1 1 
 
 lleligum of 
 jFutute 
 
 Charles <lJ.<I5li0t 
 
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 CNJ 
 
 03 
 
IN MEMORIAM 
 Charles .Josselyij 
 

&e EeUgion of tjje jfutute 
 
Cl)e Religion of 
 tlje Jfuture 
 
 A lecture delivered at the close of the 
 eleventh session of the Harvard Summer 
 School of Theology, July 22, 1909 
 
 By 
 
 CHARLES W. ELIOT 
 
 FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY 
 NEW YORK : : PUBLISHERS 
 
&R 
 
 * 
 
Contents 
 
 " THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH " ... 1 
 
 "THE KINGDOM OF GOD" '16 
 
 RELIGIOUS COMPENSATIONS ... . . 24 
 
 THE FIGHT AGAINST EVIL ..... 29 
 
 THE DIVINE JUSTICE 33 
 
 RELIGIOUS CONSOLATION 36" 
 
 " GOOD-WILL TO MEN " . . ,., . . 39 
 
 THE UPLIFTING LOVE OF TRUTH ... 42 
 
 CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD 49 
 
 615973 
 
C&e meligion of t&e jFuture 
 
The Religion of the 
 Future 
 
 As students in this Summer School of 
 Theology you have attended a series of 
 lectures on fluctuations in religious in- 
 terest, on the frequent occurrence of 
 religious declines followed soon by re- 
 coveries or regenerations both within 
 and without the churches, on the fre- 
 quent attempts to bring the prevalent 
 religious doctrines into harmony with 
 new tendencies in the intellectual 
 world, on the constant struggle be- 
 tween conservatism and liberalism in 
 existing churches and between idealism 
 and materialism in society at large, on 
 the effects of popular education and 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 the modern spirit of inquiry on reli- 
 gious doctrines and organizations, on 
 the changed views of thinking people 
 concerning the nature of the world and 
 of man, on the increase of knowledge 
 as affecting religion, and on the new 
 ideas of God. You have also listened 
 to lectures on psychotherapy, a new 
 development of an ancient tendency to 
 mix religion with medicine, and on the 
 theory of evolution, a modern scientific 
 doctrine which within fifty years has 
 profoundly modified the religious con- 
 ceptions and expectations of many 
 thinking people. You have heard, 
 too, how the new ideas of democracy 
 ; and social progress have modified and 
 ought to modify, not only the actual 
 work done by the churches, but the 
 whole conception of the function of 
 churches. Again, you have heard how 
 many and how profound are the reli- 
 gious implications in contemporary 
 
"THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH " 
 
 philosophy. Your attention has been 
 called to the most recent views con- 
 cerning the conservation of energy in 
 the universe, to the wonderful phe- 
 nomena of radio-activity, and to the 
 most recent definitions of atom, mole- 
 cule, ion, and electron human imagin- 
 ings which have much to do with the 
 modern conceptions of matter and 
 spirit. The influence on popular reli- 
 gion of modern scholarship applied to 
 the New Testament has also engaged 
 your attention; and, finally, you have 
 heard an exposition of religious condi- 
 tions and practices in the United 
 States which assumed an intimate con- 
 nection between the advance of civili- 
 zation and the contemporaneous as- 
 pects of religions, and illustrated from 
 history the service of religion and 
 particularly of Christianity to the 
 progress of civilization through its 
 contributions to individual freedom, in- 
 
 3 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 tellectual culture, and social coopera- 
 tion. 
 
 The general impression you have re- 
 ceived from this comprehensive survey 
 must surely be that religion is not a 
 fixed, but a fluent thing. It is, there- 
 fore, wholly natural and to be expected 
 that the conceptions of religion preva- 
 lent among educated people should 
 change from century to century. 
 Modern studies in comparative religion 
 and in the history of religions demon- 
 strate that such has been the case in 
 times past. Now the nineteenth cen- 
 tury immeasurably surpassed all pre- 
 ceding centuries in the increase of 
 knowledge, and in the spread of the 
 spirit of scientific inquiry and of the 
 passion for truth-seeking. Hence the 
 changes in religious beliefs and prac- 
 tices, and in the relation of churches to 
 human society as a whole, were much 
 deeper and more extensive in that cen- 
 
 4 
 
'THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH " 
 
 tury than ever before in the history of 
 the world; and the approach made to 
 the embodiment in the actual practices 
 of mankind of the doctrines of the 
 greatest religious teachers was more 
 significant and more rapid than ever 
 before. The religion of a multitude 
 of humane persons in the twentieth 
 century may, therefore, be called with- 
 out inexcusable exaggeration a " new 
 religion,"- not that a single one of its 
 doctrines and practices is really new in 
 essence, but only that the wider accept- 
 ance and better actual application 
 of truths familiar in the past at 
 many times and places, but never taken 
 to heart by the multitude or put in 
 force on a large scale, are new. I shall 
 attempt to state without reserve and in 
 simplest terms free from technicalities, 
 first, what the religion of the future 
 seems likely not to be, and secondly, 
 what it may reasonably be expected to 
 
 5 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 be. My point of view is that of an 
 American layman, whose observing and 
 thinking life has covered the extraordi- 
 nary period since the Voyage of the 
 Beagle was published, anaesthesia and 
 the telegraph came into use, Herbert 
 Spencer issued his first series of papers 
 on evolution, Kuenen, Robertson 
 Smith, and Wellhausen developed and 
 vindicated Biblical criticism, J. S. 
 Mill's Principles of Political Economy 
 appeared, and the United States by 
 going to war with Mexico set in opera- 
 tion the forces which abolished slavery 
 on the American continent the period 
 within which mechanical power came 
 to be widely distributed through the 
 explosive engine and the applications 
 of electricity, and all the great funda- 
 mental industries of civilized mankind 
 were reconstructed. 
 
