UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 AT LOS ANGELES
 
 6 
 
 ji^v^
 
 RELIGION 
 
 A CRITICISM AND A FORECAST 
 
 G. LOWES DICKINSON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 
 
 MCMV
 
 Copyright, 1905, by 
 McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO. 
 
 Pvhlished, March, 1905, N
 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 I 
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM, 3 
 II 
 
 Revelation, 31 
 
 ii III 
 
 ir: Religion, 60 
 
 i£ 
 
 C 
 
 L IV 
 
 ^" Faith, 73 
 
 208569
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 The chapters that follow were originally published 
 as articles in the Independent Review,^ and are re- 
 printed here by permission. I have left them sub- 
 stantially in the form in which they first appeared, 
 for I do not feel that I am at present in a position to 
 improve them. But periiaps I may make my point 
 clearer by a few words of introduction. My main 
 object has been to raise, definitely and unequivo- 
 cally, the question of the relation of religion to 
 knowledge. I have urged that there is only one 
 method of knowledge, that of experience and legiti- 
 mate inference from experience. And while freely 
 admitting, and even insisting upon, the importance 
 of every kind of experience as material for analysis 
 and discussion, I have argued that any truth that 
 is to be elicited from such experience must be elic- 
 ited by the method of science, in the broad and 
 proper sense of the term. In other words, truth, I 
 
 * See the numbers for October, 1903, and May, June, and No- 
 vember, 1904. 
 
 vii
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 have maintained, is not revealed, in any sense of the 
 word " revelation " which can be appropriately dis- 
 tinguished from the sense of the word " science." 
 And though it may be the case that truth may be 
 knowable or known about God, or the soul, or other 
 objects of religious belief, it can only be known, or 
 knowable, like all other truth, by perception, analy- 
 sis, and inference. 
 
 This, then, is my first point; and it is one of great 
 importance, because it affects the whole position of 
 the Churches. For, unless there is such a thing as 
 revelation, in the sense of a distinct and peculiar 
 avenue to truth, open exclusively to the members of 
 the priesthood of a particular religious organization, 
 such organization can claim no unique privilege as a 
 teacher of doctrine, however useful it may be as a 
 moral or social influence. Once it is admitted that 
 religious truth is attainable, if at all, only by the 
 method of science, it must be conceded also that 
 the notion of a Church with a revelation of divine 
 truth is as absurd as the notion of a mathematical 
 society with a revelation of mathematical truth. 
 Truth, of whatever kind it be, may originate any- 
 where, and be communicable everywhere. 
 
 Supposing this to be admitted, I have gone on to 
 a further question : If religion is not a special revela- 
 tion of truth, what is it ? And I have suggested that 
 viii
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 there is a certain attitude towards life which is very 
 valuable, and which, in my opinion, may appropri- 
 ately be called reUgious. This attitude I have de- 
 fined as a reaction of the imagination upon the world 
 as we conceive it in the light at once of truth and of 
 the ideal. This attitude it is the object of my third 
 chapter to expound and illustrate. But I recognize 
 that many people may hold that the view of religion 
 thus suggested is too wide and too indefinite. Some 
 element, they will maintain, of hope or faith is essen- 
 tial; and they will deny that there can be a religion 
 of pessimism. Such a denial would appear to be 
 inconsistent with the ordinary use of language, see- 
 ing that it is customary to describe Buddhism as a 
 reUgion, although it denies the value of life. But this 
 verbal question is not one of great importance. The 
 important thing is to consider whether, in default of 
 knowledge, there remains open to us a legitimate 
 attitude towards the objects of religion other than, 
 though not interfering with, that of agnosticism. In 
 my last chapter I have suggested that there is such 
 an attitude. I have called it "faith," but with a full 
 recognition of the ambiguity of the word. It has been 
 suggested to me that my meaning would be better 
 expressed by the word "hope." But that word, I 
 think, is too weak, as the other is too strong. What 
 I have wished to indicate is an attitude of what I 
 
 ix
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 may call active expectancy — the attitude of a man 
 who, while candidly recognizing that he does not 
 know, and faithfully pursuing or awaiting knowl- 
 edge, and ready to accept it when it comes, yet cen- 
 ters meantime his emotional, and therefore his prac- 
 tical Ufe about a possibiUty which he selects because 
 of its value, its desirability. Such I conceive to have 
 been the attitude of Plato when he wrote his myths, 
 of Wordsworth when he platonized, of many poets, 
 and perhaps of many religious teachers. I think it 
 an attitude that it is possible to maintain, though I 
 recognize the readiness with which it might lead 
 into the illegitimate position of believing a thing to 
 be true because we desire it. I also think it an atti- 
 tude that is good, for it keeps the horizon open. The 
 mistake of agnosticism, so it seems to me, has been 
 that it has said not merely " I do not know," but "I 
 will not consider." Such a position, I think, is ham- 
 pering, not only to life, but to truth. For the impulse 
 to truth is desire; and all discoveries are prompted 
 by hope and by faith. For this reason the unknown 
 may be more important than the known. Knowl- 
 edge itself may cover the eyes with scales; and such 
 scales it is the business of faith to purge away.
 
 RELIGION 
 
 A CRITICISM AND A FORECAST
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 The practical importance of religion in the history 
 of society, the profound influence it has exercised 
 from the beginning upon human development, the 
 incalculable power of its motives and its sanctions 
 over the whole life of man, are matter that now lies 
 beyond dispute. Never again will it be possible to 
 believe, as it was believed in the eighteenth century, 
 that religion was a cunning invention of priests and 
 kings for their own advantage. We know now that 
 it has its roots deep in human nature, as deep as the 
 primitive instincts and emotions, with which, in- 
 deed, it is inextricably intertwined. No one, what- 
 ever be his own beliefs, can afford not to take ac- 
 count of it; for if it were nothing else, it is a force, 
 and, like all forces, must be reckoned with. 
 
 All the more important is it carefully and dispas- 
 sionately to consider what ought to be its place in 
 the society of the future. And such consideration 
 must, I think, fall under two main heads: First 
 
 [3]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 whether any religion, or which, is true; secondly, 
 whether any, or which, and under what conditions, 
 is desirable or, as some might hold, necessary. To 
 some minds, the second question might seem to be 
 disposed of by the answer to the first. For, it may be 
 said, if a religion is true it ought to be believed, and 
 if it is false it ought to be discredited ; and there is no 
 more to be said about the matter. This opinion, 
 however, I do not think is one that is really at bot- 
 tom accepted by a number of the most influential 
 apologists of religion. On the contrary, religion has 
 in the past derived, and in the present is, I believe, 
 increasingly deriving, a great deal of support from 
 the conviction, not that it is true, but that it is nec- 
 essary. And if it be urged that it is not possible to 
 believe a thing to be true because one desires to be- 
 lieve, I would reply that it is possible at least to 
 decline to consider the matter, to regard the whole 
 inquiry as ruled out by practical considerations, and 
 to support an institution of which the object and 
 function is to perpetuate a belief, merely on the 
 ground, whether or no it be avowed, that the belief 
 is useful. It is for this reason that the question 
 whether religion is desirable may be treated inde- 
 pendently of the question whether it is true — nay, 
 that the answer given to the latter may depend, not 
 in logic, but in practice, on the answer given to the 
 [4]
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 former. And that is my justification for raising the 
 one issue independently of the other. I propose in 
 this chapter to discuss the position, that religion 
 ought to be supported, not primarily because it is 
 true, but because it is necessary to society. And in 
 this discussion I propose to consider that form of 
 religion which seems to offer most support to the 
 position I am examining. This form I shall call 
 ecclesiasticism. 
 
 By ecclesiasticism I mean religion as embodied in 
 a Church; and by a Church I mean an organization 
 which claims to be the depository of a truth other- 
 wise inaccessible to the human reason, and which, 
 therefore, endeavors to propagate its doctrine by 
 appeals, not primarily to the reason, but to the emo- 
 tions, the hopes and fears, the prejudices and habits, 
 the deep-rooted instincts and the aesthetic sensibil- 
 ities of men. It is clear that, if this definition be ac- 
 cepted, there is a great deal of religion which has 
 nothing to do with ecclesiasticism. All that, however, 
 I leave at present out of consideration, not because 
 it is unimportant, but because, for my immediate 
 purpose, it is irrelevant. For a religion which rests 
 simply on the deliverances of an individual con- 
 science could hardly give a basis for the position 
 with which I am concerned. Such a religion is natu- 
 rally anarchic in its tendencies, and has shown itself 
 [5]
 
 R E Ij I G I O N 
 
 to be so in history. It could hardly form a secure 
 foundation for a given order of society; and is not, 
 therefore, the kind of religion supported by those who 
 adopt the view I desire to discuss. An ecclesiastical 
 religion, on the other hand, is essentially stable; and 
 it is this kind of religion that people commonly intend 
 when they assert that religion is necessary to society. 
 The position to which I refer is not so familiar, 
 and has not been so ably and frankly expounded, 
 in England as upon the continent; and to many Eng- 
 lish readers it may seem strange, remote, and unin- 
 telligible. Yet I think it is one which it is of practical 
 importance for us to investigate; for it may be influ- 
 encing, half-unconsciously, many people who have 
 never formulated or avowed it; and it finds natural 
 allies wherever there is an established Church. Nor 
 is it by any means among stupid people only that it 
 finds its recruits. On the contrary, it commends itself 
 specially to those who have been led by their reason 
 to skepticism, and yet have convinced themselves 
 that skepticism is dangerous to society; and these 
 have been sometimes men profoundly versed in hu- 
 man nature, deeply concerned for the good of man- 
 kind, of catholic sympathies and wide experience. 
 The deliberate conviction of such men demands a 
 serious consideration, and I shall endeavor in these 
 pages to give it the weight it deserves. 
 [6]
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 What, then, is the position ? Briefly, I think, it 
 may be put as follows : " It is necessary to the exist- 
 ence of society that men should observe certain rules 
 of conduct; that they should obey the laws, civil and 
 moral, should respect property and life, should cher- 
 ish the family, and should honor the King, or what- 
 ever may be the form of government; that they 
 should be honest in business, faithful in service, gen- 
 erous to the poor, kindly to the weak; that they 
 should hold their country dearer than themselves, 
 and be prepared to sacrifice to it, on due occasion, 
 their wealth, their energies, and their lives. That 
 men do, however imperfectly, conform to such rules 
 as these is the extraordinary, the almost miraculous 
 result of habit and prejudice. But how are 
 habits and prejudices maintained .'' Not, assur- 
 edly, by reason. On the contrary, reason is their 
 great solvent. Teach men to think about the basis of 
 their life, and it crumbles away. For reason is criti- 
 cal, not constructive; it may destroy, but it cannot' 
 create.. The problem, therefore, of statesmen is to 
 lay reason to sleep, so far as fundamental questions 
 are concerned; and for this no better agent can be 
 found than religion as interpreted by ecclesiasticism. 
 For a Church does not doubt, but affirms; does not 
 ask questions, but answers them. Suppressing the 
 critical faculty, it masses in defense of the founda- 
 [7]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 ['\ons of society all the emotional resources of human 
 nature. It not only defines the end, it creates the mo- 
 tive; and is thus, in a profounder sense than the laws, 
 the bond of society. For it is the living spirit, they an 
 external mechanical force. An alliance, therefore, be- 
 tween Church and State is natural, if not indispens- 
 able, and has been felt to be so by some of the great- 
 est statesmen, even by those who themselves have 
 had no religious convictions; whence, for example, 
 the remark attributed to Napoleon ' If the Pope had 
 not existed, I should have had to invent him.' " 
 
 The position thus briefly stated might be copi- 
 ously illustrated from continental writers of the neo- 
 catholic school. I prefer, however, to quote an Eng- 
 lishman, and one who will not be accused of ecclesi- 
 astical prejudices. In Burke's "Reflections on the 
 French Revolution" the superiority of prejudice to 
 reason is a principal and constantly recurring theme ; 
 and for the support of prejudice he looks primarily 
 to the established Church. "We Englishmen," he says, 
 " are generally men of untaught feelings. Instead of 
 casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them 
 to a very considerable degree, and, to take more 
 shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they 
 are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and 
 the more generally they have prevailed, the more we 
 cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and 
 
 [8]
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 trade each in his own private stock of reason, be- 
 cause we suspect that this stock in each man is small, 
 and that the individuals would do better to avail 
 themselves of the general bank and capital of na- 
 tions and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, 
 instead of exploding general prejudices, employ 
 their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which 
 prevails in them. If they find what they seek — and 
 they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue 
 the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast 
 away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but 
 the naked reason: because prejudice, with its reason, 
 has a motive to give action to that reason, and an 
 affection which will give it permanenc^' So much 
 for the value of prejudice. As for the means of main- 
 taining it, we read a little later in the same book: 
 " The English do not consider their Church estabhsh- 
 ment as convenient, but as essential to their State; 
 not as a thing heterogeneous and separable; some- 
 thing added for accommodation; what they may 
 either keep or lay aside, according to their tempo- 
 rary idea of convenience. They consider it the foun- 
 dation of their whole constitution, with which and 
 with every part of which it holds an indissoluble 
 union. Church and State are ideas inseparable in 
 their minds, and scarcely is the one ever mentioned 
 without mentioning the other." 
 
