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THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 THE “PTOLEMAIC” UNIVERSE OF THE LATE MIDDLE AGES 
 
 At the center is the earth, surrounded by the three other elements — water, air. and 
 fire. Outside these are, successively, the heavens of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the 
 Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, the starry firmament with the twelve Zodiacal signs, 
 the crystal sphere, and the pritnum mobile. Surrounding all, but eccentric toward the 
 upper, inhabited side of the earth, is the Empyrean, where sits the Almighty, attended 
 by nine ranks of celestial beings as listed at the left. At the corners are the four winds. 
 
 From the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING 
 OF RELIGION 
 
 BY 
 
 V 
 
 EDWIN TENNEY BREWSTER, A.M. 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 HXtbersfoe $Dres« Cambridge 
 1923 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY EDWIN T. BREWSTER 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 ®fje SUbetsfoe $hregg 
 
 CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
 PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 If this book contained any theology, I should 
 not have written it. I know nothing whatever 
 about theology; nor have I, so far as I am aware, 
 any opinion whatever on any strictly theologi¬ 
 cal matter. But religion is, fortunately, a great 
 deal more than theology. 
 
 Religion is, in fact, really a branch of Natural 
 History. That is to say, it is one of those sub¬ 
 jects on which any one of us may hope for some 
 sound understanding merely by keeping his eyes 
 open, and reflecting upon what he sees in the 
 light of what other men have reported of their 
 observations, precisely as one does with any 
 other out-of-door matter. 
 
 Now it so happens that, for a third of a century 
 or so, I have been engaged off and on in calling 
 the attention of young persons and others to 
 various aspects of rocks and hills and trees 
 which otherwise they were, as a matter of fact, 
 not noticing. I hope now, trusting to the same 
 devices, to point out certain aspects of religion 
 which, also as a matter of fact, too many people 
 are, it seems to me, passing by on the other side. 
 We of the older generation, moreover, who in the 
 course of time have become more or less wonted 
 to this unintelligible world, are apt to flatter 
 ourselves that mere multitude of days brings 
 
 v 
 
PREFACE 
 
 wisdom. We schoolmasters, in addition, do 
 somewhat justify our existence by learning by 
 dint of practice to take apart an obscure and 
 complex matter, and to feed it out, easy end first. 
 
 It occurred to me, too, naturally enough, I 
 think, that, as I found myself approaching the 
 time of life beyond which men somewhat rarely 
 correct erroneous views, it would be the part of 
 wisdom for me to run over various of my long¬ 
 standing opinions, and to make out how these 
 relate themselves to present-day knowledge. I 
 am, it chances, practiced in no other method of 
 arriving at truth than the scientific; and I have 
 attempted by that method to come to some un¬ 
 derstanding of the phenomena of religion which 
 I observe around me. What I have noted, I 
 have here set down for the benefit of other like- 
 minded persons, either my contemporaries, or, 
 as I hope, of younger men and women, who, 
 emerging into a wider intellectual life than has 
 been theirs, find themselves for the moment 
 more or less at sea. I write as a layman, for 
 other laymen. Possibly, nevertheless, an occa¬ 
 sional cleric may be curious to know what his 
 parishioners think about between sermons. 
 
 I have observed, as I have come into contact 
 with a somewhat wide range of religious opinion, 
 that a great many unscientific people are quite 
 unnecessarily confused over matters which to 
 the scientific seem perfectly straightforward. I 
 
 vi 
 
PREFACE 
 
 note also that many good people view with quite 
 unnecessary alarm the “oppositions of science 
 falsely so-called,” for no better reason than that, 
 having taken their scientific ideas at something 
 like fourth hand, these are not seldom just about 
 the reverse of those which scientific persons 
 suppose themselves to entertain. On this matter 
 I have touched, though somewhat more lightly, 
 perhaps, than it deserves. 
 
 I am especially concerned, however, with that 
 very considerable group, both of adults and of 
 the young, who fail to see their way amid con¬ 
 flicting views, chiefly for the reason that they 
 have no idea where either alternative comes 
 from. A little knowledge of the history of ideas 
 settles many disputes offhand. This seems to me 
 to be conspicuously the case in the present-day 
 controversy, among both Protestants and Ro¬ 
 man Catholics, between the conservative and 
 the “modernist” parties, some aspects of which 
 lie in that middle ground between science and di¬ 
 vinity, where a student of the natural order may 
 venture an opinion. One point of my little vol¬ 
 ume is to offer a sort of itinerary in a portion of 
 this field. 
 
 If I may judge at all from my own experience, 
 
 a study of the sort which I have outlined should 
 
 have two effects. One ought, in the first place, 
 
 to come to see more accurately than he has just 
 
 what is and what is not possible of belief in this 
 
 • • 
 
 Vll 
 
PREFACE 
 
 our modern world. In the second place, one 
 ought, as a result, to gain a notably greater tol¬ 
 erance for opinions that differ from his own. 
 After all, we are, each of us, dealing with vastly 
 complicated, age-long problems. It is highly 
 improbable that any of our present-day conclu¬ 
 sions are final, or that the wisest of us believes 
 more truth than error. On the other hand, most 
 of those opinions which seem to us of the present 
 age utterly fantastic and absurd, were each of 
 them, in its day, sound and recent and inevitable. 
 Men have said hard things of Sir Isaac Newton 
 for clinging somewhat too long to his early the¬ 
 ory concerning the nature of light — and now 
 “the New Physics” goes back to Newton’s view 
 of light, while at the same time it questions 
 Newtonian gravitation! To scoff at any serious 
 opinion is not to have read history. 
 
 I am quite aware that in crowding such large 
 topics into so small space, I have, in more in¬ 
 stances than I should have liked, made my ac¬ 
 count of various matters a great deal too sche¬ 
 matic. Any critic who cares to be nasty can 
 undoubtedly play horse with me on several 
 points. But the one thing that I am trying to do 
 is to set up a guidepost that will send my reader 
 to the libraries, there to run down the actual 
 facts for himself. Whoso will do that need have 
 no fear that he will go astray in any present-day 
 confusion of opinion. So far as my reader finds 
 
 vui 
 
PREFACE 
 
 me in error, this should but add zest to his own 
 search for truth. 
 
 Inevitably, in all these circumstances, some 
 of those who open these pages are going to en¬ 
 counter an occasional idea to which they are not 
 yet altogether used, and, on the other hand, they 
 are likely also to miss a good deal that they ex¬ 
 pect to hear whenever religion is discussed. To 
 such I can only say that information new to 
 them will probably not in the end do them 
 any special harm; while the old truths, already 
 familiar, they can always add for themselves. 
 Doubtless, I also should have said exactly the 
 same thing if I had had more space. 
 
 The important matter nowadays in the sphere 
 of religion, so far as this is a matter of taking 
 thought, is that we shall all turn to and make up 
 our minds exactly what we actually do believe, 
 what the evidence is for each belief, and what is 
 the reason for the particular form which our 
 various opinions take in our own minds. Some¬ 
 thing of this I have attempted to do for certain 
 special topics. For us all to do this, each for 
 himself, throughout the whole range of Christian 
 doctrine, would go far toward making straight 
 the way of that “New Reformation” which 
 our modern world sadly needs, and of which, 
 as it seems to me, the signs are already manifest. 
 
 E. T. B. 
 
 Andover, Massachusetts 
 
 ix 
 

 
 I . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. What is Religion? t i 
 
 II. The Three Parts of a Religion 14 
 
 III. Religion and World-View 25 
 
 IV. The Astronomy of the Bible 36 
 
 V. The Cosmology of the Creeds 51 
 
 VI. Our Four Sources of Opinion 63 
 
 VII. Science and Things-in-Themselves 74 
 
 VIII. Primitive Souls and Ghosts 86 
 
 IX. The Problem of Survival 107 
 
 X. “The New Reformation” 124 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 The “Ptolemaic” Universe of the Late Mid¬ 
 dle Ages Frontispiece 
 
 From the original hand-colored plate in the Nuremberg 
 Chronicle (1493). 
 
 Map of the World by Hecateus (517 b.c.) 39 
 
 From James Henry Breasted’s Ancient Times: A His¬ 
 tory of the Early World , Boston, Ginn & Co., 1916. 
 
 The Primitive Cosmos 41 
 
 From the Junian manuscript (probably tenth century) 
 of Caedmon’s seventh-century Anglo-Saxon epic “The 
 Fall of Man.” Reproduced from Volume xxiv of 
 Archceologia; or , Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Antiq¬ 
 uity , published by the Society of Antiquarians of 
 London, 1832. 
 
 Schiaparelli’s Interpretation of Old Testa- " 
 
 ment Cosmology 45 
 
 From G. Schiaparelli’s Astronomy in the Old Testa¬ 
 ment. 
 
 The Three-Storied Universe of Ancient 
 Times and the Early Middle Ages 49 
 
 From the Junian manuscript of Caedmon’s “Fall of 
 Man.” Reproduced from Archceologia , Volume xxiv. 
 
 Dante’s Universe, 1300 55 
 
 Adapted from S. H. Gurteen’s Epic of the Fall of Man. 
 
 Milton’s Universe, 1667-1674 57 
 
 Adapted from Gurteen. 
 
 Xlll 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Achilles drags Hector’s Body round the 
 Grave-Mound of Patroklos; Hector’s 
 Psyche above the Corpse 89 
 
 Drawing from a Greek vase, reproduced from S. Rei- 
 nach’s Repertoire des Vases Peints Grecs et Etrusques. 
 