 (1) The religion of the future, will 
 not be based on authority, either spirit- 
 
 6 
 
"THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH " 
 
 ual or temporal. The decline of the 
 reliance upon absolute authority is one 
 of the most significant phenomena of 
 the modern world. This decline is to 
 be seen everywhere, in government, 
 in education, in the church, in business, 
 and in the family. The present gener- 
 ation is willing, and indeed often 
 eager, to be led; but it is averse to 
 being driven, and it wants to under- 
 stand the grounds and sanctions of au- 
 thoritative decisions. As a rule, the 
 Christian churches, Roman, Greek, 
 and Protestant, have heretofore relied 
 mainly upon the principle of authority, 
 the Reformation having substituted 
 for an authoritative church an authori- 
 tative book; but it is evident that the 
 authority, both of the most authorita- 
 tive churches and of the Bible as a 
 verbally inspired guide, is already 
 greatly impaired, and that the tend- 
 ency towards liberty is progressive, 
 
 7 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 and among educated men irresist- 
 ible. 
 
 (2) It is hardly necessary to say 
 that in the religion of the future there 
 will be no personifications of the primi- 
 tive forces of nature, such as light, fire, 
 frost, wind, storm, and earthquake, al- 
 though primitive religions and the ac- 
 tual religions of barbarous or semi-civ- 
 ilized peoples abound in such personi- 
 fications. The mountains, groves, vol- 
 canoes, and oceans will no longer be in- 
 habited by either kindly or malevolent 
 deities; although man will still look to 
 the hills for rest, still find in the ocean 
 a symbol of infinity, and refreshment 
 and delight in the forests and the 
 streams. The love of nature mounts 
 and spreads, while faith in fairies, 
 imps, nymphs, demons, and angels de- 
 clines and fades away. 
 
 (3) There will be in the religion of 
 the future no worship, express or im- 
 
 8 
 
"THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH* 
 
 plied, of dead ancestors, teachers, or 
 rulers; no more tribal, racial, or tute- 
 lary gods; no identification of any hu- 
 man being, however majestic in char- 
 acter, with the Eternal Deity. In 
 these respects the religion of the fu- 
 ture will not be essentially new, for 
 nineteen centuries ago Jesus said, 
 " Neither in this mountain, nor in Je- 
 rusalem, shall ye worship the Father. 
 . . . God is a Spirit; and they that 
 worship Him must worship in spirit 
 and truth." It should be recognized, 
 however, first, that Christianity was 
 soon deeply affected by the surround- 
 ing paganism, and that some of these 
 pagan intrusions have survived to this 
 day; and secondly, that the_ Hebrew 
 religion, the influence of which on the 
 Christian has been, and is, very potent, 
 was in the highest degree a racial reli- 
 gion, and its Holy of Holies was local. 
 In war-times, that is, in times when the 
 
 9 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 brutal or savage instincts remaining in 
 humanity become temporarily domi- 
 nant, and good-will is limited to peo- 
 ple of the same nation, the survival of 
 a tribal or national quality in institu- 
 tional Christianity comes out very 
 plainly. ;The aid of the Lord of Hosts 
 is still invoked by both parties to inter- 
 national warfare, and each side praises 
 and thanks Him for its successes. In- 
 deed, the same spirit has often been ex- 
 hibited in civil wars caused by religious 
 differences. 
 
 " Now glory to the Lord of Hosts, from whom all 
 
 glories are! 
 
 And glory to our sovereign liege, King Henry of 
 Navarre!" 
 
 It is not many years since an Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury caused thanks 
 to be given in all Anglican churches 
 that the Lord of Hosts had been in the 
 English camp over against the Egyp- 
 
 10 
 
"THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH " 
 
 tians. Heretofore the great religions 
 of the world have held out hopes of di- 
 rect interventions of the deity, or some 
 special deity, in favor of his faithful 
 worshippers. It was the greatest of 
 Jewish prophets who told King Heze- 
 kiahjthat^the King of Assyria, who had 
 approached Jerusalem with a great 
 army, should not come into the city nor 
 shoot an arrow there, and reported the 
 Lord as saying, " I will defend this 
 city to save it, for my own sake, and 
 for my servant David's sake." " And 
 it came to pass that night, that the an- 
 gel of the Lord went forth, and smote 
 in the camp of the Assyrians an hun- 
 dred fourscore and five thousand: and 
 when men arose early in the morning, 
 behold, they were all dead corpses." 
 The new religion cannot promise that 
 sort of aid to either nations or individ- 
 uals in peril. 
 
 (4) In the religious life of the fu- 
 ll 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 ture the primary object will not be the 
 personal welfare or safety of the indi- 
 vidual in this world or any other. 
 That safety, that welfare or salvation, 
 may be incidentally secured, but it will 
 not be the prime object in view. The 
 religious person will not think of his 
 own welfare or security, but of service 
 to others, and of contributions to the 
 common good. The new religion will 
 not teach that character is likely to be 
 suddenly changed, either in this world 
 or in any other, although in any 
 world a sudden opportunity for im- 
 provement may present itself, and the 
 date of that opportunity may be a pre- 
 cious remembrance. The new religion 
 will not rely on either a sudden conver- 
 sion in this world or a sudden paradise 
 in the next, from out a sensual, selfish, 
 or dishonest life. It will teach that 
 repentance wipes out nothing in the 
 past, and is only the first step towards 
 
 12 
 
'THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH " 
 
 reformation, and a sign of a better fu- 
 ture. 
 