 [9]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 Such is the general theory of the importance of 
 a Church to society as formulated by one of the 
 greatest of English statesmen. But the theory may 
 be further supported by the lessons of history, and 
 especially by that of the French Revolution — the 
 event which, in fact, evoked the utterances that have 
 been quoted from Burke. When Burke wrote the 
 storm had hardly broken. A gleam of sunshine trav- 
 eled in front of the approaching thunder-cloud; and 
 while our English prophet was raising his warning 
 voice the French were dancing in their orchards in 
 anticipation of perennial summer. The tempest 
 burst; and the reality exceeded the worst that Burke 
 had divined. The Church fell, and with it the State; 
 the crust of habit broke and was engulfed ; the cen- 
 tral fire burst through. Every cruelty, every vice, 
 every sordid passion, crept out of hiding and walked 
 the streets, jostling the rarest virtues. Every distinc- 
 tion of good and bad, true and false, was obliterated. 
 A patriot was indistinguishable from an assassin, a 
 republican from a tyrant, a statesman from a buf- 
 foon. Despotism and anarchy formed an incestuous 
 union. And over this carnival of all the disintegrated 
 elements of human nature presided an opera-singer 
 in the guise of the Goddess of Reason. No wonder 
 the English hugged themselves in their ancient or- 
 derly routine, and swore with Burke that they were 
 [10]
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 "resolved to keep an established Church, an estab- 
 lished monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an 
 established democracy, each in the degree in which 
 it exists, and in no greater!" 
 
 It would be easy to multiply examples tending to 
 the same conclusion ; to point to the political ruin of 
 Greece accompanying the development of philoso- 
 phy; to the decline of Roman morals as the State 
 religion lost its hold; to the anarchy, political, intel- 
 lectual and moral, that coincided with the Renais- 
 sance and the Reformation; to the Visconti, the 
 Sforzas, the Borgias, the hysterical tragi-comedy of 
 Munster, and the long agony of the Thirty Years' 
 War. Or, confining ourselves to our own history, to 
 trace the decline of the Puritan ideal, from the 
 serene and starry radiance of Milton, to the dust 
 and ashes of Muggleton and the Muggletonians. It 
 would be easy to do this, if it were worth doing; and 
 all that could be said on such lines would be true. 
 But it would not be the truth. History may be used 
 to support any conclusion, according to the empha- 
 sis of our conscious or unconscious principle of selec- 
 tion. And a history written on the lines suggested 
 above could be met by a rejoinder equally convinc- 
 ing. We have only to select the bad instead of the 
 good elements in stability, and the good instead of 
 the bad ones in disintegration, and the whole phe- 
 [11]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 nomenon will wear a different aspect. For then we 
 shall see, not the excesses of the Revolution, but the 
 iniquities it swept away: the starving peasants, the 
 parasitic Court, the impotent or mischievous admin- 
 istration, industry fettered, intellect muzzled, virtue 
 moldering in the dust. And, concentrating our imag- 
 ination not on the delicate and factitious charm, the 
 brilliancy and wit of the aristocracy of the Court, but 
 on all that lay at the roots, and was the condition of 
 the life of that wonderful flower, we shall regard in a 
 different light both the order of society and the or- 
 ganization by which it was supported; shall hear 
 above the Te Deums of the Church the cries of the 
 persecuted Huguenots, and the inarticulate misery 
 of starving peasants ; and remembering that the voices 
 raised in behalf of common-sense and humanity pro- 
 ceeded not from the pulpit, but from philosophers 
 and atheists, shall turn, not in levity, but in indigna- 
 tion, from Bossuet to Voltaire, and cry, with the 
 great apostle of reason, "Ecrasez I'infame." 
 
 The example is sufficient to indicate the fatal flaw 
 of ecclesiasticism. Just so far as it is calculated to 
 support an existing order, just so far is it compelled 
 to perpetuate abuses ; for every conviction that repu- 
 diates reason repudiates also criticism, and therefore 
 reformation. An ecclesiastical system moves, it is 
 true, as a coherent and stable whole, but it moves 
 [12]
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 under the control of fixed ideas; and these, even if 
 once they were in accord with what is good and true, 
 fall inevitably out of touch with it by the mere lapse 
 of time. Of this the whole history of the Catholic 
 Church is an illustration. That Church is now com- 
 monly regarded as one of the great civilizing agencies 
 of the world; and I have no desire to dispute its 
 claims. Let all that is urged for it in this respect be 
 granted. Let it be admitted that it evolved order out 
 of chaos, that it civilized barbarism, that it fostered 
 the virtues of charity and peace in an age of univer- 
 sal war, that it kept alive the tradition of philosophy 
 and culture, fostered the arts, disciplined the mind, 
 and inspired the spiritual life. Let all this be admit- 
 ted, and nevertheless it is true that the evil wrought 
 by the Catholic Church is so incalculable that a 
 sober and impartial historian would hesitate to pro- 
 nounce whether, even to an age of barbarism, it was 
 more of a blessing than a curse. Consider its record. 
 If it has preached peace, it has also filled the world 
 with war; if it has saved life, it has also destroyed it; 
 if it has raised the spirit, it has also degraded it; if it 
 has kindled the intelligence, it has also extinguished 
 it. Deliberately and in cold blood, in pursuance of a 
 policy, it has tortured the .souls and burnt the bodies 
 of men. Deliberately it has .struck at the root of vir- 
 tue by evoking and fostering slavish fear and desire, 
 [13]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 by promising a material heaven and threatening a 
 material hell. Deliberately it has invited men to lie, 
 and punished them for adhering to the truth. Delib- 
 erately it has arrested, so far as it could, the nascent 
 growth of science, and thwarted the only activity by 
 which man may alleviate his material lot, and set 
 himself free for the triumphs of the mind and the 
 spirit. In saying this, I am stating simple matters of 
 fact, such as no competent historian will dispute. 
 And the point I want to make is, that the Good and 
 the Evil of the Church have both proceeded from 
 the same principle, from the principle of ecclesias- 
 ticism. Because the Church claimed to possess a rev- 
 elation, therefore it conquered the world, and there- 
 fore also it harried and tortured its conquest. Be- 
 cause it relegated reason to a secondary place, 
 therefore it produced Dante and Aquinas, and 
 therefore also it persecuted Galileo and burnt Bruno. 
 Because it appealed primarily not to the intelligence 
 of men, but to their fears and desires, therefore it 
 imposed upon them an authoritative moral order, 
 and therefore also it invited anarchy when the order 
 was superseded. 
 
 For even the anarchy attributed to reason might 
 
 more truly be attributed to the attempt to suppress 
 
 it. That it is which divorces reason from experience, 
 
 which makes it revolutionary and rebellious, instead 
 
 [14]
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 of tentative, cautious, and practical; so that, in 
 truth, the very order which ecclesiasticism has 
 founded and sustained has prepared the chaos by 
 which it has been succeeded. For if history shows 
 anything, it shows that an ecclesiastical order will 
 not endure permanently; and, it may be added, if it 
 could, such endurance would be more fatal than any 
 amount of confusion. For every order imposed upon 
 the will at the expense of reason becomes, in the 
 course of time, whatever it may have been at the out- 
 set, a chain that is only the more fatal to life if it is 
 not felt to gall. To trust society to the naked reason 
 is to run the risk of anarchy, but to trust it to eccle- 
 siasticism is to incur the certainty of petrifaction. 
 
 With the view thus put forward, probably most 
 Englishmen, and even most English churchmen, 
 will be inclined to agree, supposing the premises — 
 the antithesis between ecclesiasticism and reason — 
 to be accepted. But this antithesis may be denied; 
 for reason, it may be urged, is not to be found in a 
 pure and abstract form. It is inevitably biassed by 
 something that is not rational. No one judges of what 
 is good and true, so to speak, in vacuo, for man is not 
 man in the abstract, as certain philosophers have 
 loved to delineate him, but man here and now, of 
 this century, of this or that place, of this or that call- 
 ing in society. He is an Englishman, or a Frenchman, 
 [15]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 or a German; he has been brought up in such and 
 such a home, in a slum or in the West End, in Lon- 
 don, in a provincial town or in the country; he has 
 been educated in a public school or in a Board 
 school, or, it may be, at home; he has been to a uni- 
 versity or he has not; he is an artisan, or an agricul- 
 tural laborer, or a miner; a professional man, a 
 politician, a journaHst, or a gentleman at large; he 
 has been in love or he has not ; he is married or sin- 
 gle; he has traveled or stayed at home; and the total 
 result of all these influences has been to envelop him 
 in an atmosphere which determines, whether he 
 knows it or not, all his most apparently unbiassed 
 and objective opinions. But ecclesiasticism is only a 
 way of creating such an atmosphere dehberately, in- 
 stead of leaving it more or less to chance; and in so 
 doing ecclesiasticism is only doing, more effectively 
 and thoroughly, what is done by every home and 
 every educational institution. A child takes the col- 
 or of his en\aronment at home or at school as inev- 
 itably as he takes the color of his Church. In neither 
 case is reason the predominant or even an important 
 factor. TVTiy, then, should ecclesiasticism be singled 
 out among the innumerable non-rational influences 
 for special contrast with those that are rational ? 
 
 The answer is that ecclesiasticism labors, delib- 
 erately and of set purpose, to fix the mind and char- 
 
 ri6i
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 acter permanently in a certain mould — so far, at 
 least, as what may be called fundamentals are con- 
 cerned. Its object is not merely to give a certain bias 
 
 — that is the object of every educational institution 
 
 — but to make the subject immune against all other 
 influences to which he may be exposed in the course 
 of his Ufe. It is not so much the more or less uncon- 
 scious giving of a bent that is in question; it is the 
 giving of a bent which is, so to speak, itself a bent to 
 a bent. It is the deliberate effort to prevent a man 
 ever coming into the rights of his reason on the as- 
 sumption that, in the most important matters, the 
 reason is incompetent. This is a thing very different, 
 and different in a most important way, both from 
 the unconscious and inevitable action of social envi- 
 ronment, and from such direct or indirect inculca- 
 tion of moral habits as must be part of the work of 
 any system of education. For the inculcation of such 
 habits is quite compatible with such a development 
 of the reason as will enable it in turn, when it is ripe, 
 to question and to criticise them; whereas it is the 
 very object of ecclesiasticism, as I have defined it, 
 and as it has historically existed, to prevent the rea- 
 son from ever making claims in the region reserved 
 for revelation. The reason, it is true, will not, in 
 either case, be acting in vacuo. But in the one case it 
 is encouraged — or, at least, permitted — to act 
 
 [17]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 within the Hmits of its range; in the other it is dchb- 
 erately bound and tied. 
 
 The distinction may be illustrated by a concrete 
 example. An ordinary public-school boy is submit- 
 ted, while he is at school, to very strong habitual in- 
 fluences, to a weight of public opinion more con- 
 stant and more powerful in its pressure than he is 
 likely ever to meet with again in the course of his 
 life. Whether these influences are more good than 
 bad I do not at present discuss. What I wish to point 
 out is that, strong as they are, they are not what I 
 have called ecclesiastic in their character; and that, 
 although the services of the Church of England are 
 part of the traditional routine, these services do not 
 — and I believe I may fairly say they are not in- 
 tended to — work powerfully upon the intellectual 
 attitude of the boy. They are rather, if anything, 
 one of the means of preventing him from having any 
 such attitude. It is the boast of the school — whether 
 justified or not is not at present the question — that 
 it turns him into a healthy, instinctive kind of crea- 
 ture, decent, well-mannered, and, on the whole, 
 right-feeling, but without any intellectual bias at all, 
 and without any views or prejudices as to the basis 
 of religious belief or the authority of the Church. 
 Such a boy, transferred to the university, may very 
 likely go through his career there in the same condi- 
 [18]
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 tion of intellectual atrophy; but if his intelligence 
 does awake, it will awake free. There will be nothing 
 in the discipline of the university, any more than 
 there was in the discipline of the school, to fetter it 
 — nothing, that is, except the unconscious and inev- 
 itable influences of the society in which he moves. 
 He may, as he often does, speculate boldly on the 
 foundations of belief; may lose what is called his 
 "religious faith," but what very commonly is no more 
 than a block of unassimilated ideas, laid down like 
 a pavement over the springs of religion by years of 
 habitual but passive church-going; may question 
 moral intuitions commonly supposed to be funda- 
 mental; and, after many mistakes and blunders, may 
 emerge from it all a really useful and stimulating 
 person, with some chance of contributing his mite 
 to the clarification of ethical, social, and religious 
 ideas. 
 
