Favorite of these forms was sex-love. "We find," observes a recent writer, "that all religions have engaged and concerned themselves with the sexual passion. From the times of phallic worship through Romish celibacy down to Mormonism, theology has linked itself with man's reproductive instincts."[61-1] The remark is just, and is most conspicuously correct in strongly emotional temperaments. "The devotional feelings," writes the Rev. Frederick Robertson in one of his essays, "are often singularly allied to the animal nature; they conduct the unconscious victim of feelings that appear divine into a state of life at which the world stands aghast." Fanaticism is always united with either excessive lewdness or desperate asceticism. The physiological performance of the generative function is sure to be attacked by religious bigotry.

So prominent is this feature that attempts have been made to explain nearly all symbolism and mythology as types of the generative procedure and the reproductive faculty of organism. Not only the pyramids and sacred mountains, the obelisks of the Nile and the myths of light have received this interpretation, but even such general symbols as the spires of churches, the cross of Christendom and the crescent of Islam.[62-1]

Without falling into the error of supposing that any one meaning or origin can be assigned such frequent symbols, we may acknowledge that love, in its philosophical sense, is closely akin to the mystery of every religion. That, on occasions, love of sex gained the mastery over all other forms, is not to be doubted; but that at all times this was so, is a narrow, erroneous view, not consistent with a knowledge of the history of psychical development.

Sex-love, as a sentiment, is a cultivated growth. All it is at first is a rude satisfaction of the erethism. The wild tribes of California had their pairing seasons when the sexes were in heat, "as regularly as the deer, the elk and the antelope."[63-1] In most tongues of the savages of North America there are no tender words, as "dear," "darling," and the like.[63-2] No desire of offspring led to their unions. The women had few children, and their fathers paid them little attention. The family instinct appears in conditions of higher culture, in Judea, Greece, Rome and ancient Germany. Procreation instead of lust was there the aim of marriage. To-day, mere sentiment is so much in the ascendant that both these elements are often absent. There is warm affection without even instinctive knowledge of the design of the bond assumed.[63-3]

Those who would confine the promptings of the passion of reproduction as it appears in man to its objects as shown in lower animals, know little how this wondrous emotion has acted as man's mentor as well as paraclete in his long and toilsome conflict with the physical forces.

The venereal sense is unlike the other special senses in that it is general, as well as referable to special organs and nerves. In its psychological action it "especially contributes to the development of sympathies which connect man not only with his coevals, but with his fellows of all preceding and succeeding generations as well. Upon it is erected this vast superstructure of intellect, of social and moral sentiment, of voluntary effort and endeavor."[64-1] Of all the properties of organized matter, that of transmitting form and life is the most wonderful; and if we examine critically the physical basis of the labors and hopes of mankind, if we ask what prompts its noblest and holiest longings, we shall find them, in the vast majority of instances, directly traceable to this power. No wonder then that religion, which we have seen springs from man's wants and wishes, very often bears the distinct trace of their origin in his reproductive functions. The liens of the family are justly deemed sacred, and are naturally associated with whatever the mind considers holy.

The duty of a citizen to become a father was a prominent feature in many ancient religions. How much honor the sire of many sons had in Rome and Palestine is familiar to all readers. No warrior, according to German faith, could gain entrance to Valhalla unless he had begotten a son. Thus the preservation of the species was placed under the immediate guardianship of religion.

Such considerations explain the close connection of sexual thoughts with the most sacred mysteries of faith. In polytheisms, the divinities are universally represented as male or female, virile and fecund. The processes of nature were often held to be maintained through such celestial nuptials.

Yet stranger myths followed those of the loves of the gods. Religion, as the sentiment of continuance, finding its highest expression in the phenomenon of generation, had to reconcile this with the growing concept of a divine unity. Each separate god was magnified in praises as self-sufficient. Earth, or nature, or the season is one, yet brings forth all. How embody this in concrete form?

The startling refuge was had in the image of a deity at once of both sexes. Such avowedly were Mithras, Janus, Melitta, Cybele, Aphrodite, Agdistis; indeed nearly all the Syrian, Egyptian, and Italic gods, as well as Brahma, and, in the esoteric doctrine of the Cabala, even Jehovah, whose female aspect is represented by the "Shekinah." To this abnormal condition the learned have applied the adjectives epicene, androgynous, hermaphrodite, arrenothele. In art it is represented by a blending of the traits of both sexes. In the cult it was dramatically set forth by the votaries assuming the attire of the other sex, and dallying with both.[66-1] The phallic symbol superseded all others; and in Cyprus, Babylonia and Phrygia, once in her life, at least, must every woman submit to the embrace of a stranger.

Such rites were not mere sensualities. The priests of these divinities often voluntarily suffered emasculation. None but a eunuch could become high priest of Cybele. Among the sixteen million worshippers of Siva, whose symbol is the Lingam, impurity is far less prevalent than among the sister sects of Hindoo religions.[66-2] To the Lingayets, the member typifies abstractly the idea of life. Therefore they carve it on sepulchres, or, like the ancient nations of Asia Minor, they lay clay images of it on graves to intimate the hope of existence beyond the tomb.

This notion of a hermaphrodite deity is not "monstrous," as it has been called. There lies a deep meaning in it. The gods are spirits, beings of another order, which the cultivated esthetic sense protests against classing as of one or the other gender. Never can the ideal of beauty, either physical or moral, be reached until the characteristics of sex are lost in the concept of the purely human. In the noblest men of history there has often been noted something feminine, a gentleness which is not akin to weakness; and the women whose names are ornaments to nations have displayed a calm greatness, not unwomanly but something more than belongs to woman. Art acknowledges this. In the Vatican Apollo we see masculine strength united with maidenly softness; and in the traditional face and figure of Christ a still more striking example how the devout mind conjoins the traits of both sexes to express the highest possibility of the species. "Soaring above the struggle in which the real is involved with its limitations, and free from the characteristics of gender, the ideal of beauty as well as the ideal of humanity, alike maintain a perfect sexual equilibrium."[67-1]

Another and more familiar expression of the religious emotion, akin to the belief in double-sexed deities,—nay, in its physiological aspect identical with it, as assuming sexual self-sufficiency, is the myth of the Virgin-Mother.

When Columbus first planted the cross on the shores of San Domingo, the lay brother Roman Pane, whom he sent forth to convert the natives of that island, found among them a story of a virgin Mamona, whose son Yocauna, a hero and a god, was chief among divinities, and had in the old times taught this simple people the arts of peace and guided them through the islands.[68-1] When the missionaries penetrated to the Iroquois, the Aztecs, the Mayas, and many other tribes, this same story was told them with such startling likeness to one they came to tell, that they felt certain either St. Thomas or Satan had got the start of them in America.

But had these pious men known as well as we do the gentile religions of the Old World, they would have seasoned their admiration. Long before Christianity was thought of, the myth of the Virgin-Mother of God was in the faith of millions, as we have had abundantly shown us of late years by certain expounders of Christian dogmas.

How is this strange, impossible belief to be explained? Of what secret, unconscious, psychological working was it the expression? Look at its result. It is that wherever this doctrine is developed the status matrimonialis is held to be less pure, less truly religious, than the status virginitatis. Such is the teaching to-day in Lhassa, in Rome; so it was in Yucatan, where, too, there were nunneries filled with spouses of God. I connect it with the general doctrine that chastity in either sex is more agreeable to God than marriage, and this belief, I think, very commonly arises at a certain stage of development of the religious sentiment, when it unconsciously recognises the indisputable fact that sex-love, whether in its form of love of woman, family, or nation, is not what that sentiment craves. This is first shown by rejecting the idea of sex-love in the birth of the god; then his priests and priestesses refuse its allurements, and deny all its claims, those of kindred, of country, of race, until the act of generation itself is held unholy and the thought of sex a sin. By such forcible though rude displays do they set forth their unconscious acknowledgment of that eternal truth: "He that loveth son or daughter more than Me, is not worthy of Me."

The significance of these words is not that there is an antagonism in the forms of love. It is not that man should hate himself, as Pascal, following the teachings of the Church, so ably argued; nor that the one sex should be set over against the other in sterile abhorrence; nor yet that love of country and of kindred is incompatible with that toward the Supreme of thought; but it is that each of these lower, shallower, evanescent forms of emotion is and must be lost in, subordinated to, that highest form to which these words have reference. Reconciliation, not abnegation, is what they mean.

Even those religions which teach in its strictness the oneness of God have rarely separated from his personality the attribute of sex. He is the father, pater et genitor, of all beings. The monotheism which we find in Greece and India generally took this form. The ancient Hebrews emphasized the former, not the latter sense of the word, and thus depriving it of its more distinctive characteristics of sex, prepared the way for the teachings of Christianity, in which the Supreme Being always appears with the attributes of the male, but disconnected from the idea of generation.