 (5) The religion of the future will 
 not be propitiatory, sacrificial, or expi- 
 atory. In primitive society fear of the 
 supernal powers, as represented in the 
 awful forces of nature, was the root of 
 religion. These dreadful powers must 
 be propitiated or placated, and they 
 must be propitiated by sacrifices in the 
 most literal sense; and the supposed 
 offences of man must be expiated by 
 sufferings, which were apt to be vica- 
 rious. Even the Hebrews offered hu- 
 man sacrifices for generations; and al- 
 ways a great part of their religious 
 rites consisted in sacrifices of animals. 
 The Christian church made a great 
 step forward when it substituted the 
 burning of incense for the burning of 
 bullocks and doves; but to this day 
 there survives, not only in the doctrines, 
 but in the practices of the Christian 
 
 13 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 church the principle of expiatory sacri- 
 fice. It will be an immense advance if 
 twentieth-century Christianity can be 
 purified from all these survivals of bar- 
 barous, or semi-barbarous, religious 
 conceptions; because they imply such 
 an unworthy idea of God. 
 
 (6) The religion of the future will 
 not perpetuate the Hebrew anthropo- 
 morphic representations of God, con- 
 ceptions which were carried in large 
 measure into institutional Christianity. 
 It will not think of God as an enlarged 
 and glorified man, who walks " in the 
 garden in the cool of the day," or as a 
 judge deciding between human liti- 
 gants, or as a king, Pharaoh, or em- 
 peror, ruling arbitrarily his subjects, 
 or as the patriarch who, in the early 
 history of the race, ruled his family ab- 
 solutely. These human functions will 
 cease to represent adequately the attri- 
 butes of God. The nineteenth cen- 
 
 14 
 
'THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH " 
 
 tury has made all these conceptions of 
 deity look archaic and crude. 
 
 (7) The religion of the future will 
 not be gloomy, ascetic, or maledictory. 
 It will not deal chiefly with sorrow and 
 death, but with joy and life. It will 
 not care so much to account for the evil 
 and the ugly in the world as to inter- 
 pret the good and the beautiful. It 
 will believe in no malignant powers 
 neither in Satan nor in witches, neither 
 in the evil eye nor in the malign sug- 
 gestion. When its disciple encounters 
 a wrong or evil in the world, his im- 
 pulse will be to search out its origin, 
 source, or cause, that he may attack it 
 at its starting-point. He may not 
 speculate on the origin of evil in gen- 
 eral, but will surely try to discover the 
 best way to eradicate the particular 
 evil or wrong he has 'recognized. 
 
" Cfce ffiUng&om of <>oo ' 
 
 HAVING thus considered what the re- 
 ligion of the future will not be, let us 
 now consider what its positive elements 
 will be. 
 
 The new thought of God will be its 
 most characteristic element. This 
 ideal will comprehend the Jewish Jeho- 
 vah, the Christian Universal Father, 
 , the modern physicist's omnipresent 
 and exhaustless Energy, and the bio- 
 logical conception of a Vital Force. 
 The Infinite Spirit pervades the uni- 
 verse, just as the spirit of a man per- 
 vades his body, and acts, consciously or 
 unconsciously, in every atom of it. The 
 twentieth century will accept literally 
 and implicitly St. Paul's statement, 
 " In Him we live, and move, and have 
 
 16 
 
'THE KINGDOM OF GOD" 
 
 our being;" and God is that vital at- 
 mosphere, or incessant inspiration. 
 The new religion is therefore thor- 
 oughly monotheistic, its God being the 
 one infinite force; but thfs~one God is 
 not withdrawn or removed, but in- 
 dwelling, and especially dwelling in 
 every living creature. God is so abso- 
 lutely immanent in all things, animate 
 and inanimate, that no mediation is 
 needed between him and the least par- 
 ticle qf his creation. In his moral at- 
 tributes, he is for every man the multi- 
 plication to infinity of all the noblest, 
 tenderest, and most potent qualities 
 which that man has ever seen or imag- 
 ined in a human being. In this sense 
 every man makes his own picture of j 
 God. Every age, barbarous or civi- 
 lized, happy or unhappy, improving or 
 degenerating, frames its own concep- 
 tion of God within the limits of its own 
 experiences and imaginings. In this 
 
 17 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 sense, too, a humane religion has to 
 wait for a humane generation. The 
 central thought of the new religion will 
 therefore be a humane and worthy idea 
 of God, thoroughly consistent with the 
 nineteenth-century revelations con- 
 cerning man and nature, and with all 
 the tenderest and loveliest teachings 
 which have come down to us from the 
 past. 
 
 The scientific doctrine of one omni- 
 present, eternal Energy, informing 
 and inspiring the whole creation at 
 every instant of time and throughout 
 the infinite spaces, is fundamentally 
 and completely inconsistent with the 
 dualistic conception which sets spirit 
 over against matter, good over against 
 evil, man's wickedness against God's 
 righteousness, and Satan against 
 Christ. The doctrine of God's imma- 
 nence is also inconsistent with the con- 
 ception that he once set the universe 
 
 18 
 
'THE KINGDOM OF GOD" 
 
 a-going, and then withdrew, leaving 
 the universe to be operated under phys- 
 ical laws, which were his vicegerents or 
 substitutes. If God is thoroughly im- 
 manent in the entire creation, there can 
 be no " secondary causes," in either the 
 material or the spiritual universe. 
 The new religion rejects absolutely the 
 conception that man is an alien in the 
 world, or that God is alienated from 
 the world. It rejects also the entire 
 conception of man as a fallen being, 
 hopelessly wicked, and tending down- 
 ward by nature; and it makes this em- 
 phatic rejection of long- accepted be- 
 liefs because it finds them all inconsist- 
 ent with a humane, civilized, or worthy 
 idea of God. . 
 
