently who belonged to no church, who had not been inside one for years, and to whom personal religion meant nothing, but who was valiantly supporting the fundamentalists. Since many people were going to have a religion of some kind, he wanted them to have that kind. Religion, so he thought, tended to reduce men to order; it made them docile; it was part of the repressive apparatus of society like policemen and prisons; and, therefore, the more rock-ribbed its authority, the more undisturbed its obscurantism, the more autocratie its organization, the better he liked it.
One way or another, that man is an interesting though extreme example of prevalent ideas about religion. Many people, to be sure, condescendingly regard religion merely as a superfluous [ p. 202 ] extra. Around the firm fabric of normal human experience, with its natural joys, tasks, and satisfactions, some, so it is said, desire a decorative fringe—treligion. Certain temperaments are supposed to go in for religion. Like collecting stamps or working crossword puzzles, it is a whim which a man can be interested in or not as he pleases. It is “an elective in the university of life.”
To others, however, religion means a positive suppression of life. ‘They think of it in terms of limitation and imprisonment, restraint and taboo. And often folk who do not take to it themselves warmly recommend it for others, especially for the populace in general.
It is against the background of such a prevalent conception that the meaning of religion to the spiritual seers shines out. 'To them religion has been the very opposite of suppressed and shackled living. It has meant life’s expansion and completion, with all life’s powers and possibilities unfolded and its energies aflame. It has been life’s liberator, not its jailer. Its chief effect has been not repression, but release.
[ p. 203 ]
Whether or not the spiritual seers are right about this is an important inquiry. If religion is really a suppression of life, it is doomed. We may endow it with money, build great institutions to defend it, solidify it in rituals and creeds until it looks as rugged as Gibraltar; but it will not last. It will not last unless it is indispensable to complete living, so that a man cannot be fully man without it.
Years of work in a great city in what might almost be called a Protestant confessional, where all sorts of sins and shames, all degrees of spiritual need have continually presented themselves, make clear the fact that the last thing which folk are looking for when they seek religion is repression. ‘They are always looking for life—its release and liberty and fulfilment. I have before me a letter now from one who eagerly is seeking for religious faith. “If I only had more religion,” the letter reads, “the situation would be so much more hopeful.” That is no wish to be arrested by a spiritual policeman and put under restraint, but a cry for the inner secret of free and triumphant living.
[ p. 204 ]
The deepest elements in human personality are truncated and incomplete until they have expanded into religion. One thing, for example, that all people want, when they seek religion, is happiness. That is indispensable; they cannot go on with the barren existence that lacks it. They have tried to achieve it without religion. ‘They may even have gone consciously into positive irreligion saying that there is no God, that eighty-odd chemical elements with their combinations make up all existence, that there is no spiritual origin behind life nor meaning init. They have thought of the saints and seers as_self-deceived— Wordsworth, feeling the Presence that disturbed him with the joy of elevated thoughts, befooled; even Jesus, saying, “I am not alone, because the Father is with me,” victimized by a delusion.
In the end you will often find such folk seeking somewhere for religion. 'They are not looking for restraint; their irreligious view of life has repressed and depressed them more than they could endure; they are looking for liberty and happiness. For happiness is more than physical comfort, daily work, human companionship, [ p. 205 ] books, music, play; it is incom. plete, half-grown, unless it possesses an underlying consciousness that life as a whole “means intensely and means good.” It was not a preacher but a psychologist who lately bewailed the multitudes of people who have everything in life except an incentive to live; and no incentive to live is adequate which leaves a man trying to rejoice in life’s details while thinking dejectedly of life as a whole. He who is satisfied with the circumference of his experience but has no confidence about its meaning at the center is not fully happy. It was this which caused George John Romanes, the scientist, when for a time he gave up his Christian faith, to compare the hallowed glory of the creed which once was his with the lonely mystery of existence as then he found it; it was this which made him unable to think of his loss without experiencing, as he said, the sharpest pang of which his nature was susceptible.
Many other people come to religion because their moral life is cramped without it. This [ p. 206 ] inalienable part of them, without which they would not be themselves—the inward demand for goodness and the poignant shame of missing it—seems inadequately domiciled in an irreligious world.
Many people, to be sure, try the experiment of serving goodness without caring about religion. They may even consciously say that there is no God, that all creative reality is physical, that the moral sense is a fugitive episode developed on this planet in answer to temporary circumstances, with nothing in creation as a whole corresponding to it or interested in it.
Multitudes of people, however, have not been able to stay that way, because they wanted, not moral restraint, but moral release. When at last they stepped from irreligion to religion, believed in God, believed that man’s goodness is a rivulet from an eternal fountain, believed that no lie can last forever, that no man can ultimately tip the beam of the everlasting righteousness, that God is “Powerful Goodness” and will alike forgive and conquer sin, they moved out into a world-view where [ p. 207 ] their moral sense had room, horizon, and abiding significance.
In this realm, too, religion, whatever else it may be, is not truly described as repressive. It is the moral life of man expanding to a “lordly great compass within,’ and believing that goodness, which is its priceless and hardly-won treasure, is no accident in this universe, but a revelation of the Eternal.
Many other people come to religion, as every confessor of souls knows, because they have fallen in love. A young man, never outspokenly religious, takes the minister aside on the wedding day and, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, kneels down and asks for prayer; a mother, brilliant, cultured, wealthy, who has surrendered religion, comes to the minister desperately seeking some because she adores her children and sees that ‘they ought to have it—the list is endless. As all the psychologists know, the roots of love and of religion are inextricably intertwined.