Singularly enough, the efforts to which this latent incongruity prompts, even in persons speaking English, in which tongue the articles and adjectives have no genders, point back to the errors of an earlier age. A recent prayer by an eminent spiritualist commences:—"Oh Eternal Spirit, our Father and our Mother!" The expression illustrates how naturally arises the belief in a hermaphrodite god, when once sex is associated with deity.

Of all founders of religions, Mohammed first proclaimed a divinity without relation to sex. One of his earliest suras reads:

"He is God alone, God the eternal. He begetteth not, and is not begotten; And there is none like unto him."

And elsewhere:—

"He hath no spouse, neither hath he any offspring."[71-1]

While he expressly acknowledged the divine conception of Jesus, he denied the coarse and literal version of that doctrine in vogue among the ignorant Christians around him. Enlightened christendom, to-day, does not, I believe, differ from him on this point.

Such sexual religions do not arise, as the theory has hitherto been, from study and observation of the generative agencies in nature, but from the identity of object between love in sense and love in intellect, profane and sacred passion. The essence of each is continuance, preservation; the origin of each is subjective, personal; but the former has its root in sensation, the latter in reason.

The sex-difference in organisms, the "abhorrence of self-fertilization" which Mr. Darwin speaks of as so conspicuous and inexplicable a phenomenon, is but one example of the sway of a law which as action and reaction, thesis and antithesis, is common to both elementary motion and thought. The fertile and profound fancy of Greece delighted to prefigure this truth in significant symbols and myths. Love, Eros, is shown carrying the globe, or wielding the club of Hercules; he is the unknown spouse of Psyche, the soul; and from the primitive chaos he brings forth the ordered world, the Kosmos.

The intimate and strange relation between sensuality and religion, so often commented upon and denied, again proven, and always misinterpreted, thus receives a satisfactory explanation. Some singular manifestations of it, of significance in religious history, are presented by the records of insane delusions. They confirm what I have above urged, that the association is not one derived from observation through intellectual processes, but is a consequence of physiological connections, of identity of aim in the distinct realms of thought and emotion.

That eminent writer on mental diseases, Schroeder van der Kolk, when speaking of the forms of melancholy which arise from physical conditions, remarks: "The patient who is melancholy from disorders of the generative organs considers himself sinful. His depressed tone of mind passes over into religious melancholy; 'he is forsaken by God; he is lost.' All his afflictions have a religious color." In a similar strain, Feuchtersleben says: "In the female sex especially, the erotic delusion, unknown to the patient herself, often assumes the color of the religious."[73-1] "The unaccomplished sexual designs of nature," observes a later author speaking of the effects of the single life, "lead to brooding over supposed miseries which suggest devotion and religious exercise as the nepenthe to soothe the morbid longings."[73-2]

Stimulate the religious sentiment and you arouse the passion of love, which will be directed as the temperament and individual culture prompt. Develope very prominently any one form of love, and by a native affinity it will seize upon and consecrate to its own use whatever religious aspirations the individual has. This is the general law of their relation.

All the lower forms of love point to one to which they are the gradual ascent, both of the individual and on a grander scale of the race, to wit, the love of God. This is the passion for the highest attainable truth, a passion which, as duty, prompts to the strongest action and to the utter sacrifice of all other longings. No speculative acquaintance with propositions satisfies it, no egotistic construction of systems, but the truth expressed in life, the truth as that which alone either has or can give being and diuturnity, this is its food, for which it thirsts with holy ardor. Here is the genuine esoteric gnosis, the sacred secret, which the rude and selfish wishes of the savage, the sensual rites of Babylon, "mother of harlots," and the sublimely unselfish dreams of a "religion of humanity," have alike had in their hearts, but had no capacity to interpret, no words to articulate.

Related to this emotional phase of the religious sentiment is the theurgic power of certain natural objects over some persons. The biblical scholar Kitto confesses that the moon exerted a strange influence on his mind, stirring his devotional nature, and he owns that it would not have been hard for him to join the worshippers of the goddess of the night. Wilhelm von Humboldt in one of his odes refers to similar feelings excited in him by the gloom and murmur of groves. The sacred poets and the religious arts generally acknowledge this fascination, as it has been called, which certain phenomena have for religious temperaments.

The explanation which suggests itself is that of individual and ancestral association. In the case of Kitto it was probably the latter. His sensitively religious nature experienced in gazing at the moon an impression inherited from some remote ancestor who had actually made it the object of ardent worship. The study of the laws of inherited memory, so successfully pursued of late by Professor Laycock, take away anything eccentric about this explanation, though I scarcely expect it will be received by one unacquainted with those laws.

The emotional aspect of religion is not exhausted by the varieties of fear and hope and love. Wonder, awe, admiration, the aesthetic emotions, in fact all the active principles of man's mental economy are at times excited and directed by the thought of supernatural power. Some have attempted to trace the religious sentiment exclusively to one or the other of these. But they are all incidental and subsidiary emotions.

Certain mental diseases, by abnormally stimulating the emotions, predispose strongly to religious fervor. Epilepsy is one of these, and in Swedenborg and Mohammed, both epileptics, we see distinguished examples of religious mystics, who, no doubt honestly, accepted the visions which accompanied their disease as revelations from another world. Very many epileptics are subject to such delusions, and their insanity is usually of a religious character.

On the other hand, devotional excitement is apt to bring about mental alienation. Every violent revival has left after it a small crop of religious melancholies and lunatics. Competent authorities state that in modern communities religious insanity is most frequent in those sects who are given to emotional forms of religion, the Methodists and Baptists for example; whereas it is least known among Roman Catholics, where doubt and anxiety are at once allayed by an infallible referee, and among the Quakers, where enthusiasm is discouraged and with whom the restraint of emotion is a part of discipline.[76-1] Authoritative assurance in many disturbed conditions of mind is sufficient to relieve the mental tension and restore health.

If, by what has been said, it is clear that the religious sentiment has its origin in a wish, it is equally clear that not every wish is concerned in it. The objects which a man can attain by his own unaided efforts, are not those which he makes the subjects of his prayers; nor are the periodic and regular occurrences in nature, how impressive they may be, much thought of in devotional moods. The moment that an event is recognized to be under fixed law, it is seen to be inappropriate to seek by supplication to alter it. No devotee, acquainted with the theory of the tides, would, like Canute the King, think of staying their waves with words. Eclipses and comets, once matters of superstitious terror, have been entirely shorn of this attribute by astronomical discovery. Even real and tragic misfortunes, if believed to be such as flow from fixed law, and especially if they can be predicted sometime before they arrive, do not excite religious feeling. As Bishop Hall quaintly observes, referring to a curious medieval superstition: "Crosses, after the nature of the cockatrice, die if they be foreseen."

Only when the event suggests the direct action of mind, of some free intelligence, is it possible for the religious sentiment to throw around it the aureole of sanctity. Obviously when natural law was little known, this included vastly more occurrences than civilized men now think of holding to be of religious import. Hence the objective and material form of religion is always fostered by ignorance, and this is the form which prevails exclusively in uncultivated societies.

The manifestations of motion which the child first notices, or which the savage chiefly observes, relate to himself. They are associated with the individuals around him who minister to his wants; the gratification of these depend on the volitions of others. As he grows in strength he learns to supply his own wants, and to make good his own volitions as against those of his fellows. But he soon learns that many events occur to thwart him, out of connection with any known individual, and these of a dreadful nature, hurricanes and floods, hunger, sickness and death. These pursue him everywhere, foiling his plans, and frustrating his hopes. It is not the show of power, the manifestations of might, that he cares for in these events, but that they touch him, that they spoil his projects, and render vain his desires; this forces him to cast about for some means to protect himself against them.

In accordance with the teaching of his experience, and true moreover to the laws of mind, he refers them, collectively, to a mental source, to a vague individuality. This loose, undefined conception of an unknown volition or power forms the earliest notion of Deity. It is hardly associated with personality, yet it is broadly separated from the human and the known. In the languages of savage tribes, as I have elsewhere remarked, "a word is usually found comprehending all manifestations of the unseen world, yet conveying no sense of personal unity."[78-1]

By some means to guard against this undefined marplot to the accomplishment of his wishes, is the object of his religion. Its primitive forms are therefore defensive and conciliatory. The hopes of the savage extend little beyond the reach of his own arm, and the tenor of his prayers is that the gods be neuter. If they do not interfere he can take care of himself. His religion is a sort of assurance of life.