 The Soul-Weighing of Hector and Achilles 99 
 
 Drawing from a Greek vase, reproduced from A. Bau- 
 meister’s Bilder aus dem Griechischen und Rdmischen 
 Alterthum. 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING 
 
 OF RELIGION 
 
 • • 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 WHAT IS RELIGION? - 
 
 We are all agreed that religion is a highly im¬ 
 portant matter. History is on that side. So, too, 
 is common observation. And yet, oddly enough, 
 we cannot at all agree as to exactly what is or 
 is not “ religion,” nor what the word ought to 
 mean, nor what the Romans meant when they 
 said religio. Attempts at definition run all the 
 way from visiting the fatherless and widows in 
 their affliction and keeping one’s self unspotted 
 from the world, which is pure morality and not 
 religion at all, to “the sum of all those motives 
 which lead a man to the performance of those 
 acts which he conceives intellectually to be his 
 duty,” from which all morality is expressly ex¬ 
 cluded. Neither form of words at all suggests 
 actual religions as we see them under our eyes. 
 
 On the whole, probably, the best working def¬ 
 inition is Matthew Arnold’s oft-quoted, “moral¬ 
 ity touched with emotion.” But there are so 
 many highly moral persons whose joy in the 
 
 I 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 Lord is only of the faintest, and so many highly 
 emotional persons whose morality will hardly 
 pass muster, that one is sorely tempted at times 
 to take the other horn of the dilemma, and to 
 say with Schleiermacher that “religion has 
 nothing to do with morality.” 
 
 The real trouble with us all, Arnold and 
 Cicero and Schleiermacher and the people who 
 make dictionaries alike, is that we are too aca¬ 
 demic. We approach the problem of religion 
 from the point of view of highly civilized and 
 sophisticated persons, who know religions only 
 on their higher levels, and who quite lack any 
 realizing sense of what life would be without 
 policemen and insurance companies. 
 
 But religion did not begin in churches or 
 libraries, among scholarly priests and well- 
 dressed worshipers. Religion took its start in 
 dens and caves of the earth, among naked and 
 hungry men, whose chief thought for the mor¬ 
 row was whether they should be alive at all, and 
 whose morality, such as they had, was shot 
 through by one emotion only — a primitive and 
 ever-present fear. We get at the essence of re¬ 
 ligion only by studying it at its beginning as well 
 as at its end, precisely as in these evolutionary 
 days, the proper study of mankind is Drosophila 
 and the guinea pig. All our definitions of reli¬ 
 gion, all our classification of actual religions, 
 ought to rest on very much less complicated ex- 
 
 2 
 
WHAT IS RELIGION? 
 
 amples than those which most of us know at 
 first hand. 
 
 Come at from this point of view, “religion” 
 proves to have at least four different meanings. 
 These blend into one another. Each separate, 
 organized religion commonly embodies more 
 than one sense. Men may worship side by side, 
 use the same formulas, and yet have quite dif¬ 
 ferent ideas as to what their religion is all about. 
 Nevertheless, in the end, there is no thinking 
 clearly about religion unless one keeps the four 
 meanings of the word separate in his mind. 
 
 These four meanings correspond to four his¬ 
 torical stages in the evolution of actual religions. 
 Convenient names are: 
 
 Nature religions. 
 
 Tribal and national religions. 
 
 Religions of morality. 
 
 Religions of redemption. 
 
 No one of these, to be sure, in actual practice, 
 excludes any of the rest. Each, also, in actual 
 practice, includes survivals and anticipations of 
 most of the others. Nevertheless, there are these 
 four stages. And since every actual religion is, 
 in some form or other, an offer of salvation, the 
 stages of religious advance and the meaning of 
 the word itself must always turn on the objects 
 which men fear and from which they look 4 to their 
 religion to protect them. 
 
 Religion, then, begins in fear; and the way to 
 
 3 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 understand religion is to begin with primitive 
 man and to see just what it was that he was 
 afraid of. From that point we may pass with 
 profit to times nearer our own and to men who 
 fear something different, until we reach our¬ 
 selves and our own terrors. Ultimately, all in¬ 
 terpretation of actual religion rests on the dif¬ 
 ferent objects which inspire dread and the differ¬ 
 ent means by which fear is, in the end, cast out. 
 
 Early man, then, with the best of reasons, 
 fears most of all the forces of nature. His prob¬ 
 lem of survival narrows down to coping with 
 storm and drought, plague, pestilence, and fam¬ 
 ine, wild beasts and the chances of the dark. 
 Against these, he is, in his own strength, de¬ 
 fenseless. Therefore, he looks to his religion to 
 protect him. 
 
 Thus, the Lake Superior Indian, starting off 
 in his canoe, scatters tobacco on the water and 
 prays for calm weather; or, caught in a storm, 
 appeases the angry, tempest-raising divinity by 
 throwing overboard a dog. Most hunters with 
 sling and bow half beseech, half compel by 
 charms, buffalo god, bear god, and the rest, not 
 to let the quarry wander too far afield and not 
 to lay to their charge the death of their prey. No 
 primitive husbandman plants his field without 
 some sort of religious exercise to make the seed 
 sprout; or reaps the harvest without expressing 
 to the vegetation gods his lively sense of favors 
 
 4 
 
WHAT IS RELIGION? 
 
 to come. All over the world, men have burled 
 living things or appropriate objects under corner 
 stones of buildings to make the walls stand up. 
 The horrible sacrifices of the Aztecs were to help 
 the sun through the sky. Even in modern times 
 the people of Egypt have looked to an imme¬ 
 morial ceremony to aid the Nile to rise. 
 
 Early religion is, of course, two thirds magic. 
 But on the face of things, it does work. At any 
 rate, primitive man does not experiment with 
 the chance of slow or sudden death by omitting 
 any religious form which his medicine man rec¬ 
 ommends. Therefore are all nature religions 
 alike, the world over. They all include the whole 
 of life, even to matters of diet, the phase of the 
 moon on which the believer has his hair cut, and 
 the terms in which he is to address his mother- 
 in-law. They all claim to influence the course of 
 nature, and thus to secure salvation from very 
 practical ills. They all, therefore, promise some 
 form of worldly prosperity. Their fundamental 
 ideas survive through all the stages above. 
 
 For most of us the nearest contact with a re¬ 
 ligion of this type is by way of the Greeks, among 
 whom large fragments of primitive cultus per¬ 
 sisted long after they should have been absorbed 
 into the next stage of evolution. There are 
 glimpses, also, of ancient nature gods in certain 
 of the early fragments embedded in our Book of 
 Genesis. 
 
 5 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 Survivals into our own time are numerous and 
 apparent. Here belong all prayers for rain and 
 fair weather, many healing cults, the obsolete 
 Fast Day and the still flourishing Thanksgiving, 
 all feelings of added safety during thunder-storms 
 when there is a Bible in the house. One ought 
 not to speak slightingly of any faith, even though 
 it attempt to move mountains. At the same 
 time we ought frankly to recognize that religion, 
 in the sense of a more or less magical device for 
 changing the position of material bodies in space, 
 does belong to a cultural level, from which, in 
 other fields, the world is pretty much clear. 
 
 The next stage in the evolution of religion, 
 with the corresponding alteration in the meaning 
 of the word, arises by slow degrees, as men settle 
 into organized communities, with more or less 
 permanent abodes, dependable crops or herds, 
 efficient weapons, and personal property. They 
 have put down the wild beasts, have sheltered 
 themselves from the weather, have learned to 
 carry their food supply through the slack season. 
 Though they still have to fear all that early man 
 feared — as, indeed, even we still do to-day 
 — these fears are becoming somewhat remote. 
 Means of protection have come a good deal 
 under men’s control. 
 
 The pressing fear now is raiding neighbors 
 with an eye to movable goods. Whereupon some 
 old nature divinity with a local shrine within the 
 
 6 
 
WHAT IS RELIGION? 
 
 tribal territories develops into a tribal god. The 
 deity who formerly managed the winds or the 
 thunder now gives his people victory over the 
 worshipers of other similar gods, and confirms 
 their title to whatever articles of value they have 
 been able to annex. Relation between divinity 
 and worshiper is a good deal a matter of bargain. 
 The one offers sacrifices and observes the cere¬ 
 monial law. The other reciprocates with pros¬ 
 perity and victories. The same convenient ar¬ 
 rangement on a larger scale, commonly with a 
 greater number of gods, becomes any one of the 
 great national religions of ancient times. 
 
 The Hebrews are at this level throughout 
 much of the earlier portion of the Old Testament. 
 So, too, are the Romans, well into the Christian 
 era. For the Romans, like the Greeks, had no 
 great turn for religion; and remained to the end, 
 in these matters, much below their cultural level. 
 Therefore, the Roman Government persecuted 
 the early church in pure self-defense; and even 
 beyond 400 a.d., no less a person than St. Augus¬ 
 tine felt it necessary to devote no small part of 
 his “Civitas Dei” to a somewhat disingenuous 
 refutation of the current opinion that the sack 
 of Rome by Alaric was in punishment of apos¬ 
 tasy from the ancient gods. The same order of 
 ideas controls those excellent persons who refuse 
 to vote because “there is no mention of the Deity 
 in the Constitution.” There was also Unser Gott. 
 
 7 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 But with the rise of the great empires came 
 also individualism. For men’s minds turn in¬ 
 ward both when they have acquired “more 
 country than they can love,” and when an ex¬ 
 panding world power has swallowed up the little 
 country that was theirs. Religion, in response, 
 while still remaining in effect a contract, is no 
 longer a covenant between God and the State. 
 It now becomes a relation between God and the 
 individual man. Thus, for the first time, religion 
 tends to become a private affair. 
 