 But, now, imagine that the public schools and the 
 universities were to adopt the ecclesiastical position; 
 that they were to fall into a state of panic over the 
 decline of religious belief, and to have recourse to 
 ecclesiastical machinery to remedy it. From that 
 moment everything would be transformed. Just so 
 far as the system were successful, just so far would 
 the public-school boy be converted from a healthy 
 barbarian into a hypocrite, a fanatic, or a saint. The 
 [19]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 chapel services, instead of being, as they are now, 
 merely a part of the discipline of the school, would 
 become real instruments of propaganda. Every 
 agency of rhetoric, of ritual, of emotional and sen- 
 suous appeal, would be brought to bear, to make 
 him feel and assimilate, with his whole being, what 
 would rapidly cease to be the intellectual proposi- 
 tions, and come to be the instinctive belief, that the 
 Church is of divine authority, that it has a final and 
 immutable revelation of truth, that in philosophy, 
 in ethics, in social institutions, the last word has been 
 said, and that the function of the present is simply to 
 apply, to the changing conditions of life, the known, 
 fundamental, and eternal truths. At the university he 
 would be subjected to the same influences. His whole 
 training would be conditioned by the rule, that there 
 is to be no inquiry into the foundations of belief. 
 And the result would be that the universities would 
 turn out year after year a succession of able, highly- 
 educated men, whose one aim, so far as they had a 
 public aim at all, would be to preserve and perpetu- 
 ate those institutions and ideas which it had been 
 the object of their whole training to impress auto- 
 matically upon their minds. Henceforth they would 
 be hermetically sealed against the bacilli of new ex- 
 perience. Argument, feeling, touch, sight, would avail 
 them nothing. Whatever might act as a solvent upon 
 [20]
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 the structure of their ideas would be met simply as 
 an enemy. Polemics would be their only method of 
 controversy; and, though they might be able to con- 
 vert, they would be unable to convince, just as they 
 would be unable to be convinced, because they 
 would be unable to conceive that their adversary 
 might be right. 
 
 If this account of an ecclesiastical education be 
 thought to be fanciful or exaggerated, I would ask 
 the reader to recall the discipline devised for the 
 propagation of his Order by one who was, perhaps, 
 the greatest ecclesiastical genius the world has ever 
 known; I mean the founder of the Society of Jesus. 
 The training of a Jesuit as prescribed in the famous 
 Institutes was based upon a process which a modern 
 man of science might describe as self-hypnotization. 
 By intense and solitary meditation, accompanied by 
 physical exercises, by fastings, flagellations, postures, 
 groanings, weepings, he forced himself, so far as pos- 
 sible, to realize, to re-enact in his own person, the 
 Passion of Christ, to ascend with Him to heaven, to 
 taste, in anticipation, the joys of His kingdom, and 
 to share the tortures of the damned in hell. Not the 
 imagination only, and the intelligence, but almost 
 the very physical senses were compelled to co-oper- 
 ate in this deliberate hallucination. He must not only 
 think and conceive; he must hear, see, touch, and 
 [21]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 taste. The whole personahty, intellectual, moral — 
 one might almost say physical — was run in this way 
 into a final mold. That it should take that shape, 
 uncritically, passively, not of conviction, but of force, 
 was the essence of the whole process. But once that 
 was achieved, development was permitted and en- 
 couraged along the lines thus rigidly prescribed. 
 The mind henceforth was the tool of unquestioning 
 faith. It might calculate, but it must not reason; it 
 might devise means, but it must not consider ends. 
 Every accomplishment the Jesuit may and should 
 acquire; he should be a linguist, a mathematician, a 
 man of science perhaps, above all a man of the world, 
 accomplished, pohte, persuasive, plausible, up to 
 date in his knowledge, his methods, his arts; he may 
 be anything and everything, so long as he does not 
 think, and obeys. He may study history as much as 
 he likes, but it must be history as interpreted by the 
 Church; he may study Latin and Greek, provided 
 that he remains insensible to the classical spirit; he 
 may study science, so long as he does not permit it to 
 react upon theology. Nay, all these things he ought 
 to study, in order that he may meet the enemy on his 
 own ground. Only that the enemy is the enemy, that 
 the truth is the truth, that the Church is the Church, 
 and that his whole duty is to subordinate to the in- 
 terest of bis Order all his powers, spiritual, intellec- 
 [22]
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 tual, moral, and physical — this is the never-forgot- 
 ten command of his hypnotic dream, of the fixed 
 idea branded upon him at the outset of his career by 
 the deliberately non-rational discipline to which he 
 ' has been subjected. Once for all he has been cured of 
 / the possibility of asking," Why ? " His reason has not 
 I been killed. No! It has been chained to the car of 
 Faith ; and in the car rides theology triumphant, sur- 
 rounded by the saints of the Order, and crushing 
 under the wheels the heretic, the speculator, and the 
 unbeliever. 
 
 The example, it will perhaps be admitted, is suffi- 
 cient to prove that there is an antagonism between 
 ecclesiasticism and reason different in kind from 
 that which exists between reason and any ordinary 
 prejudice; that it is the object of an ecclesiastical 
 system not merely to create an atmosphere, but to 
 paralyze beforehand the agency by which that at- 
 mosphere might be disturbed; with the result, no 
 doubt, of encouraging stability, but only at the cost 
 of arresting growth. But it may be said that eccle- / 
 siasticism, as I have defined it, has ceased to exist, 
 or, at least, has no future before it. If I thought that, 
 I should not have troubled to write this chapter. But 
 it is not, I believe, a view that is borne out by a sur- 
 vey of contemporary history. On the Continent, at 
 any rate, the battle between ecclesiasticism and rea- 
 [23]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 son appears to be raging with an intensity of which 
 we in this country have Httle conception. And, even 
 in England, is it so clear that the issue has not been 
 raised ? The Church of England, I readily admit, 
 has not commonly been ecclesiastic in the extreme 
 and uncompromising sense in which I have been 
 using the term. It has been, on the whole, and in 
 comparison with the Church of Rome, a friend of 
 compromise and of common-sense. But it will be 
 admitted that of late years it has been animated by 
 a spirit very different from that which inspired it 
 during the eighteenth, and for the most part during 
 the nineteenth, century. Whether or no, from certain 
 points of view, that spirit may be judged to be better 
 than the old one, I am not at present concerned to 
 dispute. I can believe that it is more zealous, more 
 active, more devoted, more fruitful in a certain kind 
 of result; but I am sure, and that is the point with 
 which I am concerned, that it is more ecclesiastic. 
 Every day it appears more and more to make the 
 kind of claims that are made by the Roman Catho- 
 lic Church, every day more and more to develop a 
 similar machinery for silencing, by emotional ap- 
 peals, the protests of the reason. While preserving 
 the social and other advantages of the establishment, 
 it is apparently determined not to acquiesce in the 
 accompanying restraints. Now, just so far as the 
 [24]
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 Church of England adopts this attitude, just so far as 
 it assimilates itself to the Church of Rome, just so far 
 is it alienating from itself not merely that large and 
 increasing section of thoughtful Englishmen who 
 cannot, except by courtesy, be called Christians 
 (though they certainly cannot fairly be described as 
 irreligious), but also the whole body of Christian 
 thought and sentiment included in the various Non- 
 conformist bodies. A militant Church, confident in 
 its mission, will, of course, regard such a statement 
 rather as a challenge than as a warning. It will go in 
 and fight, and expect to win. Only let it not suppose 
 that the challenge so made will not be taken up. 
 Many who would be glad to be relieved of the duty 
 of setting themselves in antagonism to the Church, 
 who feel to the full the appeal of its historical asso- 
 ciations, to whom its ritual, its architecture, the very 
 rooks amongst its ancient elms, preach in every vil- 
 lage and town with an eloquence the more poignant 
 and profound that it is half-stifled in the smoke, the 
 din, the multitudinous squalor of this age of futile 
 industry — many, I say, who do not accept Chris- 
 tianity, and who yet would be loth to attack the 
 Christian Church, will be, and are being, daily 
 driven into an attitude of hostility by the new eccle- 
 siastical policy and methods. The Church, it would 
 seem, has before it — I hardly know whether I 
 [25]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 ought to say *' has" — two courses sharply contrasted 
 and defined; and the future of the spiritual life of 
 England will, I believe, be largely determined by its 
 choice, if choice is still open to it. Either, while pre- 
 serving its organization intact, and the tradition of 
 its forms and ritual, it may develop its intellectual 
 position in the broad daylight, in full and candid 
 intercourse with the reasoned convictions of men, 
 and with their developing moral experience — and 
 this, I take it, is the attitude of what is, or was, the 
 Broad Church — or, reverting to the position of a 
 final and exclusive revelation, claiming, not merely 
 a continuity of tradition, but an identity of funda- 
 mental doctrine with the mediaeval Church, insist- 
 ing on a special and privileged position as the inter- 
 preter of God to man, repudiating philosophy, and 
 so much of science as cannot be reconciled with its 
 dogmas, and appealing always, in the last resort, not 
 to reason and experience, but to authority, it may 
 set itself, as the Church of Rome has done, across 
 the whole intellectual movement of the age, and play 
 for a supremacy over the conscience and the spiritual 
 life deliberately based on supernatural claims, sup- 
 ported and reinforced by the Confessional and Mass. 
 What may be the issue of the conflict thus provoked 
 I do not care to predict. I know only that, should the 
 Church be victorious, it will have saved society from 
 [26]
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 the possibility of intellectual and spiritual anarchy, 
 only at the cost of arresting the growth of science, 
 the development of the conscience, and all the hopes 
 of a new and happier order which have been the in- 
 spiration of the noblest minds of the past century. 
 
 It is the issue thus adumbrated that gives a more 
 than temporary interest to the controversy still rag- 
 ing in connection with the recent Education Act. 
 The reason why the continued control by the Church 
 of more than half the elementary schools in the coun- 
 try is regarded with grave mistrust by many who are 
 not animated by the jealousy of rival sects is simply 
 the avowed determination of leading champions of 
 the Church to use their power in the interest of eccle- 
 siasticism. They hope to lay the foundation of their 
 control over the intelligence of the country by bring- 
 ing up a generation imbued from its earliest years 
 with an instinctive and non-rational conviction of the 
 authority of the Church, the efficacy of its sacra- 
 ments, and the truth of its theology. This, and this 
 only, can be meant by the creation of an " atmos- 
 phere"; this, and this only, by the expressed hope 
 that the school may have a door opening into the 
 Church. To begin so is to start upon the inclined 
 plane which leads to a completely developed system, 
 such as that which was elaborated by the Jesuits. 
 Whether the attempt is likely to be successful in Eng- 
 [27]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 land I do not pronounce; but I am sure that it is one 
 that the EngUsh, if they are true to their history, 
 should resist to the uttermost. 
 
 I have thus stated briefly, and, I hope, not intem- 
 perately, what appear to me to be the vaHd objec- 
 tions to ecclesiasticism and to its intrusion into our 
 schools. And if, in conclusion, I be asked, What, 
 then, should be the aim of an educational system ? I 
 would reply. To surround a child with all the influ- 
 ences which society may judge to be healthy for body 
 and soul, while at the same time training the under- 
 standing to become, when it is ripe, the critic and 
 judge of those influences. The position has been put 
 once for all by Plato, in a passage which ought to be 
 inscribed over the door of every school in the king- 
 dom. Plato, it is true, presupposes, what is also pre- 
 supposed by the Church, that the atmosphere to 
 which the children would be subjected in his ideal 
 commonwealth would be the right and true one, so 
 that the reason, when it awoke, would inevitably 
 approve the discipline to which it had been subjected 
 while it slept. But, on the other hand, concurrently 
 with the training of healthy instincts and percep- 
 tions, he postulates a free and liberal development 
 of the understanding, and leaves to that the last word 
 on the legitimacy of the whole process. Here is the 
 passage — one that goes far beyond the scope of our 
 [28]
 
 ECCLESIASTICISM 
 
 contemporary disputes, and might well serve as an 
 inspiration, not only to the Church, but to all who 
 have in any degree the control of our national edu- 
 cation : 
 
 "We would not have our Guardians grow up 
 amid images of moral deformity as in some noxious 
 pasture, and there browse and feed upon many a 
 baneful herb and flower day by day, little by little, 
 until they silently gather a festering mass of corrup- 
 tion into their own souls. Let our Artists rather be 
 those who are gifted to discern the true nature of the 
 beautiful and graceful : then will our youth dwell in a 
 land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and re- 
 ceive the good in everything; and beauty, the efflu- 
 ence of fair works, shall flow into the eye and ear, 
 like a health-giving breeze from a purer region, and 
 insensibly draw the soul from earliest years into like- 
 ness and sympathy with the beauty of reason." 
 
 " There can be no nobler training than that," he 
 replied. 
 
 "And therefore," I said, "Glaucon, musical train- 
 ing is a more potent instrument than any other, be- 
 cause rhythm and harmony find their way into the 
 inward places of the soul, on which they mightily 
 fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him 
 who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is 
 ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who 
 [29]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 has received this true education of the inner being 
 will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art 
 and nature, and, with a true taste, while he praises 
 and rejoices over and receives into his own soul the 
 good, and becomes noble and good, he will justly 
 blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, 
 even before he is able to know the reason why: and, 
 when reason comes, he will recognize and salute the 
 friend with whom his education has long made him 
 familiar. " * 
 
 With what a breath of the air of dawn, what a 
 gleam of Mediterranean light, do these words come 
 wafting, as in a blue heaven, over the delirious fumes 
 of the Middle Ages, to remind us of what men were 
 before they had learned to distrust their own fairest 
 impulses and instincts, and to seek in authority the 
 Good and the True which it is their pri\dlege to 
 divine through experience. With this passage sound- 
 ing in our ears, I am content to leave the subject. 
 For the spirit of Greece is the antithesis of the spirit 
 of ecclesiasticism. And those who regard the latter as 
 a danger could seek no better prophylactic than a 
 wider and more popular dissemination of Greek 
 culture. 
 
 * Translation by Davies and Vaiighan. 
 
