erations of Christians are introduced into the spiritual world of their fathers, with its furnishing of hopes and fears remaining substantially the same; and their Christianity consists in their continuing to live in it with only a slight and gradual renovation. To any given individual God is more or less completely represented by his elders in the faith in their exhortations and ministerings; and through them he fixes as the centre of his system an image of God his accuser or redeemer. Historical § 25. The complete verification of this interpretation of the religious experience would require the application of it to the different historical cults. In general the examination of such instances is entirely beyond the scope of this chapter; but a brief consideration may be given to those which seem to afford reasonable grounds for objection. Religions. First, it may be said that in primitive religions, notably in fetichism, tabooism, and totemism, there is no recognition of a cosmical unity. It is quite evident that there is no conception of a universe. But it is equally evident that the natural and historical environment in its generality has a very specific practical significance for the primitive believer. It is often said with truth that these earliest religions are more profoundly pantheistic than polytheistic. Man recognizes an all-pervading interest that is capable of being directed to himself. The selection of a deity is not due to any special qualification for deification possessed by the individual object itself, but to the tacit presumption that, as Thales said, "all things are full of gods." The disposition of residual reality manifests to the believer no consistency or unity, but it is nevertheless the most constant object of his will. He lives in the midst of a capriciousness which he must appease if he is to establish himself at all. § 26. Secondly, in the case of Buddhism we are said to meet with a religion that is es Buddhism. sentially atheistic. "Whether Buddhas arise, O priests, or whether Buddhas do not arise, it remains a fact and the fixed and necessary constitution of being, that all its constituents are transitory." "4 The secret of life lies in the application of this truth: "O builder! I've discovered thee! Thy rafters all are broken now, And seen the last of all desire!" 14 14 Warren: Buddhism in Translations, p. 14. Ibid., p. 83. 15 The case of Buddha himself and of the exponents of his purely esoteric doctrine, belong to the reflective type which will presently be given special consideration. But with the ordinary believer, even where an extraneous but almost inevitable polytheism is least in evidence, the religious experience consists in substantially the same elements that appear in theistic religions. The individual is here living appropriately to the ultimate nature of things, with the ceaseless periods of time in full view. That which is brought home to him is the illusoriness and hollowness of things when taken in the spirit of active endeavor. The only profound and abiding good is nothingness. While nature and society conspire to mock him, Nirvana invites him to its peace. The religious course of his life consists in the use of such means as can win him this end. From the stand-point of the universe he has the sympathy only of that wisdom whose essence is self-destruction. And this truth is mediated by the imagination of divine sympathy, for the Blessed One remains as the perpetual incarnation of his own blessed ness. 8 27. Finally there remains the consideration of the bearing of this interpretation upon the more refined and disciplined religions. The religion of the critically enlightened man is less naive and credulous in its imagery. God Critical tends to vanish into an ideal or a universal, into some object of theoretical definition. Here we are on that borderland where an assignment of individual cases can never be made with any certainty of correctness. We can generalize only by describing the conditions that such cases must fulfil if they are properly to be denominated religious. And there can be no question of the justice of deriving such a description from the reports of historical and institutional religions. An idealistic philosophy will, then, be a religion just in so far as it is rendered practically vivid by the imagination. Such imagination must create and sustain a social relationship. The question of the legitimacy of this imagination is another matter. It raises the issue concerning the judgment of truth implied in religion, and this is the topic of the next chapter. At any rate the religious experience may be realized by virtue of the metaphorical or poetical representation of a situation as one of intercommunication between persons, where reflective definition at the same time denies it. The human worshipper may supply the personality of God from himself, viewing himself as from the divine stand-point. But whatever faculty supplies this indispensable social quality of religion, he who defines God as the ultimate goodness or the ultimate truth, has certainly not yet worshipped Him. He begins to be religious only when such an ideal determines the atmosphere of his daily living; when he regards the immanence of such an ideal in nature and history as the object of his will; and when he responds to its presence in the spirit of his conduct and his contemplation. |