 Of these “religions of morality,” Pharisaism 
 is perhaps the best-known instance. A better 
 example still, in many ways, is the old “Reli¬ 
 gion of Zoroaster,” of which we have glimpses in 
 the later books of the Old Testament, from which 
 the Pharisees seem to have borrowed many of 
 their important ideas, and by the name of whose 
 God we blasphemously call our electric lamps. 
 
 The upland of Persia is a lean country at best, 
 where men make a living at all only by the dili¬ 
 gent practice of the heathen virtues. So the Maz- 
 dayasnians abolished fasting in the interests of 
 efficiency; and while they did retain prayers 
 and ceremonial law, they made their final salva¬ 
 tion depend chiefly on actual good deeds. Kill¬ 
 ing vermin, digging up weeds, feeding stray dogs, 
 tending cows, marrying inside the family, all 
 went in to swell the man’s account and to widen 
 the bridge on which his soul would have to 
 
 8 
 
WHAT IS RELIGION? 
 
 make its way over the abyss into paradise. The 
 righteous man was saved, not so much by faith 
 or by magic as simply by his works. The wicked 
 sojourned, temporarily, in hell, if, taking their 
 lives through, the sum total of their acts had on 
 the whole put Satan to the good. Thus the fol¬ 
 lowers of Zarathushtra’ made their religion as 
 nearly pure morality as organized religions ever 
 are. 
 
 So far as religions of this type are social, the 
 goodness of the individual is thought to advance 
 also the welfare of the community, as certain 
 of the Rabbis taught that a single Sabbath per¬ 
 fectly observed would bring in the reign of Mes¬ 
 siah. In general, however, the good man stands 
 on his own feet; and he looks to receiving mani¬ 
 fold more in this present life as part of his re¬ 
 ward. “ If I went into a community with only one 
 church,” says the author of “Religion and Busi¬ 
 ness,” “ and found that church made up of only 
 the poor people of the community, I would say 
 that its religion was no good. . . . The real test 
 of a religion is whether its followers are healthy, 
 happy, and prosperous.” 
 
 Yet, on their higher levels, there are no nobler 
 faiths on earth than these Religions of Morality. 
 In such, for example, as Prophetic Judaism, the 
 believer expects no personal reward in this world, 
 and his goodness is no matter of formal code or 
 simple enumeration of good acts, but a funda- 
 
 9 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 mental righteousness of heart. “What doth the 
 Lord require of thee, but to deal justly, and to love 
 mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? ” — 
 while the whole of Leviticus and Deuteronomy 
 condenses to the eleventh and twelfth command¬ 
 ments — which, strictly speaking, are not “com¬ 
 mandments” at all. 
 
 We commonly think of the Hebrew people 
 as having a special genius for religion. Strictly, 
 they really had a special genius for getting on 
 without religion. They were of all their contem¬ 
 poraries among the least religious, in the sense 
 that they performed daily the fewest useless and 
 irrational acts because their priests commanded, 
 and held the fewest absurd opinions on theo¬ 
 logical grounds. The history of the religion of 
 Israel is a history of getting clear of superstitions 
 to which other peoples have clung. 
 
 By this way of simplicity, religions of morality 
 pass over into religions of redemption. 
 
 Actually, most of the higher religions of the 
 world hang more or less between the two types. 
 Most religious persons are also in that inter¬ 
 mediate state. So, too, are most definitions of 
 religion. 
 
 Nevertheless, ever since men have been set¬ 
 ting down their reflections concerning the inner 
 life, there have always been some persons for 
 whom religion has nothing to do with morality, 
 in the sense that, after they have kept the law 
 
 io 
 
WHAT IS RELIGION? 
 
 from their youth up, they still lack the one thing 
 which for them is most important of all. Such 
 persons desire salvation, neither in the form of 
 lengthened days and fuller barns, nor as immor¬ 
 tal life. The first they can do without; the sec¬ 
 ond they can earn. Their ardent desire is to still 
 an inner conflict and to attain to the peace of 
 God which passeth all understanding. “ Twice- 
 born men” is William James’s name for such. 
 St. Paul is the standard example. 
 
 To persons of this sort, redemption comes 
 by two different paths, which have been called, 
 more conveniently than accurately, the way of 
 Buddha and the way of Christ. 
 
 The one brings inner peace as the reward of a 
 stern and lifelong self-discipline of the will. This 
 is the way of the Stoic. It is also the way of the 
 Puritan, who, for all his open Bible, was quite as 
 much philosopher as Christian. No better men 
 have ever walked the earth than the products of 
 this method. But the gate is strait and the way 
 long; and the men who have passed through owe 
 too much to fortunate accidents of nature ever 
 to make their example popular. 
 
 The other way makes salvation a free gift, and 
 always a good deal of a miracle. As a matter of 
 fact, of course, none of the religions of redemp¬ 
 tion have any monopoly of either approach to 
 Nirvana. Islam brings men to paradise by way 
 of a formula — provided the true believer has 
 
 II 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 also made his prayers and pilgrimages, done his 
 works of mercy, died in battle with the infidel or 
 defending his property against robbers. By all 
 objective tests, Amida Buddha justifies by faith; 
 while only the cruder sort of Christian expects 
 to get through the world without mortifying the 
 flesh. So, in the end, all redemptive religions 
 are basally alike. They all have for their final 
 objective peace rather than righteousness; but 
 they all, in the end, involve both. 
 
 There are, then, to our original question, 
 What is religion? four different answers. 
 
 Religion is a set of devices for altering the 
 course of nature. It is a contract between cor¬ 
 porate society and God. It is a set of categorical 
 imperatives which the will of God imposes upon 
 individual men and sanctions by rewards and 
 punishments. It is a conversion of the inner 
 nature, accompanied by disappearance of the 
 state of sinfulness, and without overmuch con¬ 
 cern for specific moral acts. The four different 
 meanings shade into one another. Most actual 
 religions include something of each. Yet the four 
 are so far different that no one definition of re¬ 
 ligion will cover them all. 
 
 Two of these meanings concern bygone faiths 
 which, in large part, survive their utility. The 
 other two involve conceptions that are still vital. 
 Present-day religion among civilized men is 
 “ morality touched with emotion ”; and it is also 
 
 12 
 
WHAT IS RELIGION? 
 
 something that has “ nothing to do with mo¬ 
 rality.” The wise will not say “religion” with¬ 
 out taking thought which of these they mean. 
 
 Nevertheless, after all that historian and psy¬ 
 chologist and dictionary-maker can say, religion 
 always, at its best, at the same time includes 
 morality and transcends it. The best of men have 
 always been both moralists and mystics. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE THREE PARTS OF A RELIGION 
 
 We may, nevertheless, come at this whole ques¬ 
 tion of the meaning of religion from a somewhat 
 different point of view. 
 
 Each of us, as he runs through the sequences 
 of his daily acts, is, by turns, several different 
 kinds of person. We rise in the morning, sleepy 
 and hungry animals, to be washed and fed. An 
 hour later, we become “the economic man,” 
 interested ultimately in the production of con¬ 
 sumers ’ goods, concerned for the rest of the work¬ 
 ing day with the creation or distribution of 
 wealth. Or it may be that some time during office 
 hours we switch our minds entirely off our own 
 affairs, and sit with a committee that is in charge 
 of some public or political or philanthropic work. 
 Now, for the moment, we are neither hungry 
 animals nor economic men, but citizens con¬ 
 cerned for the welfare of the State. Men do, on 
 occasion, forget sleep and food and property and 
 kindred, to serve their country alone. Then, 
 perhaps, still later in the day, the producer and 
 the citizen undergoes still another metapsychosis 
 and becomes sportsman, artist, naturalist, par¬ 
 ent, husband, or friend. 
 
 14 
 
THE THREE PARTS OF A RELIGION 
 
 In some such wise as this, we cut our lives 
 into pieces. We do one thing at a time. We are 
 one person at a time, correspondingly. But 
 underneath all these various momentary selves 
 lies the basal unity. Whenever we stop to think, 
 all these various aspects of our existences drop 
 into their places in the general plan, so that see¬ 
 ing our lives steadily, we see them whole. Thus 
 we become philosophers. 
 
 In precisely similar fashion, the moment we 
 cease reacting to the separate aspects of our en¬ 
 vironment and begin to adjust ourselves to the 
 universe as a whole, we become thereby religious. 
 Religion, then, implies a unity of soul. We walk 
 by faith whenever we consider each separate act, 
 as our elders expressed it, sub specie ceternitatis . 
 
 Now these two conceptions of religion, as 
 morality touched with emotion, and as the deeds 
 of the moment seen under the aspect of eternity, 
 are at bottom the same. If we serve the Lord 
 with gladness, the serving the Lord is one side, 
 the gladness is the other. 
 
 “Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws 
 Makes that and the action fine.” 
 
 In addition, the sweeper proves himself religious. 
 The irreligious person thinks only of getting the 
 room clean, and loses correspondingly some part 
 of the joy of his labor. 
 
 Yet, while this vision of the daily chores sub 
 specie ceternitatis seems to be a nearly universal 
 
 15 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 experience, it comes, alas, with any sort of vivid¬ 
 ness and authority, to only a few gifted souls, 
 who thereby become, in these relations, the nat¬ 
 ural leaders of their fellows. The rest of us so 
 clutter up our lives with small matters done for 
 immediate ends that we have to be reminded, 
 at least once a week, that there are larger con¬ 
 cerns. Inevitably, therefore, this occasional in¬ 
 sight of ordinary men gets itself accumulated 
 and expressed in institutions. Thus, out of re¬ 
 ligion, arise religions. 
 