 [30]
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 REVELATION 
 
 In discussing, in the preceding chapter, what I have 
 called ecclesiasticism, I defined it as religion embod- 
 ied in a Church ; and a Church I defined as an organ- 
 ization which claims to be the depository of a truth 
 otherwise inaccessible to the human reason. I offered 
 some arguments tending to show that the existence of 
 such organizations — at any rate, when they adopt 
 to the full the logical consequences of their position 
 — has been, and perhaps still is, a grave danger to 
 society. But I did not in that discussion approach the 
 more fundamental question of the nature and justi- 
 fication of the claim to possess an authority indepen- 
 dent of, an superior to, reason, and the connection of 
 religion with such a claim. It is this question which I 
 propose to discuss in the present chapter. 
 
 In doing so, I shall have to venture boldly and 
 without reserve upon topics which it is customary to 
 treat with a reticence hardly compatible with com- 
 plete honesty. Perhaps, therefore, I may be permitted 
 [81]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 at the outset to express my regret should anything I 
 may say give offense to the rehgious instinct of any 
 of my readers. Nothing is further from my intention 
 or desire; and, indeed, I hardly believe that it will be 
 those who have the finest sense of religion that will 
 be the most inclined to resent my candor. Rather it 
 is precisely they who will be the most willing to in- 
 vestigate the ground and nature of their belief, and 
 who will repudiate the application to this momen- 
 tous question of a method of hushing up and slurring 
 over which they would deprecate in any of the ordi- 
 nary business of life. Such readers, I think, will not 
 receive what I have to say in a spirit of hostility, how- 
 ever profoundly they may disagree with it. And 
 should they, as may very probably be the case, find 
 my treatment to be more summary and dogmatic 
 than comports with the difficulty of the subject, I will 
 ask them to remember that I am sacrificing much 
 that might otherwise be desirable to the effort to 
 state precisely and clearly an issue which, as I think, 
 is precedent to all theology, and vital to all religion. 
 
 That issue I would put, in a preliminary way, as 
 follows : 
 
 " Is there a way of attaining truth about real exist- 
 ences which is different in kind from the method of 
 science or of philosophy — which depends not upon 
 direct perception, internal or external, clarified by 
 [32]
 
 REVELATION 
 
 analysis, tested by comparison, and supplemented 
 by inference, but upon some peculiar and unique 
 intuition having a validity superior to any other, and 
 not properly subject to the ordinary critical tests ? ' ' 
 Some such way of attaining truth seems to be im- 
 plied in what is called revelation. And it is the claim 
 to rest upon revelation that gives to religion, as it is 
 commonly conceived, a unique and peculiar place 
 among the forms of human activity. It is that which 
 underlies the exceptional position assumed by 
 Churches, and gives an exceptional weight to partic- 
 ular books. And, though I do not myself think that 
 religion depends upon revelation, yet its character 
 cannot fail to be profoundly modified by our accept- 
 ance or rejection of such an avenue to truth. The 
 question, therefore, which I propose to put is one of 
 great importance. It is the question whether the idea 
 of revelation can be made to agree with the normal 
 intellectual assumptions of the twentieth century; 
 and we may, perhaps, best approach it if we begin 
 by asking what kind of truth it is that is supposed to 
 he communicable by revelation, and not communi- 
 cable by other methods ; for by taking this point first 
 we shall be able to narrow the field of inquiry. 
 
 Now, if we consider the great religions of history, 
 and especially Christianity, with which we in Europe 
 are most immediately concerned, it appears that they 
 [33] 
 
 u
 
 R K L I G I O N 
 
 include in their revelation two distinct kinds of infor- 
 mation: the first dealing with matters of fact stated 
 to have occurred in the past, the second with truths, 
 aflSrmed to be eternally valid, about God and His 
 relation to the world. I shall first take the question of 
 historical fact — the propositions, let us say, that 
 Jesus Christ existed at such and such a date, that He 
 was born of a virgin, that He did and said such and 
 such things, that He was crucified and buried, that 
 He rose again, and that He ascended into heaven; 
 and on this point I would simply ask my readers 
 whether they really do believe that facts of that kind 
 ought to be accepted on any other evidence than that 
 of history itself — whether they believe that there is 
 a short-cut to those particular pieces of information, 
 such as would certainly be repudiated in the case of 
 any other historical events ? If any one replies in the 
 affirmative, I have on this head no more to say. But 
 if, on the other hand, it be agreed that the truth of 
 the story of the life and death of Christ must stand 
 or fall by the ordinary criteria of evidence, then that 
 whole question is removed from the sphere of reve- 
 lation to that of history; and religion, so far as it is 
 conceived to depend upon the facts we are consider- 
 ing, becomes dependent upon historical inquiry. 
 This is, in fact, the position which, as I cannot but 
 believe, educated and intelligent men do now, and 
 [34]
 
 REVELATION 
 
 will more and more in the future, adopt. But if that 
 be so, and in so far as it is so, the result must be a 
 profound modification of the character of religious 
 beHef. 
 
 For those who are acquainted with the nature of 
 historical inquiries, the uncertainty of testimony, the 
 prejudice of witnesses, the doubtfulness of docu- 
 ments, who have watched, in other religions than 
 the Christian, the growth of myths and the creation 
 of fictitious personalities, may easily assure them- 
 selves, without entering far into the laborious in- 
 quiry, that its results are bound to be in the highest 
 degree tentative and uncertain, that scholars to the 
 end of the chapter will continue to disagree and to 
 dispute, and that, in fact, there is not evidence suffi- 
 cient in quality or in quantity to establish any 
 unquestionable final truth. Now, in an ordinary his- 
 torical inquiry, this might be a matter of small mo- 
 ment. Men do not much or profoundly care whether, 
 for example, Lycurgus existed or no, what was the 
 exact contribution to the constitutional history of 
 Athens of the reforms of Draco or of Solon, nor 
 about any of the thousand and one similar points 
 which are the subject of historical controversy. But 
 it is a very different matter when they are asked to 
 stake their whole conception of life on the dubious 
 result of inquiries so difficult. And a man who thinks 
 [35]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 about the issue at all, and is bent upon honesty, will, 
 I believe, incline to set aside the whole controversy 
 as irrelevant to whatever is really essential in religion, 
 and seek elsewhere than in history the basis on which 
 to erect the fabric of his belief and conduct. He may, 
 indeed, find a religious inspiration in the recorded 
 life and sayings of Christ. But the inspiration would 
 be the same, whether he regarded the record of the 
 Gospels as myth or as fact, and would depend, not 
 on the existence of Christ in the past or in the pres- 
 ent, but on the conception of life embodied in His 
 story. 
 
 Such, I cannot but think, must be the ultimate 
 result on every really religious and candid mind, of 
 an acceptance of the scientific criterion in connection 
 with the recorded life of Christ. It does not, of course, 
 follow that many men will not continue for a long 
 time to reject this conclusion. For men tend always 
 to believe what they want to beUeve, not what they 
 are justified in believing; and many people do very 
 much want to beheve in the factual truth of the story 
 of Christ, if only because they have made it the foun- 
 dation of their religious faith. But, on the other hand, 
 those, be they many or few, who care enough about 
 religion to care whether it is true, know, or may 
 know, that the truth or falsehood of the story of 
 Christ can only be decided by historical investiga- 
 [36]
 
 REVELATION 
 
 tion; and, knowing that, those who have the pro- 
 foundest sense of what reHgion means will prefer, I 
 think, to rest it on the immediate experience of Ufe, 
 rather than on the result of inquiries into a remote 
 and uncertain past. 
 
 The readers who have gone with me so far I will 
 now ask to go a step further. Supposing that we have 
 handed over to science all questions of historical fact, 
 does there remain some other kind of truth which 
 may be held to be communicable by revelation .'* 
 "Yes," it will be replied, "there remain what are 
 really the most important truths of religion: the ex- 
 istence and nature of God and His relation to the 
 world." Let us proceed, then, to consider these. And 
 in the first place, let us note that, as a matter of fact, 
 in the case of Christianity, as of the other great his- 
 torical religions, the truth in question is intimately 
 bound up with that factual truth which we have sug- 
 gested must be relegated to the court of science. 
 Christians believe that God exists, that He has such 
 and such a character, and that He cares about and 
 directs the world, primarily because they believe 
 that Jesus Christ existed and taught in the manner 
 recorded. So far, then, as the doctrines of Christian 
 theology depend upon these facts, they stand or fall, 
 if the position I put forward be accepted, by the ver- 
 dict of history. I will suppose, however, that it is 
 [37] 
 
 2085(39
 
 RELIGION 
 
 urged that there is a direct revelation of theological 
 truth, a revelation which may be confirmed, but can- 
 not be shaken, by history, and which is communi- 
 cated somehow to some special sense, so as not to be 
 reducible to a department of science. 
 
 This revelation may be supposed to be communi- 
 cated either to an individual mind or to a Church. 
 But the revelation to a Church must, I suppose, be 
 conceived to rest originally upon revelation to indi- 
 \aduals. It is the latter, therefore, as the more funda- 
 mental, which I shall consider. And I shall proceed 
 straight to what appears to be the fundamental ques- 
 tion: What are the marks by which a revelation is 
 recognized, and which lead a man to separate off a 
 certain set of his convictions, and say that they were 
 arrived at by a route, and represent a kind of cer- 
 tainty, different from all others .'' 
 
 The answer to this question ought clearly to be 
 given by one who is conscious of possessing this spe- 
 cial avenue to truth, not by one who, like myself, is 
 aware that he does not possess it. Judging, however, 
 from what has been said on the subject by those pro- 
 fessing to have experience, and from what appear to 
 be the general possibilities of the case, I venture to 
 suggest that revelation can only be conceived in one 
 of two ways: either as an immediate intuition con- 
 veyed in what is regarded as a moment of supernor- 
 [38]
 
 R E V P: I> A T I O N 
 
 mal perception; or as the gradually garnered result 
 of the normal experience of life. I shall consider each 
 of these possibilities in turn. 
 
 And, first, with regard to the intuition of the ex- 
 ceptional moment. It is, of course, indisputable that 
 such experiences occur, and are conceived by those 
 who receive them to be communications of absolute 
 truth; the familiar phenomenon of "conversion" is 
 a case in point. But, for our present purpose, the im- 
 portant question is whether the belief of the recipi- 
 ent in the evidential value of the experience is justi- 
 fied; and I think that a little consideration will show 
 that it is not, for it is noticeable that the truth sup- 
 posed to be revealed in the moment of conversion is 
 commonly, if not invariably, the reflection of the 
 doctrine or theory with which the subject, whether 
 or no he has accepted it, has hitherto been most 
 familiar. I have never heard, for example, of a case 
 in which a Mohammedan or a Hindoo, Avithout hav- 
 ing ever heard of Christianity, has had a revelation 
 of Christian truth ; or even of a case of the conversion 
 in this way to Roman Catholicism of one who has 
 been brought up an Evangelical, or vice versa. Con- 
 version, in fact, it would .seem, is not the communi- 
 cation of a new truth; it is the presentation of ideas 
 already familiar in such a way that they arc accom- 
 panied by an irresistible certainty that they are true. 
 [39] 
 
 L^
 
 RELIGION 
 
 But this sense of certainty may attach to any kind of 
 intellectual content. If a man has been brought up a 
 Christian, he will be converted to a belief in Christ; 
 if he has been trained as a Hindoo, he will receive 
 the vision of the Absolute ; if he is optimistic by tem- 
 perament, he will have a revelation that the worid 
 is good; if pessimistic, it will be borne in upon him 
 that it is bad. All of these revelations cannot be true. 
 One may be true and the others false. But in that 
 case we must find our criterion of truth and false- 
 hood somewhere else than in the subjective certainty 
 of the converted person. And that this must be so 
 will be even more clear when we reflect that, so far 
 as the element of subjective certainty is concerned, a 
 religious revelation cannot be distinguished from 
 what would be admitted to be the hallucinations of 
 disease. There is no idea in a person's mind which 
 may not, under the appropriate conditions, become 
 an idee fixe, and substitute itself, in the conscious- 
 ness of the patient, for what is commonly taken to 
 be reality. A man may be convinced with equal assur- 
 ance that he is a poached egg or a saint; that he has 
 a mission to assassinate the King or to redeem the 
 world ; that he is eternally damned or eternally saved ; 
 that he has had a vision of the Virgin Mary or a 
 vision of Nirvana. I do not suggest that there is no 
 distinction in truth and value between the various 
 [40]
 
 REVELATION 
 
 ideas that may thus be imposed by moments of emo- 
 tional excitement upon different minds — that the 
 visions, say, of St. Francis are not more important 
 than those of Marie Alacoque, or the conversion of 
 St. Paul than that of a dipsomaniac in the Salvation 
 Army. But it is indisputable that the test of validity 
 must be sought somewhere else than in the sense of 
 certainty felt by the person who claims to have had 
 the revelation. In other words, the truth of a doc- 
 trine supposed to be thus conveyed, or the goodness 
 of a moral intuition, must be sifted, before they can 
 be accepted, by the ordinary critical processes; and, 
 except as the result of such a sifting, performed de- 
 liberately and again and again, in calm and normal 
 moments, no man who is at once religious, honest, 
 and intelligent, will or ought to accept the deliver- 
 ances of any so-called revelation of this type. But to 
 admit this is to admit that we reject revelation as a 
 basis of religion; if, that is, revelation be conceived as 
 the direct communication of truth in a moment of 
 supernormal, or, as is just as likely to be the case, of 
 infranormal experience. 
 