Not only the religion of the savage, but every religion is this and not much but this. With nobler associations and purer conceptions of life, the religious sentiment ever contains these same elements and depends upon them for its vigor and growth. It everywhere springs from a desire whose fruition depends upon unknown power. To give the religious wish a definition in the technic of psychology, I define it as: Expectant Attention, directed toward an event not under known control, with a concomitant idea of Cause or Power.

Three elements are embraced in this definition, a wish, an idea of power, ignorance of the nature of that power. The first term prompts the hope, the third suggests the fear, and the second creates the personality, which we see set forth in every religious system. Without these three, religion as dogma becomes impossible.

If a man wishes for nothing, neither the continuance of present comforts nor future blessings, why need he care for the gods? Who can hurt him, so long as he stays in his frame of mind? He may well shake off all religions and every fear, for he is stronger than God, and the universe holds nothing worth his effort to get. This was the doctrine taught by Buddha Sakyanuni, a philosopher opposed to every form of religion, but who is the reputed founder of the most numerous sect now on the globe. He sought to free the minds of his day from the burden of the Brahmanic ritual, by cultivating a frame of mind beyond desire or admiration, and hence beyond the need of a creed.

The second element, the idea of power, is an intellectual abstraction. Its character is fluctuating. At first it is most vague, corresponding to what in its most general sense we term "the supernatural." Later, it is regarded under its various exhibitions as separable phenomena, as in polytheisms, in which must be included trinitarian systems and the dualistic doctrine of the Parsees. But among the Egyptians, Greeks and Aztecs, as well as in the words of Zarathustra and in the theology of Christianity, we frequently meet with the distinct recognition of the fundamental unity of all power. At core, all religions have seeds of monotheism. When we generalize the current concepts of motion or force beyond individual displays and relative measures of quantity, we recognize their qualitative identity, and appreciate the logical unity under which we must give them abstract expression. This is the process, often unconscious, which has carried most original thinkers to monotheistic doctrines, no matter whence they started.

The idea of power controlling the unknown would of itself have been of no interest to man had he not assumed certain relations to exist between him and it on the one hand, and it and things on the other. A dispassionate inquiry disproves entirely the view maintained by various modern writers, prominently by Bain, Spencer and Darwin, that the contemplation of power or majesty in external nature prompts of itself the religious sentiment, or could have been its historical origin. Such a view overlooks the most essential because the personal factor of religion—the wish. Far more correct are the words of David Hume, in the last century, by which he closes his admirable Natural History of Religions: "We may conclude, therefore, that in all nations the first ideas of religion arose not from a contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the incessant hopes and fears which actuate the human mind." A century before him Hobbes had written in his terse way: "The natural seed of religion lies in these four things: the fear of spirits, ignorance of secondary causes, the conciliation of those we fear, and the assumption of accidents for omens."[81-1] The sentiment of religion is in its origin and nature purely personal and subjective. The aspect of power would never have led man to worship, unless he had assumed certain relations between the unseen author or authors of that power and himself. What these assumptions were, I shall discuss in the next chapter.

Finally, as has so often been remarked in a flippant and contemptuous way,[82-1] which the fact when rightly understood nowise justifies, religion cannot exist without the aid of ignorance. It is really and truly the mother of devotion. The sentiment of religious fear does not apply to a known power—to the movement of an opposing army, or the action of gravity in an avalanche for example. The prayer which under such circumstances is offered, is directed to an unknown intelligence, supposed to control the visible forces. As science—which is the knowledge of physical laws—extends, the object of prayer becomes more and more intangible and remote. What we formerly feared, we learn to govern. No one would pray God to avert the thunderbolt, if lightning rods invariably protected houses. The Swiss clergy opposed the system of insuring growing crops because it made their parishioners indifferent to prayers for the harvest. With increasing knowledge and the security which it brings, religious terror lessens, and the wants which excite the sentiment of devotion diminish in number and change in character.

This is apt to cast general discredit on religion. When we make the discovery that so many events which excited religious apprehension in the minds of our forefathers are governed by inflexible laws which we know all about, we not only smile in pity at their superstitions, but make the mental inference that the diminished emotion of this kind we yet experience is equally groundless. If at the bottom of all displays of power lies a physical necessity, our qualms are folly. Therefore, to the pious soul which still finds the bulk of its religious aspirations and experiences in the regions of the emotions and sensations, the progress of science seems and really does threaten its cherished convictions. The audacious mind of man robs the gods of power when he can shield himself from their anger. The much-talked-of conflict between religion and science is no fiction; it exists, and is bound to go on, and religion will ever get the worst of it until it learns that the wishes to which it is its proper place to minister are not those for pleasure and prosperity, not for abundant harvests and seasonable showers, not success in battle and public health, not preservation from danger and safety on journeys, not much of anything that is spoken of in litanies and books of devotion.

Let a person who still clings to this form of religion imagine that science had reached perfection in the arts of life; that by skilled adaptations of machinery, accidents by sea and land were quite avoided; that observation and experience had taught to foresee with certainty and to protect effectively against all meteoric disturbances; that a perfected government insured safety of person and property; that a consummate agriculture rendered want and poverty unknown; that a developed hygiene completely guarded against disease; and that a painless extinction of life in advanced age could surely be calculated upon; let him imagine this, and then ask himself what purpose religion would subserve in such a state of things? For whatever would occupy it then—if it could exist at all—should alone occupy it now.

FOOTNOTES:

[49-1] Address to the Clergy, pp. 42, 43, 67, 106, etc.

[49-2] E. von Hardenberg [Novalis], Werke, s. 364.

[50-1] Treatises Devotional and Practical, p. 188. London, 1836.

[50-2] In Aramaic dachla means either a god or fear. The Arabic Allah and the Hebrew Eloah are by some traced to a common root, signifying to tremble, to show fear, though the more usual derivation is from one meaning to be strong.

[51-1] "Wen die Hoffnung, den hat auch die Furcht verlassen." Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena. Bd. ii. s. 474.

[52-1] Alexander Bain, On the Study of Character, p. 128. See also his remarks in his work, The Emotions and the Will, p. 84, and in his notes to James Mill's Analysis of the Mind, vol. i., pp. 124-125.

[53-1] Wilhelm von Humboldt's Gesammelte Werke, Bd. vii., s. 62.

[53-2] De Senancourt, Obermann, Lettre xli.

[54-1] Elements of Medical Psychology, p. 331.

[56-1] Lessing's Gesammelte Werke. B. ii. s. 443 (Leipzig, 1855).

[57-1] See Exodus, xxiii. 12; Psalms, lv. 6; Isaiah, xxx. 15; Jeremiah, vi. 16; Hebrews, v. 9. So St. Augustine: "et nos post opera nostra sabbato vitae eternae requiescamus in te." Confessionum Lib. xiii. cap. 36.

[59-1] "Filioli, diligite alterutrum." This is the "testamentum Johannis," as recorded from tradition by St. Jerome in his notes to the Epistle to the Galatians.

[59-2] Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, Chap. I.

[60-1] A Christian Directory. Part I. Chap. III.

[60-2] "The very nature of affection, the idea itself, necessarily implies resting in its object as an end." Fifteen Sermons by Joseph Butler, late Lord Bishop of Durham, Preface, and p. 147 (London, 1841).

[61-1] Dr. J. Milner Fothergill, Journal of Mental Science, Oct. 1874, p. 198.

[62-1] The most recent work on the topic is that of Messrs. Westropp and Wake, The Influence of the Phallic Idea on the Religions of Antiquity, London, 1874.

[63-1] Schoolcraft's History and Statistics of the Indian Tribes, Vol. iv. p. 224.

[63-2] Richardson, Arctic Expedition, p. 412.

[63-3] Most physicians have occasion to notice the almost entire loss in modern life of the instinctive knowledge of the sex relation. Sir James Paget has lately treated of the subject in one of his Clinical Lectures (London, 1875).

[64-1] Dr. J. P. Catlow, Principles of Aesthetic Medicine, p. 112. This thoughtful though obscure writer has received little recognition even in the circle of professional readers.

[66-1] This is probably what was condemned in Deuteronomy xxii. 5, and Romans, i. 26.

[66-2] "The worship of Siva is too severe, too stern for the softer emotions of love, and all his temples are quite free from any allusions to it."—Ferguson, Tree and Serpent Worship, p. 71.

[67-1] W. von Humboldt, in his admirable essay Ueber die Maennliche und Weibliche Form (Werke, Bd. I.). Elsewhere he adds: "In der Natur des Goettlichen strebt alles der Reinheit und Vollkommenheit des Gattungsbegriff entgegen."