 If, now, man discovers God through 
 self -consciousness, or, in other words, 
 if it is the human soul through which 
 God is revealed, the race has come to 
 the knowledge of God through knowl- 
 
 19 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 edge of itself; and the best knowledge 
 of God comes through knowledge of 
 the best of the race. Men have always 
 attributed to man a spirit distinct from 
 his body, though immanent in it. No 
 one of us is willing to identify himself 
 with his body; but on the contrary 
 every one now believes, and all men 
 have believed, that there is in a man an 
 animating, ruling, characteristic es- 
 sence, or spirit, which is himself. This 
 spirit, dull or bright, petty or grand, 
 pure or foul, looks out of the eyes, 
 sounds in the voice, and appears in the 
 bearing and manners of each individ- 
 ual. It is something just as real as the 
 body, and more characteristic. To 
 every influential person it gives far the 
 greater part of his power. It is what 
 we call the personality. This spirit, 
 or soul, is the most effective part of 
 every human being, and is recognized 
 as such, and always has been. It can 
 
 20 
 
"THE KINGDOM OF GOD " 
 
 use a fine body more effectively than it 
 can a poor body, but it can do wonders 
 through an inadequate body. In the 
 crisis of a losing battle, it is a human 
 soul that rallies the flying troops. It 
 looks out of flashing eyes, and speaks 
 in ringing tones, but its appeal is to 
 other souls, and not to other bodies. 
 In the midst of terrible natural catas- 
 trophes, earthquakes, storms, confla- 
 grations, volcanic eruptions, when 
 men's best works are being destroyed 
 and thousands of lives are ceasing sud- 
 denly and horribly, it is not a few espe- 
 cially good human bodies which steady 
 the survivors, maintain order, and or- 
 ganize the forces of rescue and relief. 
 It is a few superior souls. The lead- 
 ing men and women in any society, 
 savage or civilized, are the strongest 
 personalities, the personality being 
 primarily spiritual, and only seconda- 
 rily bodily. Recognizing to the full 
 
 21 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 these simple and obvious facts, the fu- 
 ture religion will pay homage to all 
 righteous and loving persons who in 
 the past have exemplified, and made 
 intelligible to their contemporaries, in- 
 trinsic goodness and effluent good-will. 
 It will be an all-saints religion. It 
 will treasure up all tales of human ex- 
 cellence and virtue. It will reverence 
 the discoverers, teachers, martyrs, and 
 apostles of liberty, purity, and right- 
 eousness. It will respect and honor 
 all strong and lovely human beings, 
 seeing in them in finite measure quali- 
 ties similar to those which they adore 
 in God. Recognizing in every great 
 and lovely human person an individual 
 will-power which is the essence of the 
 personality, it will naturally and inev- 
 itably attribute to God a similar indi- 
 vidual will-power, the essence of his in- 
 finite personality. In this simple and 
 natural faith there will be no place for 
 
 22 
 
"THE KINGDOM OF GOD" 
 
 metaphysical complexities or magical 
 rites;"mucE~less for obscure dogmas, 
 the result of compromises in turbulent 
 conventions. It is anthropomorphic; 
 but what else can a human view of 
 God's personality be? The finite can 
 study and describe the infinite only 
 through analogy, parallelism, and 
 simile; but that is a good way. The 
 new religion will animate and guide 
 ordinary men and women who are put- 
 ting into practice religious conceptions 
 which result directly from their own 
 observation and precious experience of 
 tenderness, sympathy, trust, and sol- 
 emn joy. It will be most welcome to 
 the men and women who cherish and 
 exhibit incessant, all-comprehending 
 good-will. These are the " good " 
 people. L These are the only genuinely 
 civilized persons. 
 
Compensation? 
 
 To the wretched, sick, and downtrod- 
 den of the earth, religion has in the 
 past held out hopes of future compen- 
 sation. When precious ties of affec- 
 tion have been broken, religion has held 
 out prospects of immediate and eternal 
 blessings for the departed; and has 
 promised happy reunions in another 
 and a better world. To a human soul, 
 lodged in an imperfect, feeble, or suf- 
 fering body, some of the older religions 
 have held out the expectation of deliv- 
 erance by death, and of entrance upon 
 a rich, competent, and happy life, in 
 short, for present human ills, however 
 crushing, the widely accepted religions 
 have offered either a second life, pre- 
 sumably immortal, under the happiest 
 
RELIGIOUS COMPENSATIONS 
 
 conditions, or at least peace, rest, and 
 a happy oblivion. Can the future re- 
 ligion promise that sort of compensa- 
 tion for the ills of this world, any more 
 than it can promise miraculous aid 
 against threatened disaster? A can- 
 did reply to this inquiry involves the 
 statement that in the future religion 
 there will be nothing "supernatural." 
 This does not mean that life will be 
 stripped of mystery or wonder, or that 
 the range of natural law has been 
 finally determined; but that religion, 
 like all else, must conform to natural 
 law so far as the range of law has been 
 determined. In this sense the religion 
 of the future will be a natural religion. 
 In all its theory and all its practice it 
 will be completely natural. It will 
 place no reliance on any sort of magic, 
 or miracle, or other violation of, or ex- 
 ception to, the laws of nature. It will 
 perform no magical rites, use no occult 
 
 25 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 processes, count on no abnormal inter- 
 ventions of supernal powers, and admit 
 no possession of supernatural gifts, 
 whether transmitted or conferred, by 
 any tribe, class, or family of men. Its 
 sacraments will be, not invasions of law 
 by miracle, but the visible signs of a 
 natural spiritual grace, or of a natural 
 hallowed custom. It may preserve 
 historical rites and ceremonies, which, 
 in times past, have represented the ex- 
 pectation of magical or miraculous ef- 
 fects; but it will be content with nat- 
 ural interpretations of such rites and 
 ceremonies. Its priests will be men 
 especially interested in religious 
 thought, possessing unusual gifts of 
 speech on devotional subjects, and 
 trained in the best methods of improv- 
 ing the social and industrial conditions 
 of human life. There will always be 
 need of such public teachers and spirit- 
 ual leaders, heralds, and prophets. It 
 
 26 
 
RELIGIOUS COMPENSATIONS 
 
 sliould be observed, however, that 
 many happenings and processes which 
 were formerly regarded as supernat- 
 ural have, with the increase of knowl- 
 edge, come to be regarded as com- 
 pletely natural. The line between the 
 supposed natural and the supposed 
 supernatural is, therefore, not fixed 
 but changeable. 
 