 But if revelation be not so conceived, how is it to 
 be conceived ? Many people who have experience of 
 religion would, I think, reply somewhat as follows : 
 
 " We received originally — on authority, if you 
 like — a certain doctrine which also commended 
 [41]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 itself to our affections — the doctrine, in brief, which 
 we conceive to contain the essence of Christianity: 
 that there is a God who loves us as a Father loves His 
 children; that Jesus Christ is His son; that He lived 
 upon earth and died upon the cross; that His death 
 is the assurance of our redemption; and that that 
 redemption is gradually working itself out under His 
 immediate direction in the course of the history of 
 the world and of individual lives. Further, we believe 
 that souls are immortal, and are destined — those 
 of them, at least, who are saved — to enter into eter- 
 nal bliss. The doctrines thus received we have car- 
 ried with us through the experience of life; and, if 
 once we believed it on authority, we believe it now 
 because we have found that it w^orks. At moments of 
 trouble we have had recourse to it, and have not 
 found it to fail us. We have proved it to be progres- 
 sively capable of interpreting experience. And when 
 we say that it is 'revealed,' what we mean is that, 
 though we could never have arrived at it by the un- 
 aided operation of the reason, yet, once it was given 
 us, we tested and found it to be true. We cannot, in- 
 deed, prove it by the intelligence, but we have proved 
 it by life; and, though its source be super-rational, 
 in its operation it has shown itself to be reasonable." 
 I do not know whether, in this brief statement, I 
 iave done justice to the position of those whom I 
 [42]
 
 REVELATION 
 
 respect as at once the most religious and most ra- 
 tional of Christians. But I have endeavored to do so; 
 and I must now indicate what I conceive to be the 
 intellectual weakness of the position, without ques- 
 tioning its efficacy as a rule of life. 
 
 And, first, I must point out that the view I have 
 indicated depends, in part at least, on the assump- 
 tion that the story of the Gospel is true. But that, I 
 have urged, is a matter that can be determined only 
 by historical criticism, and about which it is hardly 
 to be expected that such criticism will ever attain to 
 certainty. No experience of life can affect the conclu- 
 sion one way or the other. Either Christ existed, and 
 was as described, or He did not. And the truth on 
 this subject cannot be modified by the fact that it is 
 possible to weave about His recorded history an emi- 
 nently consolatory and helpful scheme of life. Fur- 
 ther, with regard to the other elements of the doc- 
 trine — the existence and nature of God and the 
 immortality of the soul — these, though in the Chris- 
 tian scheme they are closely connected with the belief 
 in Christ, are no doubt capable of being held inde- 
 pendently. But, even so, in what sense can they be 
 said to be " revealed 'i " The fact that they afford a 
 solution of the riddle of the world which to many 
 minds is satisfactory does not in itself show anything 
 about their truth or falsehood. It shows merely the 
 [43]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 tremendous bias under which criticism has to act. 
 The behef in what is called revelation is, I fear, in 
 such an instance as this, only a reflection of the in- 
 tense need to believe. But such need can be no guar- 
 antee of truth, though it may be the most fruitful im- 
 pulse in the search for truth. Here, too, the fact that 
 the belief works is no evidence of its validity, but 
 only of its efficacy. Its validity can only be tested by 
 the ordinary processes of criticism. And this is a fact 
 which it will, I cannot but think, become increasingly 
 impossible for the most religious and the most can- 
 did minds to deny. There is no general presumption 
 that what is helpful and good is also true. We may 
 desire, and rightly, that it should be so; and that de- 
 sire may be, as I believe it is, the main stimulus in 
 our search for truth. But it cannot be more; and it is, 
 I feel sure, to the interest of religion, as well as of 
 science, that this should be recognized as soon and as 
 widely as possible. 
 
 This must conclude what I had to say on the sub- 
 ject of revelation. Revelation, I have suggested, in 
 proportion as men become honest, educated, and 
 intelligent, will cease to be regarded as a satisfac- 
 tory basis for religion ; for it will be increasingly rec- 
 ognized not to be an avenue to truth. And if, so far, I 
 have carried my readers with me, I will ask them to 
 proceed with me to the further question: Granting 
 [44]
 
 REVELATION 
 
 that revelation must be set aside, does religion dis- 
 appear with it ? Or does the ordinary experience of 
 life evoke and justify some point of view which may 
 properly be called religious ? 
 
 In attempting an answer to this question, it will 
 be useful, I think, to call attention to a feature which 
 is common to all the great religions, and which dif- 
 ferentiates them, on the one hand, from mere philo- 
 sophical theories of the universe, and, on the other, 
 from mere ethical systems. The point I have in mind 
 is that they combine in a close and indissoluble union 
 two things which logically are quite distinct — name- 
 ly, first, propositions about the nature of the world 
 and man's relation to it; secondly, statements of 
 values, of objects which ought to be pursued, and 
 ought to give rise, perhaps do give rise, to passion- 
 ate aspiration. Thus, on the one hand, in providing 
 a system of the universe, they bring it into close con- 
 nection with life by associating it with ideals; and, 
 on the other, in recommending ideals, they im- 
 mensely enhance their attractive force by postulat- 
 ing that they can and will be realized in actual exist- 
 ence. But the elements which are thus closely 
 associated in religion are, as I have said, logically 
 distinct. A sound and true perception in the region of 
 ideals may be accompanied by ignorance and miscon- 
 ception in the region of fact, and vice versa. And this, 
 [45]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 I think, is what has happened in the case of the great 
 reHgions. Take, for instance, Christianity. It is com- 
 monly, and, 1 think, rightly, credited with embody- 
 ing moral values of profound and singular import- 
 ance, such, for example, as the brotherhood of man ; 
 and, on the other hand, intellectually, its whole sys- 
 tem of fact, its cosmology and theology, is, to say the 
 least, inadequate. The story of the Garden of Eden, 
 of the apple and the serpent, of the Fall, of the pen- 
 alty incurred, not by Adam and Eve merely, but by 
 the whole human race, of the Atonement by a vicari- 
 ous sacrifice, of the two societies, the World and the 
 Church, pursuing through history, side by side, 
 their diverse destiny, the one to eternal damnation, 
 the other to eternal blessedness — all this is mere 
 mythology, and mj-thology not of the most edifpng 
 kind. But originally, it must always be remembered, 
 this mythology was seriously put forw'ard, not as a 
 metaphor or symbol, but as a matter of fact, by the 
 man who, more than any one else, laid the foundation 
 of Christian theology. It was accepted as matter of 
 fact by the Church. And if now, as I suppose is very 
 largely the case, it is interpreted as mere allegory, 
 that ver}' fact only illustrates the point I wish to 
 make, that a religion which embodies profound 
 moral intuitions may associate them with views about 
 the universe so inadequate and crude that subse- 
 [46]
 
 REVELATION 
 
 quent generations have no choice but to interpret 
 them as symbolism. There is thus an inherent insta- 
 bility in the great religions, due to the fact that their 
 prophets, commonly men of unique moral insight, 
 have associated their moral teaching with theories 
 about the world based upon no proper method of 
 inquiry, and unable to meet the first brunt of intelli- 
 gent criticism. 
 
 And this brings me to the conclusion at which I 
 am driving. If the whole development of the human 
 mind in the last few centuries is not to be reversed, 
 if we are not to relapse into intellectual barbarism, it 
 will become increasingly impossible for any theory 
 about the constitution of the world and the meaning 
 of human destiny to be accepted, wliich does not 
 rest explicitly upon the basis of science and philoso- 
 phy, and is not amenable to, and competent to sus- 
 tain, their criticism. In other words, it is not, and 
 cannot be, the function of religion to proclaim truths 
 about the general structure of the universe, or to 
 affirm that this or that Being does or does not exist. 
 And the frank recognition of this fact implies that, 
 whatever religion may be in the future, it will be, 
 unless all the intellectual heritage of the world is to 
 be lost, something very different from what it has 
 been in the past. 
 
 Let us turn now to the other aspect of religion, 
 [47]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 that whereby it embodies statements of moral values. 
 These are not necessarily affected by the truth or 
 falsehood of the cosmological ideas with which they 
 have been associated. And, in the future, as in the 
 past, there will be, one may anticipate and hope, 
 men of profound intuition in these matters, who will 
 deliver their message to the world. The main differ- 
 ence that may be anticipated in the attitude of men 
 towards the teacher will be that they will no longer 
 regard him as a person radically different from them- 
 selves, as a God or the Son of God, nor conceive his 
 message to have a final, exhaustive, and infallible 
 significance; but, rather, will recognize him to be a 
 man like themselves, only more finely endowed, and 
 will know that it is their duty, as it will be the duty 
 of those who succeed them, not merely passively to 
 accept, but to appropriate, to sift, and to test, the 
 gospel he announces. They will regard him, in brief, 
 as a poet, a saint, a practical reformer, and value 
 and follow him accordingly, up to the measure of his 
 merits and of their lights. 
 
 Now, granting all this, as I believe it will be grant- 
 ed by the readers whom I have in view, will there or 
 will there not, under these conditions, be any place 
 left for anything that ought properly to be called re- 
 ligion ? I believe that there will, and a very impor- 
 tant one. There will still be an interaction, though 
 [48]
 
 REVELATION 
 
 no longer a fusion, between our conception of the 
 world and our ideals. The former, indeed, we shall 
 then take, probably in a very tentative form, from 
 science and philosophy ; the latter we shall hold more 
 loosely, less dogmatically, though not, therefore, with 
 less conviction than before. But, in some form or 
 other, we shall have both ; and religion will consist 
 in the passionate apprehension, not merely by the 
 intellect but by the imagination, of the nature, as we 
 conceive it, of the world as a whole, and of our place 
 in it, regarded from the point of view of our ideals. 
 But the further elaboration of this position I must 
 leave to the next chapter. 
 
 [49]
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 RELIGION 
 
 In the preceding chapter I gave reasons that seem 
 to me to necessitate the rejection of revelation, in any 
 sense of the term which I have been able to imagine, 
 as an avenue to truth, and therefore as a basis for 
 religion. I suggested, however, that religion would 
 remain, even if we rejected revelation, and even, as I 
 am now inclined to add, all the more because we 
 have rejected it. For religion, in the view of it which 
 I now wish to develop, is a reaction of the highest 
 imagination of the best men upon life and the world, 
 so far as we know them by experience and science — 
 a passionate apprehension, from the point of view of 
 ideals, of the general situation in which we find our- 
 selves. 
 
 That situation, in essentials, has not been changed 
 by all the developments of history; and I will venture 
 briefly to describe it as follows. We find ourselves 
 born without choice of our own into a universe which 
 we do not understand, and which corresponds, as it 
 [50]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 seems, only in the most imperfect and fragmentary 
 way with those of our desires and aspirations which 
 we increasingly believe to be legitimate and good. 
 From this universe we are removed, as we entered it, 
 without notice or warning, and without any refer- 
 ence to our willingness or unwillingness to depart — 
 
 " Without asking, hither hurried whence f 
 And, ivithout asking, whither hurried hence?" 
 
 Before departing, we have, commonly and without 
 much reflection, produced others to undergo in their 
 turn the same enigmatic destiny. And so from gener- 
 ation to generation the race is continued, achieving 
 much, yet accomplishing nothing; learning much, 
 yet remaining ignorant of everything; acting, tliink- 
 ing, feeling, yet haunted by the doubt whether it is 
 not all a dream ; pursuing Good and contending with 
 Evil in a scheme of things which never appears itself 
 to take sides; developing the means to happiness, yet 
 never becoming happier; pressing ever onward to 
 goals that are never reached; and retiring, section 
 after section, bafiled but never acknowledging de- 
 feat, to make room for new combatants in the con- 
 test that is always old. 
 
 Such, or .somewhat such, is the situation. And it is 
 in an attitude of the spirit towards this situation that 
 the essence of religion, I would suggest, consists; 
 [51]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 not in opinions held about it, not in the intellectual 
 content of beliefs — these may be of almost any 
 character without thereby becoming or ceasing to be 
 religious — but in the imaginative perception and 
 feeling of the issue, however it be interpreted. It is 
 not, in a word, the doctrine that makes religion, it 
 is the spirit; and the spirit may inspire the most 
 diverse and contradictory doctrines. This is expres- 
 sed for the modern world better than I have found 
 it expressed elsewhere, in the following passage of 
 Maeterlinck : 
 
 " Je puis croire d'une maiiieresi religieuse et^infinie qu'il n'y a 
 pas de Dieu, que mon apparition n'a pas de buth ors d'elle-m me, 
 que I'existence de mon ame n'est plus necessaire a I'economie de ce 
 monde sans limites que les nuances ephemeres d'une fleur; vous 
 pouvez croire petitement q'un Dieu unique et tout-puissant vous 
 aime et vous protege; je serai plus heureux et plus calme que vous, 
 si mon incertitude est plus grande, plus grave et plus noble que 
 votre foi, si elle a interroge plus intimement mon ame, si elle a fait 
 le tour d'un horizon plus etendu, si elle a aime plus de choses. Le 
 Dieu auquel je ne crois pas deviendra plus puissant et plus conso- 
 lateur que celui auquel vous croyez, si j'ai merite que mon doute 
 repose sur des pensees et sur des sentiments plus vastes et plus 
 purs que ceux qui animent votre certitude. Encore une fois, croire, 
 ne pas croire, cela n'a guere d'importance; ce qui en a, c'est la 
 loyaute, I'etendue, le d^sinteressement et la pofondeur des raisons 
 pour lesquelles on croit ou pour lesquelles on ne croit point." 
 