[68-1] I have collected the Haitian myths, chiefly from the manuscript Historia Apologetica de las Indias Occidentales of Las Casas, in an essay published in 1871, The Arawack Language of Guiana in its Linguistic and Ethnological Relations.

[71-1] The Koran, Suras,[TN-5] cxii., lxii., and especially xix.

[73-1] Elements of Medical Psychology, p. 281.

[73-2] J. Thompson Dickson, The Science and Practice of Medicine in relation to Mind, p. 383 (New York, 1874).

[76-1] Dr. Joseph Williams, Insanity, its Causes, Prevention and Cure, pp. 68, 69; Dr. A. L. Wigan, The Duality of the Mind, p. 437.

[78-1] The Myths of the New World, a Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America, p. 145.

[81-1] Leviathan, De Homine, cap. xii.

[82-1] For instance, of later writers from whom we might expect better things, Arthur Schopenhauer. He says in his Parerga (Bd. ii. s. 290): "Ein gewisser Grad allgemeiner Unwissenheit ist die Bedingung aller Religionen;" a correct remark, and equally correct of the pursuit of science and philosophy. But the ignorance which is the condition of such pursuit is not a part of science or philosophy, and no more is it of religion.



THE RATIONAL POSTULATES OF THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT.

SUMMARY.

Religion often considered merely an affair of the feelings. On the contrary, it must assume at least three premises in reason, its "rational postulates."

I. There is Order in things.

The religious wish involves the idea of cause. This idea not exhausted by uniformity of sequence, but by quantitative relation, that is, Order as opposed to Chance. Both science and religion assume order in things; but the latter includes the Will of God in this order, while the former rejects it.

II. This order is one of Intelligence.

The order is assumed to be a comprehensible one, whether it be of law wholly or of volition also.

III. All Intelligence is one in kind.

This postulate indispensable to religion, although it has been attacked by religious as well as irreligious philosophers. Its decision must rest on the absoluteness of the formal laws of thought. The theory that these are products of natural selections disproved by showing, (1) that they hold true throughout the material universe, and (2) that they do not depend on it for their verity. Reason sees beyond phenomena, but descries nothing alien to itself.

The formal laws of reason are purposive. They therefore afford a presumption of a moral government of the Universe, and point to an Intelligence fulfilling an end through the order in physical laws. Such an assumption, common to all historic religions, is thus justified by induction.



CHAPTER III.

THE RATIONAL POSTULATES OF THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT.

In philosophical discussions of religion as well as in popular exhortations upon it, too exclusive stress has been laid upon its emotional elements. "It is," says Professor Bain, "an affair of the feelings."[87-1] "The essence of religion," observes John Stuart Mill, "is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object." "It must be allowed," says Dr. Mansel,[87-2] "that it is not through reasoning that men obtain their first intimation of their relation to a deity." In writers and preachers of the semi-mystical school, which embraces most of the ardent revivalists of the day, we constantly hear the "feeling of dependence" quoted as the radical element of religious thought.[87-3] In America Theodore Parker, and in Germany Schleiermacher, were brilliant exponents of this doctrine. To the latter the philosopher Hegel replied that if religion is a matter of feeling, an affectionate dog is the best Christian.

This answer was not flippant, but founded on the true and only worthy conception of the religious sentiment. We have passed in review the emotions which form a part of it, and recognize their power. But neither these nor any other mere emotions, desires or feelings can explain even the lowest religion. It depends for its existence on the essential nature of reason. We cannot at all allow, as Dr. Mansel asks of us, that man's first intimations of Deity came in any other way than as one of the ripest fruits of reason. Were such the case, we should certainly find traces of them among brutes and idiots, which we do not. The slight signs of religious actions thought to have been noticed by some in the lower animals, by Sir John Lubbock in ants, and by Charles Darwin in dogs, if authenticated, would vindicate for these species a much closer mental kinship to man than we have yet supposed.

If we dispassionately analyze any religion whatever, paying less attention to what its professed teachers say it is, than to what the mass of the votaries believe it to be, we shall see that every form of adoration unconsciously assumes certain premises in reason, which give impulse and character to its emotional and active manifestations. They are its data or axioms, or, as I shall call them, its "rational postulates." They can, I believe, be reduced to three, but not to a lesser number.

Before the religious feeling acquires the distinctness of a notion and urges to conscious action, it must assume at least these three postulates, and without them it cannot rise into cognition. These, their necessary character and their relations, I shall set forth in this chapter.

They are as follows:—

I. There is Order in things. II. This order is one of Intelligence. III. All Intelligence is one in kind.

I. The conscious or unconscious purpose of the religious sentiment, as I have shown in the last chapter, is the fruition of a wish, the success of which depends upon unknown power. The votary asks help where he cannot help himself. He expects it through an exertion of power, through an efficient cause. Obviously therefore, he is acting on the logical idea of Causality. This underlies and is essential to the simplest prayer. He extends it, moreover, out of the limits of experience into the regions of hypothesis. He has carried the analogy of observation into the realm of abstract conceptions. No matter if he does believe that the will of God is the efficient cause. Perhaps he is right; at any rate he cannot be denied the privilege of regarding volition as a co-operating cause. Limited at first to the transactions which most concerned men, the conception of order as a divine act extended itself to the known universe. Herodotus derives the Greek word for God Theos from a root which gives the meaning "to set in order," and the Scandinavians gave the same sense to their word, Regin.[90-1] Thus the abstract idea of cause or power is a postulate of all religious thought. Let us examine its meaning.

Every reader, the least versed in the history of speculative thought for the last hundred years, knows how long and violent the discussions have been of the relations of "cause and effect." Startled by the criticisms of Hume, Kant sought to elude them by distinguishing between two spheres of thought, the understanding and the reason. Sir William Hamilton at first included the "principle of sufficient reason'[TN-6] in the laws of thought, but subsequently rejected it as pertaining to judgments, and therefore material, not formal. Schopenhauer claimed to have traced it to a fourfold root, and Mill with most of the current English schools, Bain, Austin, Spencer, &c., maintained that it meant nothing but "uniformity of sequence."

It would be vain to touch upon a discussion so extended as this. In the first chapter I have remarked that the idea of cause does not enter into the conceptions of pure logic or thought. It is, as Hamilton saw, material. I shall only pause to show what is meant by the term "cause" in the physical sciences. When one event follows another, time after time, we have "uniformity of sequence." Suppose the constitution of the race were so happy that we slept at night only, and always awoke a few moments before sunrise. Such a sequence quite without exception, should, if uniform experience is the source of the idea of cause, justly lead to the opinion that the sun rises because man awakes. As we know this conclusion would be erroneous, some other element beside sequence must complete a real cause. If now, it were shown that the relation of cause to effect which we actually entertain and cannot help entertaining is in some instances flatly contrary to all experience, then we must acknowledge that the idea of cause asks to confirm it something quite independent of experience, that is abstract. But such examples are common. We never saw two objects continue to approach without meeting; but we are constrained to believe that lines of certain descriptions can forever approach and never meet.

The uniformity of sequence is, in fact, in the physical sciences never assumed to express the relation of cause and effect, until the connection between the antecedent and consequent can be set forth abstractly in mathematical formulae. The sequence of the planetary motions was discovered by Kepler, but it was reserved for Newton to prove the theoretical necessity of this motion and establish its mathematical relations. The sequence of sensations to impressions is well known, but the law of the sequence remains the desideratum in psychology.[92-1]

Science, therefore, has been correctly defined as "the knowledge of system." Its aim is to ascertain the laws of phenomena, to define the "order in things." Its fundamental postulate is that order exists, that all things are "lapped in universal law." It acknowledges no exception, and it considers that all law is capable of final expression in quantity, in mathematical symbols. It is the manifest of reason, "whose unceasing endeavor is to banish the idea of Chance."[93-1]

We thus see that its postulate is the same as that of the religious sentiment. Wherein then do they differ? Not in the recognition of chance. Accident, chance, does not exist for the religious sense in any stage of its growth. Everywhere religion proclaims in the words of Dante:—

"le cose tutte quante, Hann' ordine tra loro;"

everywhere in the more optimistic faiths it holds this order, in the words of St. Augustine, to be one "most fair, of excellent things."[93-2]

What we call "the element of chance" is in its scientific sense that of which we do not know the law; while to the untutored religious mind it is the manifestation of divine will. The Kamschatkan, when his boat is lost in the storm, attributes it to the vengeance of a god angered because he scraped the snow from his shoes with a knife, instead of using a piece of wood; if a Dakota has bad luck in hunting, he says it is caused by his wife stepping over a bone and thus irritating a spirit. The idea of cause, the sentiment of order, is as strong as ever, but it differs from that admitted by science in recognizing as a possible efficient motor that which is incapable of mathematical expression, namely, a volition, a will. Voluntas Dei asylum ignorantiae, is no unkind description of such an opinion.