 It is obvious, then, that the com- 
 pletely natural quality of the future 
 religion excludes from it many of 
 the religious compensations and conso- 
 lations of the past. Twentieth-cen- 
 tury soldiers, going into battle, will not 
 be able to say to each other, as Moslem 
 soldiers did in the tenth century, " If 
 we are killed to-day, we shall meet 
 again to-night in Paradise." * Even 
 now, the mother who loses her babe, or 
 the husband his wife, by a preventable 
 disease, is seldom able to say simply, 
 " It is the will of God! The babe or 
 
 27 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 the woman is better off in heaven 
 than on earth. I resign this dear ob- 
 ject of love and devotion, who has gone 
 to a happier world/' The ordinary 
 consolations of institutional Christian- 
 ity no longer satisfy intelligent people 
 whose lives are broken by the sickness 
 or premature death of those they love. 
 The new religion will not attempt to 
 reconcile men and women to present 
 ills by promises of future blessedness, 
 either for themselves or for others. 
 Such promises have done infinite mis- 
 chief in the world, by inducing men to 
 be patient under sufferings or depri- 
 vations against which they should have 
 incessantly struggled. The advent of a 
 just freedom for the mass of mankind 
 has been delayed for centuries by just 
 this effect of compensatory promises 
 issued by churches. 
 
Cfje Jftgfjt against 
 
 THE religion of the future will ap- 
 proach the whole subject of evil from 
 another side, that of resistance and pre- 
 vention. The Breton sailor, who had 
 had his arm poisoned by a dirty fish- 
 hook which had entered his finger, made 
 a votive offering at the shrine of the 
 Virgin Mary, and prayed for a cure. 
 The workman to-day, who gets cut or 
 bruised by a rough or dirty instrument, 
 goes to a surgeon, who applies an anti- 
 septic dressing to the wound, and pre- 
 vents the poisoning. That surgeon is 
 one of the ministers of the new religion. 
 When dwellers in a slum suffer the fa- 
 miliar evils caused by overcrowding, 
 impure food, and cheerless labor, the 
 modern true believers contend against 
 the sources of such misery by providing 
 
 29 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 public baths, playgrounds, wider and 
 cleaner streets, better dwellings, and 
 more effective schools, that is, they at- 
 tack the sources of physical and moral 
 evil. The new religion cannot supply 
 the old sort of consolation; but it can 
 diminish the need of consolation, or re- 
 duce the number of occasions for con- 
 solation. 
 
 A further change in religious think- 
 ing has already occurred on the subject 
 of human pain. Pain was generally 
 regarded as a punishment for sin, or as 
 a means of moral training, or as an ex- 
 piation, vicarious or direct. Twentieth- 
 century religion, gradually perfected in 
 this respect during the last half of the 
 nineteenth century, regards human pain 
 as an evil to be relieved and prevented 
 by the promptest means possible, and 
 by any sort of available means, physical, 
 mental, or moral; and, thanks to the 
 progress of biological and chemical sci- 
 
 30 
 
THE FIGHT AGAINST EVIL 
 
 ence, there is comparatively little phys- 
 ical pain nowadays which cannot be 
 prevented or relieved. The invention 
 of anaesthetics has brought into con- 
 tempt the expiatory, or penal, view of 
 human pain in this world. The 
 younger generations listen with incred- 
 ulous smiles to the objection made only 
 a little more than sixty years ago by 
 some divines of the Scottish Presbyte- 
 rian church to the employment of chlo- 
 roform in childbirth, namely, that the 
 physicians were interfering with the 
 execution of a curse pronounced by the 
 Almighty. Dr. Weir Mitchell, a physi- 
 cian who has seen much of mental pain 
 as well as of bodily, in his poem read at 
 the fiftieth anniversary of the first pub- 
 lic demonstration of surgical anaesthe- 
 sia, said of pain: 
 
 "What purpose hath it? Nay, thy quest is vain: 
 Earth hath no answer: If the baffled brain 
 Cries, 'Tis to warn, to punish, Ah, refrain ! 
 31 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 When writhes the child, beneath the surgeon's hand, 
 What soul shall hope that pain to understand? 
 Lo! Science falters o'er the hopeless task, 
 And Love and Faith in vain an answer ask." , 
 
Cfje Ditrine 3ju0tfce 
 
 A SIMILAR change is occurring in re- 
 gard to the conception of divine justice. 
 The evils in this world have been re- 
 garded as penalties inflicted by a just 
 God on human beings who had violated 
 his laws; and the justice of God played 
 a great part in his imagined dealings 
 with the human race. A young gradu- 
 ate of Andover Theological Seminary 
 once told me that when he had preached 
 two or three times one summer in a 
 small Congregational church on Cape 
 Cod, one of the deacons of the church 
 said to him at the close of the service, 
 " What sort of sentimental mush is this 
 that they are teaching you at Andover? 
 You talk every Sunday about the love 
 of God; we want to hear about his jus- , 
 tice." The future religion will not un- 
 dertake to describe, or even imagine, 
 