 But, although the actual religions of the earth 
 are as diverse as the men who make them, each 
 separate one of them, always and everywhere, 
 has in it three elements. These are, a ritual, a 
 body of doctrine, and a rule of conduct. Ritual 
 includes, not only the church or temple service, 
 but the entire outward setting of the cult — ar¬ 
 chitecture, holy seasons, priesthood, organiza¬ 
 tion. The body of doctrine involves, along with 
 the formulated dogmas, all the wide fringe of 
 tradition, presupposition, and folk-lore which 
 goes with it. The moral code includes, also, cus¬ 
 tom, taboo, and unwritten law. 
 
 The occurrence simultaneously of all three 
 elements becomes a convenient test of what is 
 or is not a religion. 
 
 Socialism, for example, is sometimes spoken of 
 as a religion. In practical conduct the more 
 thoroughgoing of socialists certainly differ, some- 
 
 16. 
 
THE THREE PARTS OF A RELIGION 
 
 times inconveniently, from non-socialists. Their 
 dogmas are formulated, and enforced, with a 
 rigidity that a pope might envy. But socialism 
 has no ritual. Therefore, socialism is not a re¬ 
 ligion. 
 
 On the other hand, there are the numerous 
 secret societies. Most of them have an elaborate, 
 if commonplace, ritual. The conduct of their 
 members, at least toward one another, does differ 
 describably from that of outsiders. But they 
 have no special body of opinion to mark them off 
 from other men. 
 
 By the same test, the attempt of certain 
 learned but unimaginative persons, late in the 
 last century, to found a “religion of science” 
 was foredoomed from the start. Scientific men 
 have a code of professional ethics, which, in em¬ 
 phasis at least, is as much their own as are the 
 moral laws of several distinct religions, and there 
 is, besides, “the scientific spirit, with its courage 
 and serenity, its disciplined conscience, its in¬ 
 tellectual morality, its habitual response to any 
 disclosure of the truth.” The total body of sci¬ 
 entific doctrine now surpasses, probably many 
 times over, that of all the religions of the world 
 combined. But science, qua science, can never 
 develop a ritual. Therefore can there never be 
 any Religion of Science. 
 
 Yet, though the differences among the actual 
 religions of the world involve all the three ele- 
 
 17 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 merits, code and ritual and dogma, the differ¬ 
 ences in the essentials of the moral law, among 
 the higher religions at least, turn out to be sur¬ 
 prisingly small. Each one, high or low, lays 
 down pretty explicitly what is or is not “ right.” 
 Nearly all, in addition, proclaim their rules to be 
 the will of God, to be transgressed at one’s peril. 
 But human nature is everywhere so much the 
 same, and human experiences are everywhere so 
 much alike, that, in spite of certain differences 
 of ideal, the ordinary “good” man of any one of 
 the higher faiths is, for all practical purposes, 
 about like the good man of any other. In India, 
 for example, where even the athletics are or¬ 
 ganized on religious lines, the cricketers and 
 polo players from the Parsi, Mohammedan, Hin¬ 
 doo, and British universities all alike conform to 
 the by no means unexacting ethics of sport, and 
 all are equally “gentlemen.” The Chinese stu¬ 
 dents in American schools are like other college 
 boys. We still admire Socrates and read Epic¬ 
 tetus. And since . 
 
 “We needs must love the highest when we see it,’' • 
 
 if there were no other element in religion than 
 morality, we should be but a short way from one 
 world-wide “religion of all good men.” 
 
 Rituals, also, though different in appearance, 
 are curiously alike. They all involve the same 
 sacrifices and offerings, the same fastings and 
 
 18 
 
THE THREE PARTS OF A RELIGION 
 
 ceremonial meals, the same sacramental wash¬ 
 ings and baptisms, processions, vigils, incense, 
 dim religious light. The forms may be vastly 
 elaborated, as in the older branches of the 
 Christian Church. They may be reduced to 
 the barest remnant, as among the Society of 
 Friends. But whatever occurs at all is about 
 the same, the world over. After everything is 
 said, ritual remains an art — and art is one, 
 everywhere. 
 
 So the early Roman Catholic missionaries to 
 Tibet, encountering the high-church Buddhists 
 of the Greater Vehicle, believed the Devil to be 
 caricaturing their own high mass. What Protes¬ 
 tant, entering into the synagogue on the Sab¬ 
 bath day, feels the service strange? Men do find 
 their deepest impulses to be weak and evanes¬ 
 cent. They do find that certain forms of worship, 
 certain types of architecture, certain recurrent 
 holy days, do help them to recall their minds 
 from temporary concerns to eternal. And since 
 all good men are, at bottom, pretty much alike, 
 the rituals that help to hold them to their duty 
 are alike also. 
 
 The differences lie, of course, in the interpre¬ 
 tation of the ritual; so that the same act may 
 have a quite different meaning even within the 
 limits of the same faith. Thus, for example, 
 baptism is for certain Christians a cleansing 
 from sin. For certain others, it typifies death and 
 
 19 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 resurrection. For John the Baptizer preaching in 
 the wilderness of Judea, there seems to have been 
 an additional meaning that is now completely 
 lost. But the taurobolium, for all its difference 
 of form, had precisely the meanings of our fa¬ 
 miliar rite. 
 
 Obviously, however, for such of us as have 
 outgrown a belief in magic, the efficiency of any 
 ritual is solely a question of habit and association. 
 One gets good out of any to which he has been 
 brought up. The wise man, therefore, will train 
 himself to all, interpreting each in accord with 
 his own momentary need. He should be willing, 
 with mental reservations, to “worship Mumbo 
 Jumbo in the Mountains of the Moon,” if fate 
 chanced to take him to that far-off district, and 
 there was nothing other to be had. For any man 
 to object to one form of religious observance, for 
 no better reason than because he happened to be 
 born into contact with another, is about as ra¬ 
 tional as to turn one’s back on the Taj Mahal, 
 on the ground that he has been living across the 
 street from a cemetery. The moralities of reli¬ 
 gions, and their aids to emotion, are alike beyond 
 argument. 
 
 Matters of doctrine, on the other hand, are in 
 quite a different case. The higher life, as others 
 before Goethe no doubt remarked, is concerned 
 with the true, the beautiful, and the good. On 
 goodness and beauty, as expressed in moral 
 
 20 
 
THE THREE PARTS OF A RELIGION 
 
 code and ritual, all men are in large measure 
 agreed. But truth is various. 
 
 Moreover, each of us, in a very real sense, 
 makes his own theology. The form, to be sure, 
 is set for us by the established faith into which 
 we chance to be born; so that we are Chris¬ 
 tian, Jew, Buddhist, Confucian, or Latter Day 
 Saint, as befits our special longitude east or 
 west of Suez. All such labels, however, have to 
 do with only the externals and the accidents 
 of our opinions. Their content, their inner and 
 personal significance, we build up for ourselves, 
 bit by bit, out of the total experience of our 
 lives. 
 
 For most normal people this process of con¬ 
 structing a set of articles of faith continues 
 throughout our years. We read our daily chap¬ 
 ter in the New Testament or the Old, in Science 
 and Health or the Bhagavad Gita; and we slowly 
 correlate revelation with experience. Old puzzles 
 resolve themselves in the light of new informa¬ 
 tion. We attack old difficulties from new angles. 
 Certain riddles, we discover, simply have no 
 answers; and they cease to trouble us. Certain 
 problems we discover to be merely verbal, the 
 solution being that there is no problem there. 
 Patiently, with the passage of years, the wise 
 man knits together his theoretic knowledge and 
 his practical experience into a working faith. 
 Just as, according to the proverb, one is, at forty, 
 
 21 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 “either a fool or a physician,” so is he, at forty, 
 either a fool or a philosopher. 
 
 Moreover, as things are now in this country, 
 even the form of one’s belief is not determined 
 altogether by accident of birth. Granted that 
 of the nearly two hundred and seventy warring 
 sects of Christendom, nine tenths are, for most 
 of us, practically negligible, a score or so remain 
 to be reckoned with. There are, besides, a half¬ 
 score of newer sects, with their variants. Few 
 men or women, probably, go through life with¬ 
 out having to make up their minds, more or less 
 finally, with which of several somewhat diverse 
 bodies their own views are in closest accord. 
 Many persons, as a matter of fact, do change. 
 
 In “truth,” then, rather than in beauty or 
 goodness, lie the differences between different 
 religions, and the diversities among different 
 religious men. And since all cannot be right, in 
 doctrine, not in ritual or law, is the weak spot 
 both of personal faith and organized cult. Rit¬ 
 uals may be crude. Moral codes may be in¬ 
 adequate. But only dogmas are demonstrably 
 wrong. 
 
 The problem thus offered is nowadays a seri¬ 
 ous one. For any religion, public or private, to 
 be accepted as completely “true,” it ought to 
 have all its doctrines in precise agreement with 
 all the soundest secular opinion of its day. This 
 has occurred at various times in the past. It was 
 
 22 
 
THE THREE PARTS OF A RELIGION 
 
 the case throughout most of Old Testament 
 history. It was the case in Christian Europe in 
 the i27o’s. But it was not at all the case in Rome 
 in the Age of Augustus; and it is not universally 
 the case in these United States of America in this 
 year of grace. 
 