 Is truth, then, indifferent ? Not at all ! But — and 
 this is what we must learn to accept — religion can- 
 not teach us what is true. Only perception, and infer- 
 
 [52]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 ence, and logic, only, in the broadest sense, science 
 — under which, for the moment, I will asked to be 
 allowed to include philosophy — can teach us 
 anything about the constitution of the universe and 
 our own place in it; can teach us whether or no there 
 be anything corresponding with what we have called 
 God; whether or no the individual soul survives 
 death; whether or no the process of things moves 
 towards a good end. These are, to my mind, ques- 
 tions of supreme importance. But I do not think that 
 the existence or the value of religion depends upon 
 the answer we may be able to give them, although 
 its character must be determined by that answer. 
 
 Let me illustrate my meaning by examples. Sup- 
 pose a man to have accepted — as many now have, 
 provisionally at least — the view which seems to be 
 suggested by modern science: that the world as a 
 whole is neither good nor bad, but simply indifferent 
 to moral values; that the life of mankind is but a 
 brief and insignificant episode in its strictly deter- 
 mined but purposeless activity; that it tends to no 
 goal having ethical significance, still less to one cor- 
 responding to our conceptions of Good — suppose 
 man to have accepted this, is he therefore debarred 
 from religion ? Surely not. On the contrary, there 
 would seem to be open to him two attitudes at least, 
 either of which he will adopt, according to his char- 
 [53]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 acter, if he has the religious instinct at all, and either 
 of which may be fairly called religious. Thus he may, 
 adhering passionately to our standards of value (none 
 the less true because their realization is so imperfect 
 and precarious), pursue, wherever it flees, the per- 
 ishing image of Good, imprisoning it in a rule or a 
 policy, impressing it on a fugitive act, embalming 
 it in the flux of feeling, reflecting it in the mirror of 
 art, always from the consciousness of frustration 
 drawing new \ngor for the chase, snatching defiance 
 from the sense of defeat, patience from the fire of 
 passion, from the very indifference of the universe 
 gathering the inspiration to contend with it, and, 
 though at last he be broken, perishing unsubdued, 
 weaker yet greater than the blind world which, 
 though it made him and destroyed, was incapable of 
 understanding or valuing its own creation. Such a 
 man, sustained by such a conviction, honestly held, 
 I should call religious. And if to some he should ap- 
 pear rather to be blasphemous, that will be only 
 because they do not share what I have supposed to 
 be his intellectual position. Granting a bad or indif- 
 ferent world, to defy it would be a form of religion. 
 But not the only possible form, even on that hypothe- 
 sis. For where one man practises defiance, another 
 may practise renunciation; and the conviction that 
 Good cannot be realized, or can be realized, if at all, 
 [54]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 only in connection with greater Evil, may lead to the 
 creed of the annihilation of desire, instead of the 
 affirmation of will. Escape, not battle, then becomes 
 the goal, as in the Buddhist faith, and the philosophy 
 of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. And this attitude, 
 too, will be religious, if it be greatly and imagina- 
 tively conceived — religious, not by virtue of its in- 
 tellectual content, but by virtue of the sense of a 
 world-issue turning upon the ideas of Good and 
 Evil. 
 
 But, now, suppose a radically different scientific 
 conception of the world. Suppose it to be believed 
 that our ideas of Good and Evil are also those with 
 which the universe is concerned; that it is moving 
 towards a goal, and a goal of which we approve; 
 that with it moves the human race, and even indi- 
 vidual souls, surviving death, and ultimately enter- 
 ing into their perfection. On this view religion 
 assumes a radically different complexion. It is opti- 
 mistic instead of pessimistic; it has exchanged the 
 horror of night for the midday sun. But it is still relig- 
 ion, for its essence is still the same — an imaginative 
 conception of the universe as a whole in relation to 
 Good and Evil. 
 
 Or, again, suppose that, to another man, science 
 does not appear to justify any attitude towards the 
 universe as a whole except that of agnosticism; sup- 
 [55]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 pose he feels that he does not know, that no one really 
 knows, what is the relation of our ideals to the world ; 
 whether or no they are destined for any complete and 
 permanent realization; whether or no there is any 
 significance in individual lives other than that which 
 appears on the surface. Still, if his imagination and 
 his feeling be profound, he is not debarred from re- 
 ligion — a religion not of sunshine or darkness, but 
 of the starr}' twilight, tremulous with hopes and fears, 
 wistful, adventurous, passionate, divining a horizon 
 more mysterious and vast than day or night can sug- 
 gest, from uncertainty conjuring possibility, from 
 doubt evoking inspiration, and passing through life 
 as a man may float down an unknown river in the 
 dusk, risking and content to risk his fortune and his 
 life on the chance of a discovery more wonderful 
 even than the most audacious of his dreams. 
 
 Enough, perhaps, has been said to bring out the 
 point I wdsh to make, one, as I believe, of the very 
 first importance to all who care at once for religion 
 and for truth. Truth is matter of science, religion of 
 imagination and feeling. It is possible to have truth 
 without having religion, and vice versa. But if a man 
 have religion, its character, if he be intelligent and 
 sincere, will necessarily depend on what he beheves 
 to be truth. He will not imagine that religion implies 
 some special organ of knowledge, whether such or- 
 [56]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 gan be supposed to be the possession of all men as 
 such, or of specially gifted individuals, or of a par- 
 ticular Church. He will never confuse his desires 
 and his aspirations with his positive knowledge, even 
 though he may think them more important than his 
 knowledge. And he will be the less inclined to do 
 this in proportion as he has come to see that, what- 
 ever be the truth, there must always be a place for 
 religion, and a place perhaps the most important of 
 all. But it is a poor religion that needs to rest upon 
 falsehood or upon the deliberate refusal to face what 
 we know of truth ; that takes refuge in excitement, or 
 in sophistry, or in deliberately induced subjective 
 hallucinations, from a truth which it fears may be 
 fatal to itself. Religion is an attitude of the imagina- 
 tion and the will, not of the intellect. But from the 
 intellect it receives its light; and its discipline will be 
 the more arduous, its insight the more profound, the 
 more candidly it accepts all that the intellect can 
 communicate. It is possible, it is common, to believe 
 in God, without having religion; it is less common, 
 but it is not less possible, to have religion without 
 believing in God. 
 
 Such, then, stated briefly, is what I conceive to 
 be the real relation of religion to truth. I do not know 
 that I could better explain my view by further elabo- 
 ration ; and I will therefore proceed to another point, 
 [57]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 perhaps not less important. I will endeavor to set 
 forth the relation of religion, in my sense of the term 
 to the other ideal activities of man — to morals, that 
 is, and to art. And, first, with regard to morals. The 
 statement that conduct depends upon religion is very 
 often made, and there may be, in some sense, some 
 truth in it; but in what sense, and what truth, is not 
 so easy to determine. I will, however, endeavor to 
 make certain distinctions which I think are impor- 
 tant. A great part of conduct — the whole conduct 
 perhaps, of most people — is purely habitual. It ap- 
 pears to depend neither on religion, nor on any con- 
 scious conviction, either of the intellect or of the 
 imagination. ]\Ien act as they do, in this the more 
 common case, because they cannot help it, because 
 they have always done so, because others about them 
 do so. Economic necessities, imitation, public opin- 
 ion — which itself is the result of these factors — 
 are the determining considerations. It is, however, 
 sometimes maintained that habitual action of this 
 type depends also upon another element ; that really, 
 though indirectly, it is determined by rehgion; for 
 that the fact of a Church in the background, with its 
 organization, its ser\'ices, its sacraments, acts, if in no 
 other way, yet as a kind of screen, shutting out from 
 the horizon of practicability all sorts of anarchic and 
 anti-social conduct which otherwise would naturally 
 [58]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 suggest itself to the imagination, and might then nat- 
 urally issue in action. This is a contention which I 
 have already discussed in dealing with what I have 
 called ecclesiasticism. It is very hard, I think, to say 
 whether there is any, or how much, truth in it. But 
 if there be any, then, so far, it must be admitted that 
 even habitual and mechanical conduct depends, in 
 the last resort, not, indeed, on personal religious con- 
 viction, but on the existence, in the society, if not of 
 rehgion, at least of religious organization. Supposing, 
 however, that such organization is developed on the 
 lines of ecclesiasticism, I have given my reasons for 
 belie\ang that the harm it does outweighs the possi- 
 ble good. The proper way to make and keep men 
 moral is to help them to conditions of life in which 
 morality would be possible, and in which it would 
 be backed and supported by intelhgence. Good con- 
 duct based on mere habit supported by the author- 
 ity of a Church is at the best a pis aller; and the 
 necessity which may be held to justify it is one which 
 also condemns the society that cannot exist without 
 recourse to it. 
 
 But, further, there is a certain amount of conduct 
 which may be said to be based upon reason; by 
 which I mean that it may depend, in part at least, 
 upon the deliberate and conscious acceptance of a 
 certain end — such, for example, as the greatest 
 [59]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 happiness of the greatest number; and upon the 
 attempt to act in such a way as will tend to bring 
 about that end. Even in such cases the conduct, I 
 think, is really far more habitual than would be ad- 
 mitted by those who adopt the position. They act, 
 in fact, much as other people act; but they believe 
 that the rules to which they are accustomed, and to 
 which they instinctively conform, are such as will 
 contribute, if duly observed, to the goal they have in 
 view. And, no doubt, in the case supposed, they are, 
 partly at least, right ; for customary action has grown 
 up under the stress of felt, if not formulated, pur- 
 poses, of which one at least has been the survival 
 and the welfare of society. Conduct of this kind I 
 should describe as rational; but it does not neces- 
 sarily imply religious conviction. A man pursuing it 
 need not have any passion for the good end he has 
 set before liimself; he may have merely an intellec- 
 tual conviction that it is good; as, indeed, I think is 
 commonly the case with those who profess utilitar- 
 ianism. Still less need he have any imaginative 
 conception of the universe as a whole, and of the 
 relation to it of our ideals. In such cases, conduct, I 
 think, clearly does not depend in any sense upon 
 religion; and, for aught I know, in some society of 
 the future conduct of this kind may be the general 
 rule. 
 
 [60]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 I hardly, however, think that this is probable. 
 The religious instinct is, I believe, too deeply rooted 
 ever to disappear; and wherever and whenever it 
 subsists as a genuine impulse, in individuals or in 
 societies, it cannot help reacting profoundly upon 
 morals. Indeed, if we look historically at the devel- 
 ment of conduct, we find that the great moral re- 
 formers have been men of religious genius; that 
 Buddha, Jesus Christ, Saint Francis, were, first, 
 rehgious teachers, and, secondly, only^ teachers of 
 morals. Indeed, a profound ethical intuition would 
 seem necessarily to depend on a profound religious 
 insight. For the best man is he who loves good for its 
 own sake, and pursues it in a reasonable way. But to 
 pursue it reasonably is to pursue it with an intelli- 
 gence of its place in the universe, and not merely an 
 intelligence, but a passionate apprehension. So that 
 moral genius depends upon religious genius, and 
 therefore, since it must be affected by anything that 
 affects religion, will be affected by the deliverances of 
 science about the world. 
 
 From this analysis, imperfect as it is, it would seem 
 to follow that, though it be true that the great mass 
 of conduct is based rather upon habits than upon 
 conviction, yet even these habits grew up in connec- 
 tion with religion, and perhaps cannot subsist indefi- 
 nitely without a new religious baptism; and that the 
 [61]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 great reformations in morals have been originated by 
 men of religious genius, upon the stream of which 
 they have, as it were, been floated. Afterwards, no 
 doubt, they are left high and dry, like sea-weed on 
 the rocks; but, then, like it, they are deprived of their 
 proper element. Only the flooding of the tide can 
 restore them to their true and native life, lift and ex- 
 pand and set them to sparkle and gleam with a thous- 
 and colors, or, it may be, sweep them away and 
 plant new seeds, to produce in their time a new and 
 radiant foliage. We can and we do, most of us, for 
 the most part, act without religion ; but such action is 
 the action of machines. Rehgion is the spirit and the 
 Ufe; and in that sense, a very profound one, rehgion 
 may be said to be the basis of conduct. 
 