So long as this recognition is essential to the life of a religious system, just so long it will and must be in conflict with science, with every prospect of the latter gaining the victory. Is the belief in volition as an efficient cause indispensable to the religious sentiment in general? For this vital question we are not yet prepared, but must first consider the remaining rational postulates it assumes. The second is

II. This order is one of intelligence.

By this is not meant that the order is one of an Intelligence, but simply that the order which exists in things is conformable to man's thinking power,—that if he knows the course of events he can appreciate their relations,—that facts can be subsumed under thoughts. Whatever scheme of order there were, would be nothing to him unless it were conformable to his intellectual functions. It could not form the matter of his thought.[94-1]

Science, which deals in the first instance exclusively with phenomena, also assumes this postulate. It recognizes that when the formal laws, which it is its mission to define, are examined apart from their material expression, when they are emptied of their phenomenal contents, they show themselves to be logical constructions, reasoned truths, in other words, forms of intelligence. The votary who assumes the order one of volition alone, or volition with physical necessity, still assumes the volitions are as comprehensible as are his own; that they are purposive; that the order, even if not clear to him, is both real and reasonable. Were it not so, did he believe that the gods carried out their schemes through a series of caprices inconceivable to intelligence, through absolute chance, insane caprice, or blind fate, he could neither see in occurrences the signs of divine rule, nor hope for aid in obtaining his wishes. In fact, order is only conceivable to man at all as an order conformable to his own intelligence.

This second postulate embraces what has been recently called the "Principle of continuity," indispensable to sane thought of any kind. A late work defines it as "the trust that the Supreme Governor of the Universe will not put us to permanent intellectual confusion."[96-1] Looked at closely, it is the identification of order with reason.

The third and final postulate of the religious sentiment is that

III. All intelligence is one in kind.

Religion demands that there be a truth which is absolutely true, and that there be a goodness which is universally and eternally good. Each system claims the possession, and generally the exclusive possession, of this goodness and truth. They are right in maintaining these views, for unless such is the case, unless there is an absolute truth, cognizable to man, yet not transcended by any divine intelligence, all possible religion becomes mere child's play, and its professed interpretation of mysteries but trickery.

The Grecian sophists used to meet the demonstrations of the mathematicians and philosophers by conceding that they did indeed set forth the truth, so far as man's intelligence goes, but that to the intelligence of other beings—a bat or an angel, for example—they might not hold good at all; that there is a different truth for different intelligences; that the intelligence makes the truth; and that as for the absolutely true, true to every intelligence, there is no such thing. They acknowledged that a simple syllogism, constructed on these premises, made their own assertions partake of the doubtful character that was by them ascribed to other human knowledge. But this they gracefully accepted as the inevitable conclusion of reasoning. Their position is defended to-day by the advocates of "positivism," who maintain the relativity of all truth.

But such a conclusion is wholly incompatible with the religious mind. It must assume that there are some common truths, true infinitely, and therefore, that in all intelligence there is an essential unity of kind. "This postulation," says a close thinker, "is the very foundation and essence of religion. Destroy it, and you destroy the very possibility of religion."[97-1]

Clear as this would seem to be to any reflective mind, yet, strange to say, it is to-day the current fashion for religious teachers to deny it. Scared by a phantasm of their own creation, they have deserted the only position in which it is possible to defend religion at all. Afraid of the accusation that they make God like man, they have removed Him beyond the pale of all intelligence, and logically, therefore, annihilated every conception of Him.

Teachers and preachers do not tire of telling their followers that God is incomprehensible; that his ways are past finding out; that he is the Unconditioned, the Infinite, the Unknowable. They really mean that he is another order of intelligence, which, to quote a famous comparison of Spinoza, has the same name as ours, but is no more one with it than the dog is one with his namesake, the dog-star!

They are eagerly seconded in this position by a school of writers who distinctly see where such a doctrine leads, and who do not hesitate to carry it home. Mr. Mill is right in his scorn for those who "erect the incurable limitations of the human conceptive faculty into laws of the outward universe," if there are such limitations. And Mr. Spencer is justified in condemning "the transcendent audacity which passes current as piety," if his definition of the underlying verity of religion is admitted—that it is "the consciousness of an inscrutable power which, in its nature, transcends intuition, and is beyond imagination."[98-1] They are but following the orthodox Sir William Hamilton, who says: "Creation must be thought as the incomprehensible evolution of power into energy."[99-1] We are to think that which by the terms of the proposition is unthinkable! A most wise master!

Let it be noted that the expressions such as inscrutable, incomprehensible, unknowable, etc., which such writers use, are avowedly not limited to man's intelligence in its present state of cultivation, but are applied to his kind of intelligence, no matter how far trained. They mean that the inscrutable, etc., is not merely not at present open to man's observation—that were a truism—but that it cannot be subsumed under the laws of his reasoning powers. In other words, they deny that all intelligence is one in kind. Some accept this fully, and concede that what are called the laws of order, as shown by science, are only matters of experience, true here and now, not necessarily and absolutely true.

This is a consistent inference, and applies, of course, with equal force to all moral laws and religious dogmas.

The arguments brought against such opinions have been various. The old reply to the sophists has been dressed in modern garb, and it has been repeatedly put that if no statement is really true, then this one, to wit "no statement is really true," also is not true; and if that is the case, then there are statements which really are true. The theory of evolution as a dogma has been attacked by its own maxims; in asserting that all knowledge is imperfect, it calls its own verity into question. If all truth is relative, then this at least is absolutely true.

It has also been noted that all such words as incomprehensible, unconditioned, infinite, unknowable, are in their nature privatives, they are not a thought but are only one element of a thought. As has been shown in the first chapter, every thought is made up of a positive and a privative, and it is absurd and unnatural to separate the one from the other. The concept man, regarded as a division of the higher concept animal, is made up of man and not-man. In so far as other animals are included under the term "not-man" they do not come into intelligent cognition; but that does not mean that they cannot do so. So "the unconditioned" is really a part of the thought of "the conditioned," the "unknowable" a part of the "knowable," the "infinite" a part of the thought of the "finite." Under material images these privatives, as such, cannot be expressed; but in pure thought which deals with symbols and types alone, they can be.

But if the abstract laws of thought themselves are confined in the limits of one kind of intelligence, then we cannot take an appeal to them to attack this sophism. Therefore on maintaining their integrity the discussion must finally rest. This has been fully recognized by thinkers, one of whom has not long since earnestly called attention to "the urgent necessity of fathoming the psychical mechanism on which rests all our intellectual life."[101-1]

In this endeavor the attempt has been made to show that the logical laws are derived in accordance with the general theory of evolution from the natural or material laws of thinking. These, as I have previously remarked, are those of the association of ideas, and come under the general heads of contiguity and similarity. Such combinations are independent of the aim of the logical laws, which is correct thinking. A German writer, Dr. Windelband, has therefore argued that as experience, strengthened by hereditary transmission, continued to show that the particular combinations which are in accord with what we call the laws of thought furnished the best, that is, the most useful results, they were adopted in preference to others and finally assumed as the criteria of truth.

Of course it follows from this that as these laws are merely the outcome of human experience they can have no validity outside of it. Consequently, adds the writer I have quoted, just as the study of optics teaches us that the human eye yields a very different picture of the external world from that given by the eye of a fly, for instance, and as each of them is equally far from the reality, so the truth which our intelligence enables us to reach is not less remote from that which is the absolutely true. He considers that this is proven by the very nature of the "law of contradiction" itself, which must be inconsistent with the character of absolute thought. For in the latter, positive truth only can exist, therefore no negation, and no law about the relation of affirmative to negative.[102-1]

The latter criticism assumes that negation is of the nature of error, a mistake drawn from the use of the negative in applied logic. For in formal logic, whether as quantity or quality, that is, in pure mathematics or abstract thought, the reasoning is just as correct when negatives are employed as when positives, as I have remarked before. The other criticism is more important, for if we can reach the conclusion that the real laws of the universe are other than as we understand them, then our intelligence is not of a kind to represent them.