Nor is the reason difficult to see. Discount, [ p. 208 ] if one will, the merely instinctive and emotional causes of this close association, an intellectual reason remains. It is not easy for a great love to think of itself as an accident. We do not say that stars are accidents; there are eternal causes behind them. But here on earth something has developed much more wonderful than stars, something which Henry Drummond rightly called the greatest thing in the world. It is not easy to suppose that this is a fortuitous by-product with nothing corresponding to it at the heart of reality. Love at its highest and finest would feel cooped and handicapped in a loveless creation. Our finest affections and friendships may not have the right to say, but they certainly desire to say, Love is of God.
It is told of one of the great composers that when he was a boy he used tou employ the harpsichord to tease his father. After the family had retired for the night he would slip from bed and strike an unfinished chord. Then his father would try in vain to sleep; the unfinished chord haunted him; he had to rise and complete it. So human love at its best, haunting [ p. 209 ] us with its suggestions, is unfulfilled until it postulates love in the Eternal.
Certainly, religion is no suppression of a life that has known deep friendship; it is the release of such a life into a world fitted to its presence and responsive to its hopes.
Some people have this experience of seeking and finding in religion enlargement and release, not primarily for their happiness, their conscience, or their love, but for their mind. Many, to be sure, think of religion as involving, of necessity, the suppression of the free exercise of thought. Who can blame them? Religion hardens into rigid forms. It is identified by its devotees with its historic encrustations. It becomes, not a liberator, but a slave-driver to the mind and justifies by its obscurantisms all that its worst enemies ¢an say about it. But that is not the true genius of religion as the seers have known it. That is the degradation of religion.
Religion at its best is not a cramped cell for the intellect, but a mind-stretcher. ‘Though a [ p. 210 ] man try to be an agnostic, as Herbert Spencer tried to be, yet he cannot escape the haunting consciousness of the vast vacancy where God ought to be. “Behind these mysteries,’ wrote Spencer in his Autobiography, “lies the allembracing mystery—whence this universal transformation which has gone on unceasingly throughout a past eternity and will go on unceasingly throughout a future eternity?” When, now, the mind tries to deal with that all-embracing mystery by which our lives are encompassed, the choices of attitude are few. We can throw up the question and try to forget it. Or we can take the lowest element in our experience, dynamic dirt going it blind, and, lifting that up as far as we can reach, say that the all-embracing mystery is most of all like that. Or we can take the highest that we know—personality at its best, endowed with purposefulness, intelligence, good-will—and, recognizing how pitifully inadequate any human symbol must be when applied to the Eternal, can say, The all-embracing mystery is most of all like that.
That is the daring outreach and intellectual [ p. 211 ] adventure of religion. It is the mind rising up to think of the Eternal in the noblest terms at its disposal.
So we could continue down the list of those constituent elements which make men what they are and continually drive them to religion —happiness, conscience, love, mind, hope, purpose, ideal. In every case we should discover that religion is a flowering out of these into their expanded meanings. ‘Take any one of these best elements in life and let it unfold its widest implications, and inevitably one has reached religion. Samuel Johnson once said, “No one can think deeply without thinking religiously.” That can be carried farther—no one can live deeply without living religiously. Religion is not the truncation of life, but life’s completion.
To be sure, that fact by itself does not prove ‘religion’s truth. Some, with what seems to them a crushing answer, will be ready to meet the facts which we have been presenting. They will say:
[ p. 212 ]
To be sure, religion is the completion of life. It would be a privilege, the supreme privilege, if you will, to give the reins to one’s ideal desires, to rejoice in a world right at its creative center because that makes us happy, to see in goodness a revelation of God, to interpret our love as a reflection of his, and so to think of the Eternal in terms of the highest that we know. It would be exhilarating to feel our lives so caught up and glorified in the unifying purpose of a morally significant universe, and to believe that mankind will garner at last the harvests for which its saints have toiled. But just because it would be exhilarating we are not going to believe it. We are not going to be credulous.
I, too, am afraid of being credulous. ‘The fear of credulity, however, does not lead me away from religion, but toward it. That is one reason for being a religious man. When I hear any one reducing the interpretation of the whole creative process to the fortuitous interactions of a few chemical elements I am sure that that man is credulous. He has been taken in by a superficial view of things.
One easily can get hold of this fear of credulity by the wrong handle, and many in history have done so. Some of the best minds of the race would not believe that there were people [ p. 213 ] on the other side of the globe walking with their feet up and their heads down. They were not going to be fools. No such credulity for them! They would not even believe that the earth was round, because it looked flat, or moving, because it seemed stationary. They were devoted to their canny common sense. They would not surrender that to think that blood circulates, that steamships can cross the sea, that gravitation is true, that democracy can be made to work. Our whole modern view of the world has been built up against the scornful antagonism of able minds that were dead set against credulity. For while the fear of credulity is a necessary guardian against falsehood and superstition, it has, on the other side, prevented multitudes from believing some of the greatest truths which later generations gloried in. Always the universe has proved more marvelous than the incredulous have dared to think.
When, therefore, the modern materialist ar‘rives, reduces the qualitative aspect of man’s life to the quantitative and then analyzes the quantitative into molecules, atoms, electrons, presenting us at last with a formula in physics [ p. 214 ] as the sufficient explanation of everything, I am sure that man is credulous. If he says, The formula is simple, I reply, Too simple! Our life and the creation that enshrines it are too deep and varied, too mysterious and meaningful, too filled with spiritual potencies to be reduced to a formula like that. I will not surrender to that kind of credulity.
Incredulity works in two ways. It can guard men from the gullible acceptance of folly, or it can keep men from belief in amazing truth. For myself, on what seems to me the good evidence of man’s spiritual evolution up to date, I am confident that this world in the end will prove far more spiritually significant, not less, than we have dared to think. At any rate, only the caricatures of religion are suppressions of life. Real religion is the secret of life fulfilled and abundant.