 For a religion, by its very nature, is conserv¬ 
 ative. Its truths of faith tend to preserve forms 
 of words which the learned world has abandoned. 
 The God who is the object of its worship tends 
 to be the kind of being who would have created 
 the universe known to the science of the past. 
 It tends to interpret its sacred books in the way 
 that other books were interpreted years before. 
 A ritual easily takes on new meaning, and is all 
 the better for its age. Moral codes have proved 
 curiously elastic. But a formulated dogma is 
 fixed in an eternal state. The more rapid the 
 progress of knowledge, the more difficult becomes 
 the continuous readjustment. In the end, old 
 religions break down and new ones take their 
 place when this adaptation finally becomes im¬ 
 possible. It was not the Christian apostle, but 
 the Alexandrian astronomer, that ended the 
 ancient Roman cult. 
 
 The wise man, therefore, will see to it, early 
 in life, that he holds all truth as he sees it in 
 such fashion that, with each fresh advance in 
 knowledge, he will have no cause to balk or to 
 compromise, but may accept, heartily and gladly, 
 
 23 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 any new light from any source. It must needs be 
 that changes come; but the test of a sound opin¬ 
 ion is precisely its elasticity, as Newton’s teach¬ 
 ing, based on the motions of the moon, held also 
 for Uranus and the dark companion of Algol, of 
 which Sir Isaac never knew. All the fundamen¬ 
 tal doctrines of natural science have made fish 
 of whatever came to their net, and grown by 
 what they feed on. Why should it be different 
 with fundamental doctrines in any field? We 
 can never have a religion of science: we may, 
 whenever we will, have a scientific religion. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 RELIGION AND WORLD-VIEW 
 
 The Germans have a word, Weltanschauung , 
 which of late years we have begun to take over 
 into English, having ourselves no precise equiv¬ 
 alent, yet needing the idea. 11 World-view ’ ’ is the 
 nearest we can come — meaning one’s entire 
 general conception of the universe, as a whole 
 and also in its parts, as all hangs together 
 into one consistent scheme. A world-view in¬ 
 volves, therefore, matter and souls, angels and 
 gods and devils, planets and stars, animals and 
 human nature, the beginning of everything and 
 its end, together with the relations and the mean¬ 
 ing of them all. It is, in short, a man’s way of 
 conceiving the whole of things as they are. 
 
 Each of us, therefore, has more or less his 
 own personal world-view. Differences of opinion 
 between men are commonly, at bottom, not 
 really concerned with the particular point at 
 issue; but involve the entire substratum of prej¬ 
 udice and presupposition, of ways of envisaging 
 evidence, of ideas as to what is or is not possible. 
 The wisdom of each disputant seems foolishness 
 to the other, because neither can fit the other’s 
 contention into his own world. So 
 
 25 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 “ East is east, and west is west, 
 
 And never the twain shall meet.” 
 
 Unfortunately for us all, such differences of 
 Weltanschauung are most conspicuous in the 
 sphere of religion. 
 
 All the men who made our historic creeds, 
 most of those who wrote our best hymns, many 
 who fixed the forms of our rituals, had a world- 
 outlook altogether different from our own. Cal¬ 
 vin and Luther, for example, both believed in a 
 flat earth; and Calvin seems to have clung to 
 that opinion even after Magellan’s voyage. Lu¬ 
 ther called Copernicus “upstart astrologer” and 
 “fool.” Milton, in the eighth book of “Para¬ 
 dise Lost,” though he knew Galileo personally, 
 cannot bring himself to “El pur se muove .” 
 Wesley, born sixteen years after the “ Principia,” 
 opined that “Mr. Newton’s theories tend to 
 infidelity.” Even now, every short while, the 
 Monday morning newspapers report some cler¬ 
 gyman’s animadversions on “Darwinism.” 
 
 Ultimately, most of our formal theology goes 
 back to Augustine and 325 a.d. It took shape, 
 therefore, in a dying world, where a great civi¬ 
 lization was running down from good to bad and 
 from bad to worse, until the night of the Dark 
 Ages closed over Europe. Our creeds, therefore, 
 our hymns, our church services, our entire re¬ 
 ligious vocabulary, reflect the world-view of 
 men who, so far from being able to discover new 
 
 26 
 
RELIGION AND WORLD-VIEW 
 
 truth, could not so much as hold on to the old 
 which the past had given them, and who were 
 bringing back to plague mankind every sort of 
 superstition which Greek science had held at 
 bay. Naturally, then, some of their opinions do 
 not altogether fit a time when, in certain fields, 
 we make more progress in twenty years than our 
 forbears made in twenty centuries. 
 
 Six days in the week we live in an ordered 
 world. On the seventh, we open the church door 
 on a land of topsy-turvy, where axes float, dry 
 sticks change to serpents, cities are let down out 
 of the sky, angels stir the water of wells, bedeviled 
 swine run violently into the sea. We say prayers 
 for rain an hour after we have consulted a gov¬ 
 ernment bulletin to see whether we shall need an 
 umbrella before we get home. We solemnly 
 repeat, “. . . Maker of heaven and earth . . . de¬ 
 scended into Hell . . . sitteth on the right hand 
 of God . . .” Yet all the while we know perfectly 
 well that heaven is not “up” nor hell “down,” 
 that this universe was never ‘ ‘ made ’ ’ by anybody 
 in any such sense as the “apostles” supposed, 
 nor has it any such topographical relations as 
 they assumed. Whoso has sat with his eye at 
 one end of a brass tube and a fragment of the 
 everlasting mystery at the other, knows that no 
 living being, from pond scum to mammal, ever 
 gets into this unintelligible world by virtue of any 
 process that in the least resembles anything 
 
 2 7 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 that the days of ignorance meant by “ concep- 
 tus ”; while as for “carnis resurrectionem ,” which, 
 as a piece of psychophysics, we inherit from the 
 followers of Zarathushtra by way of the Phari¬ 
 sees and St. Paul, most of us actually do hold 
 the diametrically opposite opinion — the Pla¬ 
 tonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul. 
 
 One need not dwell on the incongruous lan¬ 
 guage of our hymns. “While with ceaseless 
 course the sun”; “Sing choirs of angels”; “The 
 Lamb upon the throne”; 
 
 “Casting down their golden crowns 
 Around the glassy sea. 
 
 Cherubim and Seraphim 
 Falling down before Thee.” 
 
 Who would guess, listening to many prayers, 
 that the Being to whom they are addressed is sup¬ 
 posed also to be responsible for the sixty thou¬ 
 sand great stars of that dim cluster in Hercules? 
 
 We can write good war poetry without mention¬ 
 ing shields and spears. We can talk about books 
 and architecture and music and the rest of the 
 things of the spirit in an accurate, critical, mod¬ 
 ern vocabulary. But we do not seem to be able 
 to sing hymns or to say prayers or to define dog¬ 
 mas without dragging in the world-view of peo¬ 
 ple who looked to a king’s touch to cure skin 
 disease and rang a church bell to frighten off a 
 comet. The inevitable result is “the seeming 
 unreality of the spiritual life.” 
 
 28 
 
RELIGION AND WORLD-VIEW 
 
 One lesson the war taught us: the difference 
 between a regiment of Mohammedans, dropping 
 down in their places at the hour of prayer, every 
 man with his face toward Mecca and his forehead 
 on the ground, and a regiment of Christians, 
 using the forms of their faith only as the basis 
 of their profanity. The one has no universal 
 education or popular press. Therefore, it keeps 
 the Weltanschauung of the Koran, and believes its 
 religion. The other, having both, tries vainly to 
 be at the same time in two worlds. The practical 
 result is that this United States of America, in this 
 year of grace, is probably the most irreligious 
 nation that has ever had a place on the earth. 
 
 And yet, obviously, we cannot very well re¬ 
 write all our hymns and re-edit all our service 
 books every time somebody synthesizes a new 
 carbon compound. This has, in away, been tried. 
 Some of the more aberrant denominations, in 
 addition to composing new spiritual songs to 
 embody their doctrines, have tried revising the 
 old ones to the same end. The result is sorry 
 doggerel in place of good poetry. After all, 
 “Mesopotamia” really is a “blessed word.” 
 Practically, for us, there is no moving men’s 
 hearts to righteousness by any other form of 
 words than those which uplifted Israel. That 
 much is fixed for us in all matters of ritual. 
 
 Creeds need not be in the same case. There is 
 just now, a marked trend, on the part of those 
 
 29 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION * 
 
 bodies which are least limited by tradition, 
 toward a continual restating of their doctrines 
 as their own Weltanschauung moves another step 
 away from that of their founders. Unfor¬ 
 tunately, the practical result of this process is 
 to make each successive formulary just a little 
 vaguer than the one before it, until, in certain 
 instances, no mortal man can attach any precise 
 meaning whatever to the words. 
 
 Such, clearly, is not the way out. If we are to 
 make vain repetitions as the heathen do — and 
 there is, really, not a little to be said for this 
 time-honored method — we had much better 
 repeat time-honored words. Much of the value 
 of forms of any sort lies precisely in their sug¬ 
 gestion of our own dependence on the past. It 
 is good in times of joy, for us rampant indi¬ 
 vidualists to recall how many other men, pagans 
 many of them in German forests, have also re¬ 
 peated, '‘with this ring, I thee wed”; and how 
 many ancient worshipers of heathen gods have 
 looked to the same touch of water to make their 
 children better men than they. There is no 
 greater comfort in bereavement than to feel how 
 many other men and women have listened to the 
 same burial service, and taken heart again at the 
 same assurance. The religion that shows us our 
 daily acts sub specie ceternitatis should also show 
 us our place in history. 
 