 $3 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 the justice of God. We are to-day so 
 profoundly dissatisfied with human jus- 
 tice, although it is the result of centu- 
 ries of experience of social good and ill 
 in this world, that we may well distrust 
 human capacity to conceive of the jus- 
 tice of a morally perfect, infinite being. 
 The civilized nations now recognize the 
 fact that legal punishments usually fail 
 of their objects, or cause wrongs and 
 evils greater than those for which the 
 punishments were inflicted; so that pe- 
 nology, or the science of penalties, has 
 still to be created. It is only very 
 lately that the most civilized communi- 
 ties began to learn how to deal with 
 criminal tendencies in the young. In 
 the eyes of God human beings must all 
 seem very young. Since our ideas of 
 God's modes of thinking and acting are 
 necessarily based on the best human at- 
 tainments in similar directions, the new 
 religion cannot pretend to understand 
 
 M 
 
THE DIVINE JUSTICE 
 
 God's justice, inasmuch as there is no 
 human experience of public justice fit 
 to serve as the foundation for a true 
 conception of God's. The new religion 
 will magnify and laud God's love and 
 compassion, and will not venture to 
 state what the justice of God may, or 
 may not, require of himself, or of any 
 of his finite creatures. This will be one 
 of the great differences between the fu- 
 ture religion and the past. Institu- 
 tional Christianity as a rule condemned 
 the mass of mankind to eternal tor- 
 ment ; partly because the leaders of the 
 churches thought they understood com- 
 pletely the justice of God, and partly 
 because the exclusive possession of 
 means of deliverance gave the churches 
 some restraining influence over even the 
 boldest sinners, and much over the 
 timid. The new religion will make no 
 such pretensions, and will teach no such 
 horrible and perverse doctrines. 
 
 35 
 
Religious Consolation 
 
 Do you ask what consolation for hu- 
 man ills the new religion will offer? I 
 answer, the consolation which often 
 comes to the sufferer from being more 
 serviceable to others than he was before 
 the loss or the suffering for which con- 
 solation is needed; the consolation of 
 being one's self wiser and tenderer than 
 before, and therefore more able to be 
 serviceable to human kind in the best 
 ways ; the consolation through the mem- 
 ory, which preserves the sweet fra- 
 grance of characters and lives no longer 
 in presence, recalls the joys and achieve- 
 ments of those lives while still within 
 mortal view, and treasures up and mul- 
 tiplies the good influences they exerted. 
 Moreover, such a religion has no tend- 
 
 36 
 
RELIGIOUS CONSOLATION 
 
 ency to diminish the force in this 
 world, or any other, of the best human 
 imaginings concerning the nature of the 
 infinite Spirit immanent in the universe. 
 It urges its disciples to believe that as 
 the best and happiest man is he who best 
 loves and serves, so the soul of the uni- 
 verse finds its perfect bliss and effi- 
 ciency in supreme and universal love 
 and service. It sees evidence in the 
 moral history of the human race that a 
 loving God rules the universe. Trust 
 in this supreme rule is genuine consola- 
 tion and support under many human 
 trials and sufferings. Nevertheless, al- 
 though brave and patient endurance of 
 evils is always admirable, and generally 
 happier than timid or impatient conduct 
 under suffering or wrong, it must be 
 admitted that endurance or constancy is 
 not consolation, and that there are 
 many physical and mental disabilities 
 and injuries for which there is no con- 
 
 37 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 solation in a literal sense. Human 
 skill may mitigate or palliate some of 
 them, human sympathy and kindness 
 may make them more bearable, but 
 neither religion nor philosophy offers 
 any complete consolation for them, or 
 ever has. 
 
to 
 
 ' 
 
 IN thus describing the consolations for 
 human woes and evils which such a reli- 
 gion can offer, its chief motives have 
 been depicted. They are just those 
 which Jesus said summed up all the 
 commandments, love toward God and 
 brotherliness to man. It will teach a 
 universal good-will, under the influence 
 of which men will do their duty, and at 
 the same time, promote their own hap- 
 piness. The devotees of a religion of 
 service will always be asking what they 
 can contribute to the common good ; but 
 their greatest service must always be to 
 increase the stock of good-will among 
 men. One of the worst of chronic hu- 
 man evils is working for daily bread 
 without any interest in the work, and 
 
 39 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 with ill-will towards the institution or 
 person that provides the work. The 
 work of the world must be done; and 
 the great question is, shall it be done 
 happily or unhappily? Much of it is 
 to-day done unhappily. The new reli- 
 gion will contribute powerfully toward 
 the reduction of this mass of unneces- 
 sary misery, and will do so chiefly by 
 promoting good-will among men. 
 
 A paganized Hebrew-Christianity 
 has unquestionably made much of per- 
 sonal sacrifice as a religious duty. The 
 new religion will greatly qualify the 
 supposed duty of sacrifice, and will re- 
 gard all sacrifices as unnecessary and 
 injurious, except those which love dic- 
 tates and justifies. " Greater love hath 
 no man than this, that a man lay down 
 his life for his friends." Self-sacrifice 
 is not a good or a merit in itself ; it must 
 be intelligent and loving to be meritori- 
 ous, and the object in view must be 
 
 40 
 
"GOOD-WILL TO MEN " 
 
 worth its price. Giving up attractive 
 pleasures or labors in favor of some 
 higher satisfaction, or some engrossing 
 work, is not self-sacrifice. It is a re- 
 nunciation of inferior or irrelevant ob- 
 jects in favor of one superior object; it 
 is only the intelligent inhibition of 
 whatever distracts from the main pur- 
 suit, or the worthiest task. Here, 
 again, the new religion will teach that 
 happiness goes with dutifulness even in 
 this world. 
 