 Thus, briefly, of the relation of religion to conduct; 
 I turn now to consider its relation to art. And here I 
 may be met, at the outset, by the contention that 
 there is no such relation at all. For artists, or at least 
 modern artists, are urgent in their repudiation of the 
 dependence of their art upon an}i:hing but itself; and 
 I presume that, so far as their own inspiration is con- 
 cerned, they are right. Art is now very largely a not 
 too sincere hobby of the rich, a matter of drawdng- 
 room decoration, of fashion, of conversation over tea, 
 or, what is really most important, of pecuniary spec- 
 ulation. In the best cases, where the artist at least is 
 [62]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 genuine, it is a creation of beautiful things for the 
 love of beauty, without reference to any view of life 
 as a whole, or any place to be filled by its products in 
 the corporate activities of society. And it is thus, per- 
 haps, that artists at all times have most commonly 
 regarded their art. But there have been exceptions. 
 There have been, it seems, men who have been pro- 
 foundly inspired by the view of art first formulated, 
 so far as I know, by Aristotle : that beauty is the end 
 set before herself by Nature, an end which she real- 
 izes so far as the limitations of matter permit, but 
 which it is reserved for the artist to bring to full per- 
 fection, his work being thus the fulfilment of her 
 ideal. And if in this view Nature be conceived as 
 herself the minister of God, art will become a relig- 
 ious activity — as indicated, for example, in the fol- 
 lowing lines of Michael Angelo: 
 
 "So, all the lovely things we find on earth 
 Resemble, for the send that rightly sees. 
 That Source of bliss divine which gave us birth: 
 Nor have we first fruits or remembrances 
 Of heaven elsewhere." * 
 
 I have thought it worth while to refer, in passing, 
 to this conception of art; but I do not wish to lay un- 
 due stress upon it. It is, perhaps, exceptional for an 
 artist to pursue art in a religious spirit. What, how- 
 
 * Sonnet 54 in Symonds' translation. 
 [63]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 ever, is true and important is that, in the two greatest 
 periods of European art, the Greek and the ItaUan, 
 art was used and inspired by rehgion. And it would, 
 I think, be unhistorical to deny that the perfection it 
 attained in those periods was connected with the 
 definite purpose, the hmitations, the unity of aim, 
 imposed by the end to which it was made subservient. 
 However that may be, there can be no doubt that, 
 for the votary who is sensitive both to rehgion and 
 art, both gain indefinitely by their association with 
 one another. For him, without art religion is dumb; 
 and without religion art, if it is not insignificant, 
 lacks at least the highest significance of which it is 
 capable. 
 
 It may be worth while, in illustration of this point, 
 to remind the reader of the various ways in which 
 art has been made, and perhaps might be made 
 again, contributory to religion. First, as architecture, 
 it has raised the material habitation of the Divine, 
 and in doing so has reflected, I think, by a perhaps 
 unconscious symbolism, the forms in which that 
 Divine has been conceived. Surely, at least, one 
 might question whether the difference between a 
 classical temple and a Gothic church is to be attri- 
 buted only to a difference of climate, or of technical 
 skill and tradition. It would be a curiously happy 
 chance, if it were merely chance, that made the house 
 [64]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 destined for the abode of one of the bright Olympians 
 a palace of gleaming marble set on a hill by the sea, 
 perfect in form, brilliant in color, a jewel to reflect 
 the sun and the sky, a harp for the winds to play 
 upon, an incarnation of the spirit of the open air, of 
 the daylight and of the blue heaven; while, for the 
 mysterious Jehovah and the God Man His Son, there 
 rose into gray and weeping skies huge emblems of 
 the cross, crowned with towers aspiring to a heaven 
 unexplored, and arched over huge spaces where the 
 eye is lost in the gloom, where form is dissolved in 
 vagueness, and the white light of day, rejected in its 
 purity, is permitted to pass only upon condition that 
 it depicts in sombre colors the pageant of the life of 
 the soul. That architecture has, whether by chance 
 or no, a symbolic value, as well as one purely and 
 simply aesthetic, will not, I think, be disputed by 
 those who are sensitive to such impressions; and, so 
 regarded, architecture has been, and might be again, 
 one of the chief expressions of religion. 
 
 But not the only one ; for, within the temple or the 
 church, art, in its greatest period, was used to illus- 
 trate the legends and the ideals of the faith. Such 
 illustration ranged from the crudest story-telling, 
 devoid of all aesthetic significance, to works in which 
 symbolism was amalgamated inseparably with artis- 
 tic beauty. In the Greek temple was throned the 
 [65]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 statue of the god, the perfection, on the one hand, of 
 form, of handling, of surface, of. all that of which 
 alone the artist professes to take account; and, on 
 the other, what for the layman will always and 
 rightly be more important, a symbol at once of the 
 physical ideal of the human form, and of that par- 
 ticular aspect of the hfe of man of which the deity 
 represented was the type. And so, again, in the 
 Christian Church were expressed, in color and form, 
 not only aesthetic beauty, but those various phases of 
 the spiritual life of which the Christian religion takes 
 account, the ideal of redemption by suffering, of 
 maternity, of asceticism, of charity, expressed in and 
 through the legends of the founder of the religion and 
 of the saints. In tliis way religion became articulate. 
 No longer a mere matter of feeHng, it confronted man 
 as an object, and only so, perhaps, can it reach its full 
 development. Protestantism, in purifying its inner 
 life, has gone far towards destroying its outward 
 form. But ^^^thout expression and expression in 
 choice and deU berate form, reUgious, hke other 
 feehng, tends to become stagnant, sour, and corrupt. 
 It needs the open air, it needs communion and inter- 
 change ; and this it can only receive in the finest form 
 through the mediation of art. 
 
 But it is perhaps in ritual that that mediation 
 reaches its highest power. Ritual is, or should be, a 
 [66]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 product of two of the greatest arts, literature and 
 music, with the assistance, perhaps, of an element of 
 drama. No emotion so poignant and profound can, 
 I think, be produced, no " purgation " so sanctifying 
 be effected, by any other means at our disposal. The 
 effect even of a ritual which we do not understand, 
 or one with the intellectual basis of which we are out 
 of touch, may be immense upon a sensitive spirit. 
 How much more that of one which should really and 
 adequately express our conviction and feeling about 
 life and the world! For those who can accept the 
 Christian view, the Christian ritual must be their 
 most precious possession; but for those who cannot 
 — and they are, as I believe, an increasing number 
 of not the least religious souls — their lack of intel- 
 lectual assent to the faith weakens or even nullifies 
 the effect of the sjonbol. And if, as I think will be the 
 case, the men in whom the rehgious instinct is strong- 
 est move farther and farther from the Christian pos- 
 tulates, a ritual which shall express their new atti- 
 tude will become, perhaps is already, one of the chief 
 spiritual needs. But a ritual cannot be invented; an- 
 tiquity appears to be of the essence of its power — 
 though, to be sure, rituals must have had a begin- 
 ning! — and, as experiment shows, it is difficult to 
 take seriously any new attempt in this direction. Per- 
 haps, therefore, there is a better prospect for the mod- 
 [G7]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 cm world in the development of art towards religion 
 than in that of religion towards art. Something of 
 this kind, it is clear, was the idea of Wagner. And 
 without raising here what may be a point of some- 
 what acrimonious dispute, whether any of his operas 
 can appropriately be called religious, there can be no 
 doubt that there might be a music-drama that would 
 be such, if the man who conceived it were himself 
 religious. The drama of iEschylus is, of course, a 
 convincing historical example ; and so is such a medi- 
 eval play as " Everyman," which has recently been 
 presented to us almost with the effect of a revelation. 
 Such drama, I cannot but think, is the highest form 
 of aesthetic production. And, while nothing can be 
 further from my purpose than to enter upon the not 
 very fruitful controversy as to the proper function of 
 art, I may perhaps be permitted to record my owm 
 feeling that never have its wonderful resources, espe- 
 cially in the region of music, been more wantonly 
 squandered than in this generation; and that only 
 their deliberate dedication to what, say what men 
 may, is at bottom always their most serious pre-oc- 
 cupation, so soon as they have any spiritual pre-oc- 
 cupations at all — I mean the significance of their life 
 in the whole scheme of the world — nothing but 
 such a dedication will rescue art from triviality, or 
 restore life to the dignity of which it is capable. 
 [68]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 Such, then, in brief are what I conceive to be the 
 relations of rehgion to the other ideal activities of 
 men — to science, conduct, and art. And of these, I 
 have suggested, the most important is the relation to 
 science, because upon science depends logically not 
 the existence, but the character of religion. For re- 
 ligion, in the view I have put forward, is concerned 
 with the place of our ideals in the structure of the 
 universe. And that place it cannot itself determine; 
 it must wait for the determination of the intellect. 
 But on that point the intellect has as yet been unable 
 with certainty to determine anything; and conse- 
 quently religion tends to assume different characters, 
 according to the way in which different people tend 
 to estimate the situation under the influence of their 
 temperamental or intellectual bias. The advent of 
 positive and conclusive knowledge would put an end 
 to such differences; and, however improbable it may 
 now seem that such knowledge should ever be at- 
 tainable, it would be a foolish credulity to deny the 
 possibility or to discourage the quest of it. 
 
 Religion so conceived is, of course, a very different 
 thing from that which purports to offer a special rev- 
 elation of truth on the very points which I am assum- 
 ing to be still unknown. Many religious people, car- 
 ing more for their religion than for the truth, will no 
 doubt continue to believe that there is such a revela- 
 [69]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 tion. But, though they will have more assurance, and 
 it may be more peace, they will not necessarily have 
 more religion — and they may easily have less — 
 than those who candidly recognize the claims of in- 
 tellect. Their road through life will be simpler, but 
 their knowledge of the land will be more limited, and 
 their range of emotion proportionately restricted. 
 Religion is not a creed, it is a growing experience; 
 and the experience is necessarily narrowed by any- 
 thing that narrows the intellectual horizon. 
 
 If I may conclude with a parable, we are all trav- 
 elers through an unknown country. The majority, 
 I think, at all times journey with their eyes on the 
 ground, following the track of necessity and custom 
 in which their feet were set from the beginning, look- 
 ing neither to the right nor to the left, but at most 
 backward or forward, and learning nothing, nor car- 
 ing to learn, about the country through which they 
 pass, whether it is mountainous or level, fed with 
 rivers or dry, inhabited or solitary, lit by sun or moon 
 or glimmering stars. These are the men without 
 religion, those who plod in blinkers, as secure and 
 unperplexed as it is possible for men to be when at 
 any moment the ground beneath their feet may open 
 and swallow them up. 
 
 Others there are — those who believe in some 
 revealed religion — whose eyes are directed not 
 [70]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 down, but straight before them, following a beam of 
 light that springs from a sun still below the horizon, 
 but one, as they believe, which is about to rise. So 
 dazzling is this beam that the land all about it appears 
 to be shrouded in thick darkness. Only in the path of 
 the light is anything to be seen, where it illumines a 
 mountain-top, gleams on a far river, or gilds what 
 perhaps may be the distant sea. Thither the travel- 
 ers hasten, without fear or doubt, counting as noth- 
 ing the hardships of the road in their certainty of 
 the consummation. 
 
 But, again, there are others who seek no such 
 light to follow, but who yet refuse to walk in the 
 beaten track. Desiring, not merely to pass through, 
 but to explore the strange land, they look freely 
 above, beneath, around them, in an uncertain glim- 
 mer of starlight often obscured by clouds. All about 
 them are dangers which they note but cannot gauge, 
 formless terrors, inexplicable sounds, stirrings, am- 
 bushes, contacts. But also, here and there, are sug- 
 gestions of unutterable promise — an unexpected 
 clearing in a wood, a footprint or a sign left by some 
 friendly traveler gone before, pale flowers beside a 
 brook, the note of a nightingale, a peak of snow like 
 a cloud in the sky, the rising of a new star, and always 
 the tremulous hope, " In the east is there not a crys- 
 tal gleam ? does not a violet lustre begin to bum upon 
 [71]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 the gray? does not the planet hanging there throb 
 more passionate and pale ? The sun we saw set, will 
 he not rise again ? " 
 
 These latter it is who have the religion of agnos- 
 ticism; by which I mean, not a conviction that 
 knowledge is impossible, but an uncertainty as to 
 what may be its deliverance — an uncertainty, not 
 of indifference, but of sensitive, passionate desire. 
 Only the advent of knowledge can put an end to that 
 uncertainty, can dash or confirm the audacities of 
 hope, dissipate or establish the forebodings of fear. 
 One way or other by knowledge the character of 
 religion will be determined. But, in either case, relig- 
 ion will still be possible, and, for those who possess 
 the instinct, necessary. What depends upon knowl- 
 edge is not religion; it is approbation or condemna- 
 tion of the world. That issue we cannot shirk; we 
 can only settle it, if at all, by science; and the at- 
 tempt to find in revelation a short-cut to the solution 
 does but divert our efforts from the only fruitful 
 method of inquiry. 
 
 [72]
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 FAITH 
 
 In the preceding chapters I have attempted to state 
 my view as to the relation of rehgion to knowledge. 
 Religion, I have said, does not give us truth. And as 
 this statement to some of my readers ^may have 
 seemed paradoxical, I propose here further so explain 
 what, in my opinion, is the relation of religion, and in 
 particular of what is sometimes called "faith," to 
 knowledge. 
 
 My point, perhaps, may be put most clearly thus: 
 If a man says " Religion gives me truth," I would 
 reply, " Then why not call it knowledge ? " For truth, 
 though it be truth about God, is still truth; and truth 
 that is known is part of knowledge. But there is only 
 one method of knowledge, viz., experience, and legiti- 
 mate inference from experience. Theology, therefore, 
 if it is a branch of knowledge, must differ from other 
 branches, not in its method, but in its object. If we 
 know the truth about God, that truth is scientific, in 
 the broad and proper sense of the term. It is arrived 
 [73]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 at by a method which can be explainea and criti- 
 cised, and it is subject to constant revision as exper- 
 ience develops and intellectual capacity increases. 
 
 This much, I dare say, would be admitted, per- 
 haps even eagerly asserted, by many theologians. 
 My next point takes me into a more difficult region. 
 What, I would ask, is the kind of experience on which 
 knowledge about God and other objects of religious 
 belief can claim to be based ? 
 