Such an opinion can be refuted directly. The laws which we profess to know are as operative in the remotest nebulae as in the planet we inhabit. It is altogether likely that countless forms of intelligent beings inhabit the starry wastes, receiving through sensory apparatus widely different from ours very diverse impressions of the external world. All this we know, but we also know that if those beings have defined the laws which underlie phenomena, they have found them to be the same that we have; for were they in the least different, in principle or application, they could not furnish the means, as those we know do, of predicting the recurrence of the celestial motions with unfailing accuracy. Therefore the demonstrations of pure mathematics, such as the relation of an absciss to an ordinate, or of the diameter to the circumference, must be universally true; and hence the logical laws which are the ultimate criteria of these truths must also be true to every intelligence, real or possible.[103-1]

Another and forcible reply to these objections is that the laws which our intelligence has reached and recognizes as universally true are not only not derived from experience, but are in direct opposition to and are constantly contradicted by it. Neither sense nor imagination has ever portrayed a perfect circle in which the diameter bore to the circumference the exact proportion which we know it does bear. The very fact that we have learned that our senses are wholly untrustworthy, and that experience is always fallacious, shows that we have tests of truth depending on some other faculty. "Each series of connected facts in nature furnishes the intimation of an order more exact than that which it directly manifests."[104-1]

But, it has been urged, granted that we have reached something like positive knowledge of those laws which are the order of the manifestation of phenomena, the real Inscrutable, the mysterious Unknowable, escapes us still; this is the nature of phenomenal manifestation, "the secret of the Power manifested in Existence."[104-2] At this point the physicist trips and falls; and here, too, the metaphysician stumbles.

I have already spoken of our aptitude to be frightened by a chimera, and deceived by such words as "nature" and "cause." Laws and rules, by which we express Order, are restrictive only in a condition of intelligence short of completeness, only therefore in that province of thought which concerns itself with material facts. The musician is not fettered by the laws of harmony, but only by those of discord. The truly virtuous man, remarks Aristotle, never has occasion to practise self-denial. Hence, mathematically, "the theory of the intellectual action involves the recognition of a sphere of thought from which all limits are withdrawn."[105-1] True freedom, real being, is only possible when law as such is inexistent. Only the lawless makes the law. When the idea of the laws of order thus disappears in that of free function consistent with perfect order, when, as Kant expresses it, we ascend from the contemplation of things acting according to law, to action according to the representation of law,[105-2] we can, without audacity, believe that we have penetrated the secret of existence, that we have reached the limits of explanation and found one wholly satisfying the highest reason. Intelligence, not apart from phenomena, but parallel with them, not under law, but through perfect harmony above it, power one with being, the will which is "the essence of reason," the emanant cause of phenomena, immanent only by the number of its relations we have not learned, this is the satisfying and exhaustive solution. The folly lies not in claiming reason as the absolute, but in assuming that the absolute is beyond and against reason.

There is nothing new in this explanation; and it is none the worse for being old. If Anaxagoras discerned it dimly, and many a one since him has spoken of Intelligence, Reason, Nous or Logos as the constructive factor of the creation; if "all the riper religions of the Orient assumed as their fundamental principle that unless the Highest penetrates all parts of the Universe, and itself conditions whatever is conditioned, no universal order, no Kosmos, no real existence is thinkable;"[106-1] such inadequate expressions should never obscure the truth that reason in its loftiest flights descries nothing nobler than itself.

The relative, as its name implies, for ever presupposes and points to the absolute, the latter an Intelligence also, not one that renders ours futile and fallacious, but one that imparts to ours the capacity we possess of reaching eternal and ubiquitous truth. The severest mathematical reasoning forces us to this conclusion, and we can dispense with speculation about it.

Only on the principle which here receives its proof, that man has something in him of God, that the norm of the true holds good throughout, can he know or care anything about divinity. "It takes a god to discern a god," profoundly wrote Novalis.

When a religion teaches what reason disclaims, not through lack of testimony but through a denial of the rights of reason, then that religion wars against itself and will fall. Faith is not the acceptance of what intelligence rejects, but a suspension of judgment for want of evidence. A thoroughly religious mind will rejoice when its faith is shaken with doubt; for the doubt indicates increased light rendering perceptible some possible error not before seen.

Least of all should a believer in a divine revelation deny the oneness of intelligence. For if he is right, then the revealed truth he talks about is but relative and partial, and those inspired men who claimed for it the sign manual of the Absolute were fools, insane or liars.

If the various arguments I have rehearsed indicate conclusively that in the laws of thought we have the norms of absolute truth—and skepticism on this point can be skepticism and not belief only by virtue of the very law which it doubts—some important corollaries present themselves.

Regarding in the first place the nature of these laws, we find them very different from those of physical necessity—those which are called the laws of nature. The latter are authoritative, they are never means to an end, they admit no exception, they leave no room for error. Not so with the laws of reasoning. Man far more frequently disregards than obeys them; they leave a wide field for fallacy. Wherein then lies that theoretical necessity which is the essence of law? The answer is that the laws of reasoning are purposive only, they are regulative, not constitutive, and their theoretical necessity lies in the end, the result of reasoning, that is, in the knowing, in the recognition of truth. They are what the Germans call Zweckgesetze.[108-1]

But in mathematical reasoning and in the processes of physical nature the absolute character of the laws which prevail depends for its final necessity on their consistency, their entire correspondence with the laws of right reasoning. Applied to them the purposive character of the laws is not seen, for their ends are fulfilled. We are brought, therefore, to the momentous conclusion that the manifestation of Order, whether in material or mental processes, "affords a presumption, not measurable indeed but real, of the fulfilment of an end or purpose;"[108-1][TN-7] and this purpose, one which has other objects in view than the continuance of physical processes. The history of mind, from protoplasmic sensation upward, must be a progression, whose end will be worth more than was its beginning, a process, which has for its purpose the satisfaction of the laws of mind. This is nothing else than correct thinking, the attainment of truth.

But this conclusion, reached by a searching criticism of the validity of scientific laws, is precisely that which is the postulate of all developed creeds. "The faith of all historical religions," says Bunsen, "starts from the assumption of a universal moral order, in which the good is alone the true, and the true is the only good."[109-1]

The purposive nature of the processes of thought, as well as the manner in which they govern the mind, is illustrated by the history of man. His actions, whether as an individual or as a nation, are guided by ideas not derived from the outer world, for they do not correspond to actual objects, but from mental pictures of things as he wants them to exist. These are his hopes, his wishes, his ideals; they are the more potent, and prompt to more vigorous action, the clearer they are to his mind. Even when he is unconscious of them, they exist as tendencies, or instincts, inherited often from some remote ancestor, perhaps even the heir-loom of a stage of lower life, for they occur where sensation alone is present, and are an important factor in general evolution.

It is usually conceded that this theory of organic development very much attenuates the evidence of what is known as the argument from design in nature, by which the existence of an intelligent Creator is sought to be shown. If the distinction between the formal laws of mathematics, which are those of nature, and logic, which are those of mind, be fully understood, no one will seek such an argument in the former but in the latter only, for they alone, as I have shown, are purposive, and they are wholly so. The only God that nature points to is an adamantine Fate.

If religion has indeed the object which Bunsen assigns it, physical phenomena cannot concern it. Its votaries should not look to change the operation of natural laws by incantations, prayers or miracles.

Whenever in the material world there presents itself a seeming confusion, it is certain to turn out but an incompleteness of our observation, and on closer inspection it resolves itself into some higher scheme of Order. This is not so in the realm of thought. Wrong thinking never can become right thinking. A profound writer has said: "One explanation only of these facts can be given, viz., that the distinction between true and false, between correct and incorrect, exists in the processes of the intellect, but not in the region of a physical necessity."[111-1] A religion therefore which claims as its mission the discovery of the true and its identification with the good,—in other words the persuading man that he should always act in accordance with the dictates of right reasoning—should be addressed primarily to the intellect.

As man can attain to certain truths which are without any mixture of fallacy, which when once he comprehends them he can never any more doubt, and which though thus absolute do not fetter his intellect but first give it the use of all its powers to the extent of those truths; so he can conceive of an Intelligence in which all truth is thus without taint of error. Not only is such an Intelligence conceivable, it is necessary to conceive it, in order to complete the scientific induction of "a sphere of thought from which all limits are withdrawn," forced upon us by the demonstrations of the exact sciences.[111-2]

Thus do we reach the foundation for the faith in a moral government of the world, which it has been the uniform characteristic of religions to assert; but a government, as thus analytically reached, not easily corresponding with that which popular religion speaks of. Such feeble sentiments as mercy, benevolence and effusive love, scarcely find place in this conception of the source of universal order. In this cosmical dust-cloud we inhabit, whose each speck is a sun, man's destiny plays a microscopic part. The vexed question whether ours is the best possible or the worst possible world, drops into startling insignificance. Religion has taught the abnegation of self; science is first to teach the humiliation of the race. Not for man's behoof were created the greater and the lesser lights, not for his deeds will the sun grow dark or the stars fall, not with any reference to his pains or pleasure was this universe spread upon the night. That Intelligence which pursues its own ends in this All, which sees from first to last the chain of causes which mould human action, measures not its purposes by man's halting sensations. Such an Intelligence is fitly described by the philosopher-poet as one,

"Wo die Gerechtigkeit so Wurzel schlaeget, Und Schuld und Unschuld so erhaben waeget Dass sie vertritt die Stelle aller Guete."[112-1]

In the scheme of the universe, pain and pleasure, truth and error, has each its fitness, and no single thought or act can be judged apart from all others that ever have been and ever shall be.