C6e Uplifting 3L : otie of Ctutt) 
 
 ALL the religions have been, to a 
 greater or less extent, uplifting and in- 
 spiring, in the sense that they raised 
 men's thoughts to some power above 
 them, to some being or beings, which 
 had more power and more duration 
 than the worshippers had. When 
 kings or emperors were deified, they 
 were idealized, and so lifted men's 
 thoughts out of the daily round of their 
 ordinary lives. As the objects of wor- 
 ship became nobler, purer, and kinder 
 with the progress of civilization, the 
 prevailing religion became more stimu- 
 lating to magnanimity and righteous- 
 ness. Will the future religion be as 
 helpful to the spirit of man? Will it 
 touch his imagination as the anthropo- 
 
 40 
 
THE UPLIFTING LOVE OF TRUTH 
 
 morphism of Judaism, polytheism, Is- 
 lam, and paganized Christianity have 
 done? Can it be as moving to the hu- 
 man soul as the deified powers of na- 
 ture, the various gods and goddesses 
 that inhabited sky, ocean, mountains, 
 groves, and streams, or the numerous 
 deities revered in the various Christian 
 communions, God the Father, the 
 Son of God, the Mother of God, the 
 Holy Ghost, and the host of tutelary 
 saints? All these objects of worship 
 have greatly moved the human soul, and 
 have inspired men to thoughts and 
 deeds of beauty, love, and duty. Will 
 the new religion do as much? It is rea- 
 sonable to expect that it will. The sen- 
 timents of awe and reverence, and the 
 love of beauty and goodness, will re- 
 main, and will increase in strength and 
 influence. All the natural human af- 
 fections will remain in full force. The 
 new religion will foster powerfully a 
 
 45 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 virtue which is comparatively new in 
 the world the love of truth and the 
 passion for seeking it, and the truth will 
 progressively make men free; so that 
 the coming generations will be freer, 
 and therefore more productive and 
 stronger than the preceding. The new 
 religionists will not worship their an- 
 cestors; but they will have a stronger 
 sense of the descent of the present from 
 the past than men have ever had before, 
 and each generation will feel more 
 strongly than ever before its indebted- 
 ness to the preceding. 
 
 The two sentiments which most in- 
 spire men to good deeds are love and 
 hope. Religion should give freer and 
 more rational play to these two senti- 
 ments than the world has heretofore 
 witnessed; and the love and hope will 
 be thoroughly grounded in and on effi- 
 cient, serviceable, visible, actual, and 
 concrete deeds and conduct. When a 
 
 44 
 
THE UPLIFTING LOVE OF TRUTH 
 
 man works out a successful treatment 
 for cerebro-spinal meningitis a disease 
 before which medicine was absolutely 
 helpless a dozen years ago by apply- 
 ing to the discovery of a remedy ideas 
 and processes invented or developed by 
 other men studying other diseases, he 
 does a great work of love, prevents for 
 the future the breaking of innumerable 
 ties of love, and establishes good 
 grounds for hope of many like benefits 
 for human generations to come. The 
 men who do such things in the present 
 world are ministers of the religion of 
 the future. The future religion will 
 prove, has proved, as effective as any 
 of the older ones in inspiring men to 
 love and serve their fellow-beings, 
 and that is the true object and end of 
 all philosophies and all religions; for 
 that is the way to make men better and 
 happier, alike the servants and the 
 served. 
 
 45 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 The future religion will have the at- 
 tribute of universality and of adapta- 
 bility to the rapidly increasing stores of 
 knowledge and power over nature ac- 
 quired by the human race. As the reli- 
 gion of a child is inevitably very differ- 
 ent from that of an adult, and must 
 grow up with the child, so the religion 
 of a race whose capacities are rapidly 
 enlarging must be capable of a corre- 
 sponding development. The religion of 
 any single individual ought to grow up 
 with him all the way from infancy to 
 age ; and the same is true of the reli- 
 gion of a race. It is bad for any peo- 
 ple to stand still in their governmental 
 conceptions and practices, or in the or- 
 ganization of their industries, or in any 
 of their arts or trades, even the oldest; 
 but it is much worse for a people to 
 stand still in their religious conceptions 
 and practices. Now, the new religion af- 
 fords an indefinite scope, or range, for 
 
 46 
 
THE UPLIFTING LOVE OF TRUTH 
 
 progress and development. It rejects 
 all the limitations of family, tribal, or 
 national religion. It is not bound to 
 any dogma, creed, book, or institution. 
 It has the whole world for the field of 
 the loving labors of its disciples; and 
 its fundamental precept of serviceable- 
 ness admits an infinite variety and 
 range in both time and space. It is 
 very simple, and therefore possesses an 
 important element of durability. It is 
 the complicated things that get out of 
 order. Its symbols will not relate to 
 sacrifice or dogma ; but it will doubtless 
 have symbols, which will represent its 
 love of liberty, truth, and beauty. It 
 will also have social rites and reverent 
 observances; for it will wish to com- 
 memorate the good thoughts and deeds 
 which have come down from former 
 generations. It will have its saints; 
 but its canonizations will be based on 
 grounds somewhat new. It will have 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 its heroes; but they must have shown 
 a loving, disinterested, or protective 
 courage. It will have its communions, 
 with the Great Spirit, with the spirits 
 of the departed, and with living fellow- 
 men of like minds. Working together 
 will be one of its fundamental ideas, 
 of men with God, of men with prophets, 
 leaders, and teachers, of men with one 
 another, of men's intelligence with the 
 forces of nature. It will teach only 
 such uses of authority as are necessary 
 to secure the cooperation of several or 
 many people to one end; and the disci- 
 pline it will advocate will be training in 
 the development of cooperative good- 
 will. 
 