 There would seem 30 be two possible answers, not 
 incompatible with one another. First, the experience 
 may be historical. It may depend on a record of the 
 past. And such record is, of course, part of the theo- 
 retical basis of Christianity. On this point I have 
 nothing to add to what I said in a pre^^ous chapter. 
 Historical truth must be ascertained by historical 
 methods. But it is my own personal opinion that such 
 methods will never give us the kind of certainty 
 which has thitherto attached in practice to religious 
 beliefs; and that men will become increasingly un- 
 willing and unable to base their scheme of life on data 
 and inferences of that kind. 
 
 I pass, therefore, to a position which seems to me 
 to have more importance for the future. " Whatever," 
 it may be said, " be the deliverance of history, there 
 is, quite apart from that, in the direct experience of 
 men, a perception of the Being we call God." Such a 
 [74]
 
 FAITH 
 
 statement is one of the most interesting and impor- 
 tant that could be made, if it be made sincerely. But 
 it is pre-eminently one that ought to be challenged. 
 And that, partly because of its importance; partly 
 because of the indefiniteness that attaches to the 
 word "God"; partly because of the probable com- 
 plexity of the assertion that is in form so simple. For, 
 if a man says, " I know God by direct experience," 
 what is it he knows, and how "^ Has he had a " vis- 
 ion" ? Possibly! Such visions do occur. But in them- 
 selves they prove nothing. Everything depends on 
 whether or no there is any real object corresponding 
 to them. And that is a matter for scientific inquiry. 
 Probably, however, visions of tliis kind are not what 
 is meant. When a man says he has a direct knowledge 
 of God, he will probably mean that he has a sense, 
 somehow, that there does exist a Being who is good, 
 and loving, and powerful, and wise beyond all expe- 
 rience, of ours. Such a sense, I suppose, many people 
 do have, genuinely and constantly. And there is no 
 reason a priori why it should not correspond to a 
 reality. But, once more, whether it does correspond 
 or no is a matter for science. The sense in question, if 
 it is to yield knowledge, must be analyzed and tested 
 by a very complicated and difficult process. And I 
 cannot doubt that, were such an analysis to be made, 
 the original and apparently simple impression would 
 [75]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 be found to include a number of heterogeneous ele- 
 ments — elements of tradition, elements of desire, ele- 
 ments of inference. Thus, the man's idea of God will 
 surely be derived, partly from the religion in which 
 he has been brought up, partly from his own reflec- 
 tions upon life and the world; and, almost certainly, 
 it will have been affected by his needs and desires, 
 by what he profoundly wants to be true. And, as soon 
 as this analysis has been made, it will become clear 
 that the single and apparently simple sense or im- 
 pression which he calls his direct experience of God 
 has no more vahdity as a deliverance of truth than 
 the elements of which it is composed. If truth is to 
 be ehcited from it, the tradition must be sifted, the 
 inferences tested; and above all, the element of desire 
 ruled out as prima facie irrelevant; unless, indeed, 
 and until it can be shown — as, for example, the new 
 philosophy that calls itself "pragmatism" endeav- 
 ors to show — that truth is in some way determined 
 by our desires. In other words, any truth that finally 
 emerges from the process will be scientific or philo- 
 sophic truth, and if it is to be called religious, should 
 be called so only with relation to its objects, not to 
 its method. And that is what I mean when I say that 
 religion does not give us truth, but that truth is only 
 given by science. 
 
 Now, I do not pretend to judge what may be the 
 [76]
 
 FAITH 
 
 result of the kind of inquiries I have been suggesting 
 above. It is by some such inquiries, in my opinion, 
 that religious truth must be established, if it is to be 
 established at all. But, meantime, it is, I think, true 
 that religious questions are the kind of questions 
 about which many serious and reflecting men do not, 
 in fact, and will not, preserve an attitude merely of 
 suspended judgment. Such men, I think, will prefer 
 to describe their religious position as one of faith 
 rather than of knowledge; and they will, perhaps, feel 
 that it is fooUsh, and even presumptuous, to expect 
 to attain to knowledge on such subjects. I have my- 
 self no sympathy with any attitude which limits a 
 priori the possibilities of human endeavor. But, see- 
 that most men, for a long time, in proportion as they 
 are candid, are likely to be intellectually agnostic on 
 the most vital questions of religion, it seems to be 
 important to try to ascertain in what sense faith may 
 be legitimate, and what may be the relation of such 
 faith to knowledge. 
 
 To avoid, so far as possible, all ambiguity, I wish 
 to make it clear at the outset that, in using the word 
 "faith," I do not wish it to carry all the meanings 
 that attach to it in common usage. The word, for in- 
 stance, is often used to imply a faculty which has the 
 power to communicate, not only knowledge, but the 
 mo.st certain knowledge to which we can attain. It is 
 [77]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 not, of course, in that sense that I use the term, as 
 will be clear from the preceding pages. When I speak 
 here of faith, I speak of an attitude which is not pri- 
 marily intellectual at all, and which is quite com- 
 patible with — nay, which depends upon — intel- 
 lectual agnosticism; for it presupposes that, in the 
 region to which it applies, we do not know. The atti- 
 tude I would describe is one of the emotions and the 
 will — the lajang hold, in the midst of ignorance, of 
 a possibility that may be true, and directing our feel- 
 ing and our conduct in accordance with it. In its 
 broadest sense, I would say it is an emotional and 
 volitional assumption that, somehow or other, in 
 spite of appearances, things are all right. This gen- 
 eral outline, of course, may be, and is, filled in by 
 every and the most varied kind of content, according 
 to the traditions in which men have been brought up, 
 and the course and extent of their knowledge and 
 experience. But very commonly it expresses itself, in 
 the form of w hat is called a " belief in God " ; an atti- 
 tude, however, which does not imply any very definite 
 nor any very uniform conception of God, but is apt, 
 rather, to manifest itself negatively in a kind of dis- 
 tress if the existence of God is denied. And the root 
 of that distress is, I think, the suggested inference 
 that things are all wrong and not all right ; or, to vary 
 the phrase, one may perhaps say that faith involves 
 [78]
 
 FAITH 
 
 a volitional assumption that things, whatever appear- 
 ances may suggest, are really "worth while." 
 
 Now, if we had positive and complete knowledge 
 on this point of " worth-whileness " ; if we knew, 
 instead of merely conjecturing what may be, as we 
 say, the " meaning " of life; if we could see Good and 
 Evil in their true and ultimate proportions, and finally 
 sum up and judge the world ; there would be no room 
 and no possibiHty for any attitude of faith. Instead, 
 we should have knowledge. But, in fact, our position 
 is very different from this. We know that there is Evil, 
 we know that there is Good ; in some moods we may 
 imagine that there is nothing but Evil, or nothing but 
 Good ; but, in sober truth, we cannot reasonably and 
 finally, on grounds of knowledge, form a judgment 
 about the " worth-whileness " of life, because of the 
 many important factors of which we are ignorant. 
 
 Thus, for example, many men feel, when it is put 
 to them, that the question of the value of life depends 
 very largely on the question whether individuals sur- 
 vive death; and, if they do, on the kind of life into 
 which they pass. It is one kind of universe, they 
 think, if death means annihilation; another kind if 
 it means heaven or hell; another kind if it means a 
 series of progressing lives, and so on. 
 
 Such possibilities, many people hold, are of vital 
 importance to us; and these people are apt, in the 
 [79]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 absence of knowledge, to adopt towards them an 
 attitude, not merely of agnosticism, but also of what 
 I have called faith, they select, that is, among the 
 possibilities, that one which seems to them to give 
 value to life, and concentrate about it their practical 
 and emotional life. The attitude they thus adopt is 
 different in its origin and effect from an attitude 
 based upon knowledge. It is more precarious, more 
 adventurous, more exciting, more liable to ups and 
 downs. But it may be equally and even more effica- 
 cious upon life; and it is not, as I shall try to show, 
 necessarily to be condemned as illegitimate. 
 
 There are others, again, to whom the fate of indi- 
 viduals after death is either a matter of indifference, 
 or, as they may hold, has been finally settled by 
 science. On this subject, therefore, they will have 
 no faith. But they will almost certainly have faith on 
 some subject. Probably, for example, they may cling 
 to the idea of "progress." And that, although argu- 
 ments may be adduced in its favor, is a doctrine so 
 far from being established that acceptance of it is, 
 I think, commonly the result rather of what I am 
 calling faith than of intellectual conviction. 
 
 Or, again, a man may be indifiFerent to the ques- 
 tions both of a survival of individuals after death 
 and of the progress of the race, but may feel that 
 the important point is the existence of God. People 
 [80]
 
 FAITH 
 
 who feel this are, I suppose, commonly attached to 
 one of the Churches. But there may be men not so 
 attached to whom, nevertheless, a faith in God is the 
 foundation of their life. It may be a personal God 
 that they conceive; it may be a " tendency in the uni- 
 verse"; it may be something which they prefer to 
 call "Earth" or "Nature"; it may be an "Abso- 
 lute"; but, in any case, it is something not them- 
 selves and greater than themselves, something which, 
 by its mere existence, makes everything supremely 
 worth while, overrides and subsumes Evil, intensi- 
 fies and makes omnipresent Good, and concentrates 
 and satisfies in itself those ideal impulses that other- 
 wise would be tortured and broken about an imper- 
 fect self. 
 
 The various attitudes towards life thus briefly indi- 
 cated, different though they be, are, nevertheless, all 
 examples of what I am calling faith. They all involve 
 a voUtional assumption, not based upon knowledge, 
 as to the " worth-whileness " of the universe; and 
 their differences are differences as to what is it that 
 constitutes "worth-whileness." If men should ever 
 come, by thought and experience, nearer to an agree- 
 ment on this point, their faiths are likely to approxi- 
 mate more than they do at present. But, meantime, 
 the point I wish to make is, that faith, in some form 
 [81]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 or other, seems to be an almost necessary condition, 
 if not of life, yet of the most fruitful and noble life. 
 Almost necessary, I say. For there is a kind of pessi- 
 mism which is nobler than most optimism ; which is, 
 so to speak, active in its character, and implies rather 
 a passionate love of Good than an impotent despair 
 at Evil. But that is a rare condition. And most men, 
 I think, are significant, and find and make life sig- 
 nificant, in proportion to their faith. Of the practical 
 value of such faith there can, I think, be no doubt. 
 The only question is whether, from the standpoint of 
 knowledge, it is legitimate. For it must be remem- 
 bered that the pursuit of truth is itself one of our 
 highest practical activities; and that it must always 
 be wrong to hamper or pervert that pursuit by a 
 predetermination that certain beliefs shall not be 
 assailed. Faith, in a word, can only be legitimate so 
 long as it occupies a region not yet conquered by 
 knowledge, and so long as it holds itself ready in a 
 moment to yield its place so soon as knowledge ar- 
 rives. Faith should stand always with the dagger of 
 science pointed at its breast. It need not fear. It has 
 its resurrections. And it, too, must be ready, if it 
 would save its life, to lose it. On that condition it 
 may rightly and profitably take its place alongside 
 of, and in anticipation of, knowledge. But, once that 
 condition is neglected, once we begin to say " I be- 
 [82] 
 
 I
 
 FAITH 
 
 lieve though truth testify against me," once we echo 
 TertulHan's credo quia impossibile, or, with Luther, 
 in our zeal for what we suppose to be reUgion, assail 
 reason with all the resources of a German BiUings- 
 gate — from that moment our attitude, instead of 
 being legitimate and admirable, becomes one of the 
 most disastrous and the most immoral which it is 
 possible to assume. 
 
 Faith, then, in the sense in which I am using the 
 term, is distinguished from knowledge, but is not 
 necessarily opposed to it, though it may easily be 
 misled into opposition. And, being distinguished 
 from knowledge, the kind of support it gives is not, 
 or should not be, intellectual certainty. On the con- 
 trary, faith would seem to be an expression of the 
 imagination and the will, rather than of the intellect, 
 though it be from the intellect that it takes its form. 
 It is closer to music and poetry than to science. It is 
 the operation of our passion and our desire, shaping 
 in anticipation the forms and features of the un- 
 known land which we are about to explore. I know 
 no better metaphor for it than that — the passion in 
 the explorer's heart, dictating the vision by which he 
 is led. Because there is an horizon, because there is 
 space, because there is the unknown, therefore 
 there is faith. Columbus had faith. But what 
 he discovered was not the world of his dream. 
 [83]
 
 RELIGION 
 
 Only, the dream helped him to discover it; and, 
 spiritually, we are all in his position. We are Co- 
 in mbuses setting forth on onr voyage. We need 
 our dream, but we need also our compass. And the 
 confirmation or dissipation of the dream hangs upon 
 reality. But while, in this sense, faith must wait upon 
 truth, it is also true, in another sense, that truth 
 waits upon faith. For the impulse to pursue truth is 
 itself a form of faith. We hope that truth is obtain- 
 able; we desire and will to attain it; we dream its 
 attainment as we go in quest of it. And, but for that 
 dream, and that hope, and that will, we should never 
 start at all. Faith is the sense and the call of the open 
 horizon. If we abstract it from the forms in which 
 we clothe it, from the specific beliefs which are, as it 
 were, its projection into the intelligence, it presents 
 itself as the spring of our whole Ufe, including our 
 intellectual life. It is the impulse to grow and ex- 
 pand; and, just because it is that, it has itself no 
 form, but may assume any form. It is a taper burn- 
 ing, now bright, now dim, and changing color and 
 substance with every change in the stuff it consumes. 
 The frailest thing we know, it is also the least per- 
 ishable, for it is a tongue of the central fire that bums 
 at the heart of the world. 
 
 THE END 
 
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