Such was the power that was contemplated by the Hebrew prophet, one from which all evil things and all good things come, and who disposes them all to the fulfilment of a final purpose:

"I am the Lord and there is none else. I form the light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil."

"I am God and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things which are not yet done."[113-1]

In a similar strain the ancient Aryan sang:—

"This do I ask thee, tell me, O Ahura! Who is he, working good, made the light and also darkness? Who is he, working good, made the sleep as well as waking? Who the night, as well as noon and the morning?"

And the reply came:

"Know also this, O pure Zarathustra: through my wisdom, through which was the beginning of the world, so also its end shall be."[113-2]

Or as the Arabian apostle wrote, inspired by the same idea:—

"Praise the name of thy Lord, the Most High, Who hath created and balanced all things, Who hath fixed their destinies and guideth them."

"The Revelation of this book is from the Mighty, the Wise. We have not created the Heavens and the Earth and all that is between them otherwise than with a purpose and for a settled term."[113-3]

FOOTNOTES:

[87-1] The Emotions and Will, p. 594. So Professor Tyndall speaks of confining the religious sentiment to "the region of emotion, which is its proper sphere."

[87-2] H. L. Mansel, The Limits of Religious Thought, p. 115. (Boston, 1859.)

[87-3] "The one relation which is the ground of all true religion is a total dependence upon God." William Law, Address to the Clergy, p. 12. "The essential germ of the religious life is concentrated in the absolute feeling of dependence on infinite power." J. D. Morell, The Philosophy of Religion, p. 94. (New York, 1849.) This accomplished author, well known for his History of Philosophy, is the most able English exponent of the religious views of Schleiermacher and Jacobi.

[90-1] "Weil sie die Welt eingerichtet haben." Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Voelker, Bd. I. s. 169. It is not of any importance that Herodotus' etymology is incorrect: what I wish to show is that he and his contemporaries entertained the conception of the gods as the authors of order.

[92-1] This distinction is well set forth by A. von Humboldt, Kosmos, p. 388 (Phila., 1869).

[93-1] "Ueberall den Zufall zu verbannen, zu verhindern, dass in dem Gebiete des Beobachtens und Denkens er nicht zu herrschen scheine, im Gebiete des Handelns nicht herrsche, ist das Streben der Vernunft." Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ueber Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea, iv.

[93-2] "Iste ordo pulcherrimus rerum valde bonarum." Confessiones, Lib. xiii. cap. xxxv.

[94-1] "The notion of a God is not contained in the mere notion of Cause, that is the notion of Fate or Power. To this must be added Intelligence," etc. Sir Wm. Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics, Lecture ii.

[96-1] The Unseen Universe, p. 60.

[97-1] James Frederick Ferrier, Lectures on Greek Philosophy, p. 13 (Edinburgh, 1866). On a question growing directly out of this, to wit, the relative character of good and evil, Mr. J. S. Mill expresses himself thus: "My opinion of this doctrine is, that it is beyond all others which now engage speculative minds, the decisive one between moral good and evil for the Christian world." Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy, p. 90.

[98-1] First Principles, pp. 108, 127.

[99-1] Lectures on Metaphysics, Vol. I., p. 690.

[101-1] Professor Steinthal in the Zeitschrift fuer Voelkerpsychologie.

[102-1] Dr. W. Windelband, Die Erkenntnissiehre unter dem voelkerpsychologischem Gesichtspunkte, in the Zeitschrift fuer Voelkerpsychologie, 1874, Bd. VIII. S. 165 sqq.

[103-1] I would ask the reader willing to pursue this reasoning further, to peruse the charming essay of Oersted, entitled Das ganze Dasein Ein Vernunftreich.

[104-1] Geo. Boole, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, p. 407.

[104-2] Herbert Spencer, First Principles, p. 112. Spinoza's famous proposition, previously quoted, Unaquaeque res quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur, (Ethices, Pars III., Prop. VI.,) expresses also the ultimate of modern investigation. A recent critic considers it is a fallacy because the conatus "surreptitiously implies a sense of effort or struggle for existence," whereas the logical concept of a res does not involve effort (S. N. Hodgson, The Theory of Practice, vol. I. pp. 134-6, London, 1870.) The answer is that identity implies continuance. In organic life we have the fact of nutrition, a function whose duty is to supply waste, and hence offer direct opposition to perturbing forces.

[105-1] Geo. Boole, The Laws of Thought, p. 419.

[105-2] Kant, The Metaphysic of Ethics, p. 23 (Eng. Trans. London, 1869.)

[106-1] Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Voelker, Bd. I. s. 291.

[108-1] See this distinction between physical and thought laws fully set forth by Prof. Boole in the appendix to The Laws of Thought, and by Dr. Windelband, Zeitschrift fuer Voelkerpsychologie, Bd. VIII., s. 165 sqq.

[108-2] Geo. Boole, u. s. p. 399.

[109-1] "Der Glaube aller geschichtlichen Religionen geht aus von dieser Annahme einer sittlichen, in Gott bewusst lebenden, Weltordnung, wonach das Gute das allein Wahre ist, and das Wahre das allein Gute." Gott in der Geschichte, Bd. I. s. xl. Leipzig, 1857.

[111-1] Geo. Boole, Laws of Thought, p. 410.

[111-2] The latest researches in natural science confirm the expressions of W. von Humboldt: "Das Streben der Natur ist auf etwas Unbeschraenktes gerichtet." "Die Natur mit endlichen Mitteln unendliche Zwecke verfolgt." Ueber den Geschlechtsunterschied, etc.

[112-1] Wilhelm von Humboldt, Sonnette, "Hoechste Gerechtigkeit."

[113-1] Isaiah, xlv. 7; xlvi. 10.

[113-2] Khordah—avesta, Ormazd—Yasht, 38, and Yacna, 42.

[113-3] The Koran, Suras lxxxvii., xlvi.



THE PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER.

SUMMARY.

Religion starts with a Prayer. This is an appeal to the unknown, and is indispensable in religious thought. The apparent exceptions of Buddhism and Confucianism.

All prayers relate to the fulfilment of a wish. At first its direct object is alone thought of. This so frequently fails that the indirect object rises into view. This stated to be the increase of the pleasurable emotions. The inadequacy of this statement.

The answers to prayer. As a form of Expectant Attention, it exerts much subjective power. Can it influence external phenomena? It is possible. Deeply religious minds reject both these answers, however. They claim the objective answer to be Inspiration. All religions unite in this claim.

Inspirations have been contradictory. That is genuine which teaches truths which cannot be doubted concerning duty and deity. A certain mental condition favors the attainment of such truths. This simulated in religious entheasm. Examples. It is allied to the most intense intellectual action, but its steps remain unknown.



CHAPTER IV.

THE PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER.

The foregoing analysis of the religious sentiment results in finding it, even in its simplest forms, a product of complicated reasoning forced into action by some of the strongest emotions, and maintaining its position indefeasibly through the limitations of the intellect. This it does, however, with a certain nobleness, for while it wraps the unknown in sacred mystery, it proclaims man one in nature with the Highest, by birthright a son of the gods, of an intelligence akin to theirs, and less than they only in degree. Through thus presenting at once his strength and his feebleness, his grandeur and his degradation, religion goes beyond philosophy or utility in suggesting motives for exertion, stimuli to labor. This phase of it will now occupy us.

The Religious Sentiment manifests itself in thought, in word and in act through the respective media of the Prayer, the Myth and the Cult. The first embraces the personal relations of the individual to the object of his worship, the second expresses the opinions current in a community about the nature and actions of that object, the last includes the symbols and ceremonies under and by which it is represented and propitiated.

The first has the logical priority. Man cares nothing for God—can care nothing for him practically—except as an aid to the fulfilment of his desires, the satisfaction of his wants, as the "ground of his hopes." The root of the religious sentiment, I have said, is "a wish whose fruition depends upon unknown power." An appeal for aid to this unknown power, is the first form of prayer in its religious sense. It is not merely "the soul's sincere desire." This may well be and well directed, and yet not religious, as the devotion of the mathematician to the solution of an important problem. With the desire must be the earnest appeal to the unknown. A theological dictionary I have at hand almost correctly defines it as "a petition for spiritual or physical benefits which [we believe] we cannot obtain without divine co-operation." The words in brackets must be inserted to complete the definition.