Cfjtfstian TBrot&er&ooD 
 
 WILL such a religion as this make 
 progress in the twentieth-century 
 world? You have heard in this Sum- 
 mer School of Theology much about the 
 conflict between materialism and reli- 
 gious idealism, the revolt against long- 
 accepted dogmas, the frequent occur- 
 rence of waves of reform, sweeping 
 through and sometimes over the 
 churches, the effect of modern philoso- 
 phy, ethical theories, social hopes, and 
 democratic principles on the established 
 churches, and the abandonment of 
 churches altogether by a large propor- 
 tion of the population in countries 
 mainly Protestant. You know, too, 
 how other social organizations have, irj 
 some considerable measure, taken the 
 
 49 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 place of churches. Millions of Ameri- 
 cans find in Masonic organizations, 
 lodges of Odd Fellows, benevolent and 
 fraternal societies, granges, and trades- 
 unions, at once their practical religion, 
 and the satisfaction of their social 
 needs. So far as these multifarious or- 
 ganizations carry men and women out 
 of their individual selves, and teach 
 them mutual regard and social and in- 
 dustrial cooperation, they approach the 
 field and functions of the religion of the 
 ? uture. The Spiritualists, Christian 
 Scientists, and mental healers of all 
 sorts manifest a good deal of ability to 
 draw people away from the traditional 
 churches, and to discredit traditional 
 dogmas and formal creeds. Neverthe- 
 less, the great mass of the people re- 
 main attached to the traditional 
 churches, and are likely to remain so, 
 partly because of their tender associa- 
 tions with churches in the grave crises 
 
 50 
 
CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD 
 
 of life, and partly because their actual 
 mental condition still permits them to 
 accept the beliefs they have inherited 
 or been taught while young. The new 
 religion will therefore make but slow 
 progress, so far as outward organiza- 
 tion goes. It will, however, progress- 
 ively modify the creeds and religious 
 practices of all the existing churches, 
 and change their symbolism and their 
 teachings concerning the conduct of 
 life. Since its chief doctrine is the doc- 
 trine of a sublime unity of substance, 
 force, and spirit, and its chief precept 
 is, Be serviceable, it will exert a strong 
 uniting influence among men. 
 
 Christian unity has always been 
 longed for by devout believers, but has 
 been sought in impossible ways. Au- 
 thoritative churches have tried to force 
 everybody within their range to hold 
 the same opinions and unite in the same 
 observances, but they have won only 
 
 51 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 temporary and local successes. As 
 freedom has increased in the world, it 
 has become more and more difficult to 
 enforce even outward conformity; and 
 in countries where church and state 
 have been separated, a great diversity 
 of religious opinions and practices has 
 been expressed in different religious or- 
 ganizations, each of which commands 
 the effective devotion of a fraction of 
 the population. Since it is certain that 
 men are steadily gaining more and 
 more freedom in thought, speech, and 
 action, civilized society might as well as- 
 sume that it will be quite impossible to 
 unite all religiously-minded people 
 through any dogma, creed, ceremony, 
 observance, or ritual. All these are 
 divisive, not uniting, wherever a reason- 
 able freedom exists. The new religion 
 proposes as a basis of unity, first, its 
 doctrine of an immanent and loving 
 God, and secondly, its precept, Be serv- 
 
CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD 
 
 iceable to fellow-men. Already there 
 are many signs in the free countries of 
 the world that different religious de- 
 nominations can unite in good work to 
 promote human welfare. The support 
 of hospitals, dispensaries, and asylums 
 by persons connected with all sorts of 
 religious denominations, the union of 
 all denominations in carrying on Asso- 
 ciated Charities in large cities, the suc- 
 cess of the Young Men's Christian As- 
 sociations, and the numerous efforts to 
 form federations of kindred churches 
 for practical purposes, all testify to the 
 feasibility of extensive cooperation in 
 good works. Again, the new religion 
 cannot create any caste, ecclesiastical 
 class, or exclusive sect founded on a 
 rite. On these grounds it is not unrea- 
 sonable to imagine that the new religion 
 will prove a unifying influence, and a 
 strong reinforcement of democracy. 
 Whether it will prove as efficient to 
 
 53 
 
THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE 
 
 deter men from doing wrong and to en- 
 courage them to do right as the prevail- 
 ing religions have been, is a question 
 which only experience can answer. In 
 ;hese two respects neither the threats 
 tor the promises of the older religions 
 have been remarkably successful in soci- 
 ety at large. The fear of hell has not 
 proved effective to $eter men from 
 wrongdoing, and heaven has never'yet 
 been described in terms very attractive 
 to the average man or woman. Both 
 are indeed unimaginable. The great 
 geniuses, like Dante and Swedenborg, 
 have produced only fantastic and in- 
 credible pictures of either state. The 
 modern man would hardly feel any ap- 
 preciable loss of motive-power toward 
 good or away from evil if heaven were 
 burnt and hell quenched. The prevail- 
 ing Christian conceptions of heaven and 
 hell have hardly any more influence 
 with educated people in these days than 
 
 54 
 
CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD 
 
 Olympus and Hades have. The mod- 
 ern mind craves an immediate motive or 
 leading, good for to-day on this earth. 
 The new religion builds on the actual 
 experience of men and women, and of 
 human society as a whole. The motive 
 powers it relies on have been, and are, 
 at work in innumerable human lives; 
 and its beatific visions and its hopes are 
 better grounded than those of tradi- 
 tional religion, and finer, because free 
 from all selfishness, and from the im- 
 agery of governments, courts, social 
 distinctions, and war. 
 
 Finally, this twentieth-century reli- 
 gion is not only to be in harmony with 
 the great secular movements of modern 
 society democracy, individualism, so- 
 cial idealism, the zeal for education, the 
 spirit of research, the modern tendency 
 to welcome the new, the fresh powers 
 of preventive medicine, and the recent 
 advances in business and industrial 
 
 55 
 
CHRISTIAN BROTHERHOOD 
 
 ethics but also in essential agreement 
 with the direct, personal teachings of 
 Jesus, as they are reported in the Gos- 
 pels. The revelation he gave to man- 
 kind thus becomes more wonderful than 
 ever. 
 
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