 Shall we, then, continue to mumble the same 
 
 30 
 
RELIGION AND WORLD-VIEW 
 
 old words, letting it be understood, not too pub¬ 
 licly, that we know neither what they meant to 
 everybody once, nor what they mean to our¬ 
 selves now, leaving it to our children to discover 
 for themselves that what we say in church be¬ 
 longs with Santa Claus and the stork? It has 
 been done. Men have, in fact, gone even farther 
 on the same road. The Parsis of India, up to the 
 time of their great awakening in the middle of 
 the last century, had, for a thousand years, been 
 chanting passages from the Gathas, in a tongue 
 of which no living man understood so much as a 
 single sentence. Apparently, they received their 
 reward, for they have been called the most 
 moral community in the world. We, also, can 
 do likewise if we will. We can take our formulas 
 as vague figures of speech, affirming our accept¬ 
 ance of them in some sense or other, yet never 
 deciding either what that sense is, or why we do 
 not take them literally as they stand. More¬ 
 over, we can continue to take the clause on one 
 side of a comma as literal history, properly doc¬ 
 umented ; and the clause on the other side of the 
 same comma as a “spiritual truth” to which 
 everybody is at liberty to attach any meaning 
 he likes, or no meaning at all. But to do these 
 things is to take all rationality out of our faith. 
 Furthermore, it is also the way to court intellec¬ 
 tual bankruptcy. 
 
 With things as they are, therefore, nowadays, 
 
 31 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 there is only one course open to a reasonable 
 man. That is to take, bit by bit, all the dogmas 
 of his church, all the articles of his private faith, 
 and so many passages as interest him out of 
 hymn and scripture, and to say of each: “To the 
 man who wrote this, it meant precisely so-and- 
 so. I do, or I do not believe it in this sense.” 
 
 An unknown Jew, for example, wrote, “The 
 Lord is my Shepherd . . Obviously, he did 
 not mean to be taken literally, as having wool on 
 his back and sleeping out on the grass. Whoever 
 wrote the twenty-third psalm knew that he was 
 writing poetry; and as poetry he expected to be 
 read. We may, therefore, read that passage as 
 poetry, with whatever poetic imagination it has 
 pleased Providence to bless us. But that other 
 unknown Jew who wrote the account of the 
 shadow on the sundial of Ahaz, which “returned 
 backward ten steps ... on the dial whereon it 
 was gone down,” thought he was writing literal 
 history. He meant his account to be taken as it 
 stands; and he was writing nonsense. It was, to 
 be sure, not nonsense to him; because his world¬ 
 view included a flat earth, with a sun, the size of 
 a tent, carried across the under surface of a 
 solid sky. For him, there was no reason why the 
 sun should not move east as easily as west. So 
 long, then, as we see this story, in its own setting, 
 as part of a consistent Weltanschauung, we may 
 do what else^ we like with it, and extract any 
 
 32 
 
RELIGION AND WORLD-VIEW 
 
 moral that we can. But we must not take it out 
 of its place, and try, by any process of rational¬ 
 ization, to fit it into the Copernican astronomy. 
 Along that way lies all confusion. 
 
 So with any article of any historic creed or any 
 ancient teaching of any church. We can never 
 know too completely why men of other days 
 thought as they did, nor too accurately what it 
 was they thought. We shall come to no harm by 
 conducting our present-day worship or by talk¬ 
 ing about our present-day faith in terms of the 
 science of a bygone time, any more than by 
 building our churches in a style that men once 
 used also for houses and barns, so long as we 
 understand frankly that we are using obsolete 
 forms. Religion takes on the unreality of the 
 discarded science only when we forget that the 
 science is discarded and try to piece together the 
 old garment and the new cloth. We may rightly 
 say all the old words in honor of the old saints —• 
 provided only that we always understand pre¬ 
 cisely what the ancient worthies meant, and 
 precisely what we mean, and precisely why the 
 two are or are not the same. The danger lies in 
 muddle-headed pretense of factitious agreement. 
 
 On the other hand, whatever is anywhere per¬ 
 manently true ought to be capable of statement 
 in terms of the Weltanschauung of any time and 
 place. This, we sometimes forget, includes our 
 own. We have to live in a world where axe heads 
 
 33 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 do not float, angels do not trouble the water, 
 and the sun is a million times larger than the 
 earth. Only in terms of this world can we, in 
 the end, think profitably about anything. 
 
 We must, then, as things are, master two 
 languages. One, the language of hymn and Bible 
 and creed, is for edification and worship. The 
 other, the language of our own day, is for making 
 out what we really think. We ought to handle 
 either language freely; and we ought, besides, to 
 have a sort of historical grammar of our religious 
 tongue, so that we can tell, at least in a general 
 way, to what particular historic world-view each 
 form of words belongs. But we ought not to talk 
 a religious pidgin English. 
 
 Doubtless, in the course of time history will 
 again repeat itself. A new prophet will arise who 
 will restate once more the ancient truths — this 
 time, in terms of a universe that is a thousand 
 light years across and a thousand million years in 
 age. Then will new poets write us new hymns, 
 new priests devise new rituals, and new theolo¬ 
 gians formulate new creeds. We shall think we 
 have a new religion, and prepare for persecution 
 at the hands of persons who think they still be¬ 
 lieve the old one. 
 
 Meanwhile, we must not forget that religions 
 are always practical affairs. They begin as 
 specific taboos and special magics for getting 
 crops to grow, walls to stand, and enemies to 
 
 34 
 
RELIGION AND WORLD-VIEW 
 
 run away. They end by getting men happily and 
 efficiently through their day’s work. What 
 counts, then, as Arnold said, is the emotional ex¬ 
 perience and the moral ideal. The form of doc¬ 
 trine is a good deal incidental, a reflection of the 
 special Weltanschauung of some prophet of the 
 past, whose insight into a timeless reality has 
 preserved some fossilized opinion of his day. 
 Doubtless, some men will long continue to refuse 
 to worship under the same roof with other men 
 whose world-view dates a century or two earlier 
 or later than their own. But the fashion of the 
 time is all the other way; and we expect most 
 opinions to be obsolescent from their birth. So 
 the main thing nowadays is to keep clear of 
 “that nebulous country where words take the 
 place of ideas,” and to remember always that 
 “Truth proceedeth rather out of error than 
 out of confusion.”* 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE ASTRONOMY OF THE BIBLE 
 
 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 
 And the earth was waste and void; and darkness 
 was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God 
 moved upon the face of the waters. ... And God said, 
 Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and 
 let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made 
 the firmament, and divided the waters which were under 
 the firmament from the waters which were above the fir¬ 
 mament. 
 
 In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second 
 month, on the seventeenth day of the month . . . were all 
 the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the win¬ 
 dows of heaven were opened. And the rain was upon the 
 earth forty days and forty nights. ... And God remem¬ 
 bered Noah .... and the waters were assuaged; the foun¬ 
 tains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were 
 stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained. 
 
 I knew a man in Christ, fourteen years ago {whether 
 in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I 
 know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to 
 the third heaven. And I knew such a man . . . how that 
 he was caught up into Paradise. . . . 
 
 As we comprehend no man’s religion until we 
 
 36 
 
THE ASTRONOMY OF THE BIBLE 
 
 know his world-view, so we understand no man’s 
 world-view till we discover his astronomy. The 
 earth itself is for each of us the stage on which 
 he sets his opinions. The sun and the planets and 
 the stars are the background against which his 
 drama of history is played. These give him his 
 scale, both in space and in time; and fix for him 
 the limits of what may or may not occur. Even 
 his god is always just that sort of divinity who 
 will account for the visible universe as he con¬ 
 ceives it to be. 
 
 Most unfortunately for us just now, there are 
 at least three different and mutually incompat¬ 
 ible astronomies with which we have to reckon, 
 and among which we have to change back 
 and forth as we attend to this interest or 
 that. Our sacred book sets forth one order of na¬ 
 ture. Our traditional theology presupposes an¬ 
 other. Our school geographies teach still a third. 
 
 The first of these supposes the entire material 
 universe to be about the size of the actual moon, 
 with the moon itself just beyond the clouds, and 
 the sun “as large as the Peloponnesus.” The 
 second puts the entire visible creation inside the 
 known orbit of Mercury, and makes the distance 
 of the moon from the earth, when correctly 
 measured, to be one of the long dimensions of 
 interstellar space. The third does its thinxing in 
 terms of a galaxy that is thousands of light years 
 across the shortest way and at least ten times as 
 
 37 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 far the other; that contains three hundred million 
 stars actually visible, several of them of such a 
 size that a body one thousandth part as large 
 would still be a thousand times larger than the 
 sun; that relates the known distance of the moon 
 to the known distance of the nearest fixed star as 
 an inch to a thousand miles. Naturally, it makes 
 no small difference to any man’s religious opin¬ 
 ions in which of these three universes he thinks 
 of himself as dwelling. 
 
 Names for these three cosmologies are not 
 to be had that will imply nothing and say all. 
 Biblical, Christian, and modern, are convenient 
 terms. Jerusalem, Rome (mediaeval Rome, that 
 is), and Alexandria suggest another set that has 
 the merit of being colorless. 
 
 The Biblical astronomy is, of course, very 
 much older than any portion of the Bible. It is, 
 in fact, substantially the original conception of 
 the mundus which arises always, everywhere, 
 and among all men, before they have become 
 critical. 
 