It need not be expressed in language. Rousseau, in his Confessions, tells of a bishop who, in visiting his diocese, came across an old woman who was troubled because she could frame no prayer in words, but only cry, "Oh!" "Good mother," said the wise bishop, "Pray always so. Your prayers are better than ours."[119-1]

A petition for assistance is, as I have said, one of its first forms; but not its only one. The assistance asked in simple prayers is often nothing more than the neutrality of the gods, their non-interference; "no preventing Providence," as the expression is in our popular religion. Prayers of fear are of this kind:

"And they say, God be merciful, Who ne'er said, God be praised."

Some of the Egyptian formulae even threaten the gods if they prevent success.[119-2] The wish accomplished, the prayer may be one of gratitude, often enough of that kind described by La Rochefoucauld, of which a prominent element is "a lively sense of possible favors to come."[119-3]

Or again, self-abasement being so natural a form of flattery that to call ourselves "obedient and humble servants" of others, has passed into one of the commonest forms of address, many prayers are made up of similar expressions of humility and contrition, the votary calling himself a "miserable sinner" and a "vile worm," and on the other hand magnifying his Lord as greater than all other gods, mighty and helpful to those who assiduously worship him.

In some form or other, as of petition, gratitude or contrition, uttered in words or confined to the aspirations of the soul, prayer is a necessary factor in the religious life. It always has been, and it must be present.

The exceptions which may be taken to this in religious systems are chiefly two, those supposed to have been founded by Buddha Sakyamuni and Confucius.

It is undoubtedly correct that Buddha discouraged prayer. He permitted it at best in the inferior grades of discipleship. For himself, and all who reached his stage of culture, he pronounced it futile.

But Buddha did not set out to teach a religion, but rather the inutility of all creeds. He struck shrewdly at the root of them by placing the highest condition of man in the total extinguishment of desire. He bound the gods in fetters by establishing a theory of causal connection (the twelve Nidana) which does away with the necessity of ruling powers. He then swept both matter and spirit into unreality by establishing the canon of ignorance, that the highest knowledge is to know that nothing is; that there is neither being nor not-being, nor yet the becoming. After this wholesale iconoclasm the only possible object in life for the sage is the negative one of avoiding pain, which though as unreal as anything else, interferes with his meditations on its unreality. To this negative end the only aid he can expect is from other sages who have gone farther in self-cultivation. Self, therefore, is the first, the collective body of sages is the second, and the written instruction of Buddha is the third; and these three are the only sources to which the consistent Buddhist looks for aid.

This was Buddha's teaching. But it is not Buddhism as professed by the hundreds of millions in Ceylon, in Thibet, China, Japan, and Siberia, who claim Sakyamuni under his names Buddha, the awakened, Tathagata, thus gone, or gone before, Siddartha, the accomplisher of the wish, and threescore and ten others of like purport, as their inspired teacher. Millions of saints, holy men, Buddhas, they believe, are ready to aid in every way the true believer, and incessant, constant prayer is, they maintain, the one efficient means to insure this aid. Repetition, dinning the divinities and wearying them into answering, is their theory. Therefore they will repeat a short formula of four words (om mani padme hum—Om! the jewel in the lotus, amen) thousands of times a day; or, as they correctly think it not a whit more mechanical, they write it a million times on strips of paper, fasten it around a cylinder, attach this to a water or a wind-wheel, and thus sleeping or waking, at home or abroad, keep up a steady fire of prayer at the gods, which finally, they sanguinely hope, will bring them to submission.

No sect has such entire confidence in the power of prayer as the Buddhists. The most pious Mahometan or Christian does not approach their faith. After all is said and done, the latter has room to doubt the efficacy of his prayer. It may be refused. Not so the Buddhists. They have a syllogism which covers the case completely, as follows:—

All things are in the power of the gods. The gods are in the power of prayer. Prayer is at the will of the saint. Therefore all things are in the power of the saint.

The only reason that any prayer fails is that it is not repeated often enough—a statement difficult to refute.

The case with Confucius was different.[122-1] No speculative dreamer, but a practical man, bent on improving his fellows by teaching them self-reliance, industry, honesty, good feeling and the attainment of material comfort, he did not see in the religious systems and doctrines of his time any assistance to these ends. Therefore, like Socrates and many other men of ancient and modern times, without actually condemning the faiths around him, or absolutely neglecting some external respect to their usages, he taught his followers to turn away from religious topics and occupy themselves with subjects of immediate utility. For questions of duty, man, he taught, has a sufficient guide within himself. "What you do not like," he said, "when done to yourself, do not to others." The wishes, he adds, should be limited to the attainable; thus their disappointment can be avoided by a just estimate of one's own powers. He used to compare a wise man to an archer: "When the archer misses the target, he seeks for the cause of his failure within himself." He did not like to talk about spiritual beings. When asked whether the dead had knowledge, he replied: "There is no present urgency about the matter. If they have, you will know it for yourself in time." He did not deny the existence of unseen powers; on the contrary, he said: "The kwei shin (the most general term for supernatural beings) enter into all things, and there is nothing without them;" but he added, "We look for them and do not see them; we listen, but do not hear them." In speaking of deity, he dropped the personal syllable (te) and only spoke of heaven, in the indefinite sense. Such was this extraordinary man. The utilitarian theory, what we call the common sense view of life, was never better taught. But his doctrine is not a religion. His followers erect temples, and from filial respect pay the usual honors to their ancestors, as Confucius himself did. But they ignore religious observances, strictly so-called.

These examples, therefore, do not at all conflict with the general statement that no religion can exist without prayer. On the contrary, it is the native expression of the religious sentiment, that to which we must look for its most hidden meaning. The thoughtful Novalis, whose meditations are so rich in reflections on the religious nature of man, well said: "Prayer is to religion what thought is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion. The religious sense prays with like necessity that the reason thinks."

Whatever the form of the prayer, it has direct or indirect relation to the accomplishment of a wish. David prays to the Lord as the one who "satisfies the desire of every living thing," who "will fulfil the desire of them that fear him," and it is with the like faith that the heart of every votary is stirred when he approaches in prayer the divinity he adores.

Widely various are the things wished for. Their character is the test of religions. In primitive faiths and in uncultivated minds, prayers are confined to the nearest material advantages; they are directed to the attainment of food, of victory in combat, of safety in danger, of personal prosperity. They may all be summed up in a line of one which occurs in the Rig Veda: "O Lord Varuna! Grant that we may prosper in getting and keeping!"

Beyond this point of "getting and keeping," few primitive prayers take us. Those of the American Indians, as I have elsewhere shown, remained in this stage among the savage tribes, and rose above it only in the civilized states of Mexico and Peru. Prayers for health, for plenteous harvests, for safe voyages and the like are of this nature, though from their familiarity to us they seem less crude than the simple-hearted petition of the old Aryan, which I have quoted. They mean the same.

The more thoughtful votaries of the higher forms of religion have, however, frequently drawn the distinction between the direct and indirect fulfilment of the wish. An abundant harvest, restoration to health, or a victory in battle is the object of our hopes, not in itself, but for its results upon ourselves. These, in their final expression, can mean nothing else than agreeable sensations and pleasurable emotions. These, therefore, are the real though indirect objects of such prayers; often unconsciously so, because the ordinary devotee has little capacity and less inclination to analyze the nature of his religious feelings.

A recent writer, Mr. Hodgson, has said: "The real answer to prayer is the increase of the joyful emotions, the decrease of the painful ones."[126-1] It would seem a simpler plan to make this directly the purport of our petitions; but to the modern mind this naked simplicity would be distasteful.

Nor is the ordinary supplicant willing to look so far. The direct, not the indirect object of the wish, is what he wants. The lazzarone of Naples prays to his patron saint to favor his choice of a lottery ticket; if it turn out an unlucky number he will take the little leaden image of the saint from his pocket, revile it, spit on it, and trample it in the mud. Another man, when his prayer for success is not followed by victory, sends gifts to the church, flogs himself in public and fasts. Xenophon gives us in his Economics the prayer of a pious Athenian of his time, in the person of Ischomachus. "I seek to obtain," says the latter, "from the gods by just prayers, strength and health, the respect of the community, the love of my friends, an honorable termination to my combats, and riches, the fruit of honest industry." Xenophon evidently considered these appropriate objects for prayer, and from the petitions in many recent manuals of devotion, I should suppose most Christians of to-day would not see in them anything inappropriate.