 Pre-scientific man built his universe on com¬ 
 mon sense. The earth is, obviously, flat and 
 very large. Obviously, too, this flat surface is, in 
 a general way, circular, with the observer’s own 
 native land somewhere near the middle. To 
 those ancient peoples who most concern us, it 
 was about equally obvious that, since travelers 
 in most directions in which travel was profitable 
 
 38 
 
THE ASTRONOMY OF THE BIBLE 
 
 came by and by to salt water, the entire circle of 
 the lands must be surrounded on all sides by the 
 stream of ocean. Somewhere beyond the ocean 
 lie the mountains or the pillars or the unknown 
 
 MAP OF THE WORLD BY HECAT 7 EUS (517 B.C.) 
 
 lands which support the sky. On this much are 
 agreed all those ancient peoples whose pupils we 
 are. For them, all parts of the universe lay 
 within a thousand miles of Suez. 
 
 39 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 As for the sky, this obviously is a solid firma¬ 
 ment or vault, blue and star-studded on the 
 under side, resting on the earth at the horizon. 
 The sun “as a bridegroom coming out of his 
 chamber,” the moon and planets commonly, 
 sometimes also the stars, are thought to enter 
 the sky by doors in the east, pass across the fir¬ 
 mament by their own will if they are gods, or be 
 carried by angels if they are not, and to leave at 
 night by other doors in the west. They may all 
 return again to the east during the night; or the 
 stars may be scrapped each morning and a new 
 lot be created. Often, in countries far enough 
 from the equator for the pole to be well up in the 
 sky, all the heavenly bodies pass either by day 
 or by night behind the great “Mountain of the 
 North” on which was the Babylonian Garden 
 of Eden. Somewhere beyond the horizon, pre¬ 
 sumably outside the firmament, are the store¬ 
 houses of the winds, commonly four in number. 
 High overhead, yet not so high that men may 
 not hope to climb by way of a tower, are “the 
 waters that are above the firmament,” like a 
 great tank, and “the treasuries of the hail.” 
 When “the windows of heaven are opened,” 
 rain or snow falls upon the earth. 
 
 Such, in general, is the universe which is so 
 eloquently described in Job, the creation of 
 which is so vividly set forth in Genesis. The 
 same general conception is everywhere pre- 
 
 40 . 
 
THE PRIMITIVE COSMOS 
 
 Above, the Almighty, seated on the concave firmament, is creating light. 
 Below is the flat surface of the Great Deep with the Spirit of God moving 
 upon the face of the waters. 
 
 From the Junian manuscript (probably tenth century) of Caedmon’s seventh- 
 century Anglo-Saxon epic “The Fall of Man.” 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 supposed throughout all the Biblical books, even 
 in the New Testament. It persisted, side by 
 side with the “Ptolemaic” or Roman cosmol¬ 
 ogy, all down through the Christian centuries, 
 until Magellan, after 1519, finally wiped it off 
 the scientific map. In general, the Protestant 
 clergy, because of their dependence on the letter 
 of the Scripture, maintained this Biblical view 
 against the Roman Catholics, who trusted to 
 Aristotle. It is held even now more widely than 
 most persons realize. There are still in these 
 United States schools in which a teacher of geog¬ 
 raphy has to use no small tact in expounding 
 “the globular hypothesis.” At last accounts 
 the Massachusetts Zetetic Society, with head¬ 
 quarters in Boston, was printing tracts to con¬ 
 vert the world back to its ancient faith. 
 
 Our own great interest, however, must always 
 be in the special form of the primitive flat-earth 
 doctrine which developed in lower Mesopotamia, 
 passed with some alterations to the early He¬ 
 brews, was still further modified by contact with 
 Persia, prevailed throughout the Jewish world, 
 and still has to be explained out of our own 
 sacred text. 
 
 The Asian of the southwest set himself this 
 problem: When Marduk or Ahura Mazda or 
 Javeh Elohim, or whatever other god it was who 
 first shaped the present world out of original 
 chaos, did he start with a chaos of dry land and 
 
 42 
 
THE ASTRONOMY OF THE BIBLE 
 
 add the water, or did he start with a chaos of 
 water and add the land? The ancient Iranians, 
 living on a dry upland, put the land first. But 
 for dwellers near the head of the Persian Gulf, 
 who could see with their own eyes, year by year, 
 the great delta of the Tigris-Euphrates building 
 out into the sea, the question had only one 
 answer. Creation starts with “ the great waters,” 
 ‘‘without form and void.” The dry land appears 
 only after a portion of this ancient sea has been 
 divided off to become “the waters that are above 
 the firmament.” Still might the coast-dweller 
 observe for himself more of the dry land appear¬ 
 ing from out the waters of the great deep, of 
 which the Gulf is a part, a hundred miles of new 
 country during historic times. 
 
 But Mesopotamia is arid, with a desert on 
 each side, fertile only when irrigated. Its ten 
 inches of rain a year are quite insufficient to ac¬ 
 count for its two great rivers. Moreover, since 
 “all the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not 
 full,” there is no other conclusion possible for 
 pre-scientific man in a dry climate except that 
 “ unto the place whence they come, thither they 
 return again,” by way of underground passages. 
 Thus the waters of the great deep flow back to 
 lakes and ponds and springs, which in their turn 
 feed the rivers. The waters which are under the 
 earth are, however, not so much local channels 
 as a vast cistern underlying all the fertile lands, 
 
 43 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 a portion of the waters of the great deep, which 
 the fountains of the great deep bring to the sur¬ 
 face of the earth. 
 
 In terms of this geography, therefore, all that 
 was necessary to produce the great deluge was to 
 open the windows of heaven and let down the 
 waters above the firmament, and to break up the 
 fountains of the great deep to let out the sub¬ 
 terranean supply. The same general conception 
 persisted into the Middle Ages. Albertus Mag¬ 
 nus, who died in 1280, and Thomas Aquinas, 
 who was his contemporary, both held that the 
 larger rivers at least are supplied directly from 
 the ocean, underground. 
 
 Somewhere in the bowels of the earth — 
 whether above or below the waters of the great 
 deep is commonly not clear — lies the country 
 of the dead. Primitively, for the most part, the 
 dead go to heaven. But, oddly enough, both the 
 Jews and the Greeks, the two peoples to whom 
 we owe most, seem to have made the shift to 
 an underground country of the dead shortly 
 before they appear in history. Paradise in the 
 sky is, therefore, both primitive and Christian; 
 though there are all sorts of variants, so that 
 the Greenlanders, not perhaps without reason, 
 tuck heaven cozily underground and put hell 
 aloft where the wind blows. 
 
 Originally, both Hades and Sheol are ail alike. 
 1 ‘The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that 
 
 44 
 
THE ASTRONOMY OF THE BIBLE 
 
 go down into silence.” “There is one fate to the 
 righteous and to the wicked.” But with the rise 
 of self-conscious individualism and the religions 
 of morality, men began to look to the future for 
 
 SCHIAPARELLI’S INTERPRETATION OF OLD 
 TESTAMENT COSMOLOGY 
 
 rewards for themselves and punishment for 
 others; so that the underworld tended to differ¬ 
 entiate itself into Tartarus and Elysian Fields. 
 Dives, in the parable, “ died and was buried,” and 
 kept on downward into the pit at the bottom 
 of Sheol. But Lazarus, “carried by the angels 
 into Abraham’s bosom,” is in the upper and 
 pleasanter portion of Sheol, though within sight 
 and speaking distance of the bottom. In later 
 
 45 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 portions of the New Testament, however, the 
 shift has been made back to paradise in the sky. 
 
 But the Jews as we meet them in history do 
 not live on the flood plain of Mesopotamia, but 
 in a hill country, a land of little rivers and of 
 rain. In such a region, the sky is not so obviously 
 brass, “like a molten mirror,” and the rain is 
 evidently from the clouds. The Babylonian 
 world-view, therefore, while it remains as a pious 
 tradition, is modified, not only in its theology — 
 greatly to its advantage — but in its more veri¬ 
 fiable aspects as well. 
 
 Thus, for example, in the ancient document 
 which scholars separate out from the rest of the 
 Hexateuch and call J, the background of which 
 is southern Palestine, the flood story — in Gen¬ 
 esis 7:1-5, this is the version that has the seven 
 pairs of each sort of animal in the ark — has no 
 mention of the fountains of the great deep. The 
 flood waters come from the sky only. Moreover, 
 J, which furnishes the second of the creation 
 stories — the one in Genesis 2 in which the cre¬ 
 ation occupies one day only — adjusts most in¬ 
 geniously the discrepant climates of the land of 
 Marduk and the land of Javeh Elohim, making 
 the transition in time, as it was not, instead of in 
 space, as it actually was. “For the Lord God 
 had not caused it to rain on the earth . . . but 
 there went forth [probably a fountain of the 
 great deep, originally] and watered the whole 
 
 46 
 
THE ASTRONOMY OF THE BIBLE 
 
 face of the ground. . . . And a river went out of 
 Eden to water the garden . . . and became four 
 heads. . . . And the fourth river is Euphrates.” 
 Curiously enough, taking the narrative as it 
 stands, the first rain on the new-created world 
 was that which caused the great flood. 
 
 More important than this, as the primitive 
 arid-country account altered under a rainy sky, 
 is the change in the character of the firmament. 
 This, from an opaque “inverted bowl,” thins out 
 to a curtain that is more or less transparent. 
 The stars recede beyond the sky and shine 
 through. The waters that are above the firma¬ 
 ment persist only as a sop to tradition. The 
 clouds themselves tend to form the floor of 
 heaven. 
 
 With the firmament worn thin and no longer 
 starry, the way is open for an increase in the 
 number of heavens and elaboration of their de¬ 
 tails, under the influence, apparently, of a devel¬ 
 oping scientific interest in the planets. St. Paul, 
 following his contemporaries, who in turn bor¬ 
 rowed from Persia, seems to have distinguished 
 three heavens. Seven has always been a favorite 
 number, as still, for example, among Moham¬ 
 medans. Dante and Milton come just under 
 the dozen. According to Irenseus, Basilides had 
 365 in his cosmos. But no matter what the num¬ 
 ber, one of the set is commonly identified with 
 the original firmament. 
 
 47 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 When the lowest heaven is at the level of the 
 clouds, as commonly in the New Testament 
 narrative, it lies, of course, only just above the 
 tops of the higher hills. Whenever, therefore, the 
 sky is torn asunder, men behold the Almighty 
 sitting on his throne, or hear his voice in the air. 
 Saints and angels slip back and forth between 
 heaven and earth on all sorts of errands. A great 
 sheet knit at the four corners, or a greater heav¬ 
 enly city, can be let down through the roof of the 
 world. Nevertheless, the future abode of com¬ 
 mon mortals tends to remain underground. The 
 various heavens are reserved for the gods, the 
 angels, and a few favored mortals — Elijah, 
 Moses, Messiah, the emperors. In fact, one of 
 the great problems of religion, about the begin¬ 
 ning of the Christian era, was how, with the 
 rising of democracy, to get the ordinary man 
 after death into the sky. On this essentially 
 astronomical matter hang all the mystery re¬ 
 ligions. 
 
 A variant of this old flat-earth geography 
 came out of Egypt — along with a good deal of 
 important theology. Since the sky is only the 
 Goddess Nut on her hands and knees; the earth 
 must needs be twice as long one way as the other 
 — whence our ‘‘latitude” and “longitude” — 
 with a mountain at each corner to hold up the 
 floor of heaven. So the universe is more box than 
 bowl; though still, of course, three-storied, since 
 
 48 
 
THE THREE-STORIED UNIVERSE OF ANCIENT TIMES AND 
 
 THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES 
 
 The Glory-King of Hosts, with his faithful angels, stands on the floor of 
 heaven, above the stars. Rebel spirits fall through the air into the 
 mouth of hell. 
 
 " And all henceforth to demons were transformed 
 And doomed triumphless to the swart Abyss.” 
 
 Hell, conceived, as usually, as a monster, connects interestingly with Jonah's 
 “whale” — “Out of the belly of Sheol cried I” — and with Leviathan, the 
 swift serpent, who devours the sun and moon at eclipses. 
 
 From the Junian manuscript (probably tenth century) of Caedmon’s seventh- 
 century Anglo-Saxon epic “The Fall of Man.” , 
 
THE ASTRONOMY OF THE BIBLE 
 
 hell, as usual, has a floor, and heaven a roof. But 
 the waters under the earth and the waters above 
 the firmament have become only a pious con¬ 
 vention. 
 
 This general conception of a rectangular uni¬ 
 verse, longest from east to west, fitted, much 
 better than the Biblical “bowl theory,” what was 
 actually known after Alexander’s time concern¬ 
 ing the countries of the earth. It became, there¬ 
 fore, the favorite form of the flat-earth doctrine 
 down through the Middle Ages until the time of 
 Columbus and Magellan, Cosmas Indicopleustes, 
 an Egyptian monk of the sixth century, being 
 chief authority for the details. Nevertheless, by 
 the end of the eighth century, both flat-earth 
 astronomies had so far dropped out of sight that 
 Dante, writing about 1300, shows no trace of 
 either. Milton, on the other hand, reverts; and 
 the real heroine of “Paradise Lost” is the God¬ 
 dess Nut. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE COSMOLOGY OF THE CREEDS 
 
 The Roman, Christian, Alphonsine, or “ Ptole¬ 
 maic” astronomy begins, as much as with any 
 one, with Pythagoras, shortly before 500 b.c. 
 
 The Greeks, as a whole, had no great turn 
 for common sense. Therefore, because the earth 
 looks like a flat disk, they straightway took to 
 speculating whether, after all, it may not be 
 some other shape — square, cylindrical, possibly 
 even round. The Greeks were not really any¬ 
 thing like so scientific as we sometimes make 
 them out to be; but once clear of the common- 
 sense presupposition that the earth is flat, it is 
 only a short step for anybody to the proof that 
 the figure actually is a sphere. Even before 
 Plato’s day, therefore, the true shape of the 
 earth had become a commonplace of Greek 
 science; and by the first century B.c., its size also 
 was known, with an accuracy not surpassed until 
 1617. From Aristotle on, scientific Greek astron¬ 
 omy is substantially our own modern system. 
 
 There remained, nevertheless, one very funda¬ 
 mental problem — the distances of the various 
 heavenly bodies. Most primitive astronomies 
 put sun, moon, stars, and planets about equally 
 
 5i 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 far from the earth. At the most, the fixed stars 
 only are a little beyond the rest. 
 
 The Greeks, as usual, perceiving that all the 
 host of heaven looks to be in about the same 
 region, straightway assumed that their distances 
 must be very unlike; and attempted forthwith 
 to find what these distances are. By the second 
 century b.c., at the Alexandrian Observatory 
 they had located the moon with an error of only 
 half of one per cent, and had measured its diam¬ 
 eter to within about two hundred miles of the 
 correct value. This gave, then, some idea of the 
 scale of the universe, which they made out to be 
 at least a half-million miles from side to side. 
 The planets were proved to be somewhere be¬ 
 yond the moon, but resisted all attempts to place 
 them accurately. Aristarchus, who was on the 
 observatory staff at that time, got himself 
 frowned upon for arguing that the stars may be 
 many times more than ten million miles away. 
 In general, the universe looked several thousand 
 times farther across in Egypt than in Judea. 
 
 The Pythagoreans, however, were philoso¬ 
 phers, not scientists. They philosophized a 
 “central fire” for the earth to revolve about, 
 and a “counter earth” that hid this fire from 
 the antipodes. In addition, they evolved from 
 their inner consciousnesses the famous “crystal 
 spheres,” each carrying one or other of the 
 seven planets in its orbit, except the eighth 
 
 52 
 
THE COSMOLOGY OF THE CREEDS 
 
 and outermost, which held all the fixed stars and 
 was the limit of creation. All three together, 
 as they moved, ground out “the music of the 
 spheres.” 
 
 How this extraordinary Pythagorean system 
 ever came to be called “Ptolemaic” is one of the 
 ironies of history; for Ptolemy himself held no 
 such opinion, and what he did think was quite 
 incompatible with anything in the least like 
 it. “Ptolemaic,” nevertheless, it became, and 
 “Ptolemaic” it remains to this day. 
 f The Middle Ages made two changes. Al* 
 phonso X, who was an astronomer, added an¬ 
 other sphere outside that which carries the 
 fixed stars, to account for the precession of the 
 equinoxes, and still another, the tenth, outside 
 this, the primum mobile , to account for day and 
 night. The theologians, in addition, made each 
 crystal sphere the floor of a separate heaven, and 
 put the heaven of heavens, the empyrean, the 
 special dwelling-place of God, outside them all. 
 Thus the successive heavens, eleven in number, 
 surround the earth and each other on all sides, 
 with the heaven of the moon farthest inside the 
 ball. There still survive, however, certain ves¬ 
 tiges of the older flat earth. Giant heads blow 
 the winds from the four corners of the map. The 
 empyrean is skewed off center with the rest of 
 the heavens, to retain the absolute direction for 
 up and down.. 
 
 53 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 Needless to say, the inhabitants of these va¬ 
 rious spheres — principalities, powers, thrones, 
 archangels, saints, the persons of the trinity — 
 are all as accurately located in their several 
 heavens as the inhabitants of a modern city on 
 their proper streets. We shall never again know 
 as much about the universe as men knew then. 
 
 Such, substantially, is the world-view of those 
 theologians and fathers of the church who did 
 not refuse altogether to believe that the world is 
 round. This is the astronomy of Augustine, of 
 Albertus Magnus, of Thomas Aquinas, and in 
 general of the more enlightened clergy of the 
 Roman Church after the eighth Christian cen¬ 
 tury. Dante knows no other. Milton combines 
 this with the Biblical theory; but is half minded 
 to turn Copernican, a century after Copernicus 
 had gone to his grave. Cotton Mather’s conver¬ 
 sion to the doctrine of a moving earth, about 
 1720, marks, in a general way, the end of schol¬ 
 arly support for the Christian theory in America. 
 
 Dante’s system is essentially that of any of his 
 educated countrymen three hundred years either 
 side of his time. He puts his heavens in the Al- 
 phonsine spheres and in the space beyond. His 
 earth is fixed at the center of the universe, and, 
 although spherical, is inhabited on only one side, 
 Jerusalem being at the middle point. On the 
 backside of the earth is the Mount of Purgatory, 
 nine stages along its sides, the terrestrial para- 
 
 54 
 
dante’s UNIVERSE, 1300 
 
 Adapted from S. H. Gurteen’s Epic of the Fall of Man. 
 
THE COSMOLOGY OF THE CREEDS 
 
 dise at its top just touching the heaven of the 
 moon, so that the purified spirit may pass on 
 conveniently to its reward. 
 
 Hell lies, also conveniently, on the inhabited 
 side of the earth, a vast crater, four thousand 
 miles across, thinly roofed by the earth’s crust, 
 the hole made where Satan struck when he was 
 hurled from the empyrean. This conical under¬ 
 world, nine circles around its sides, has its nar¬ 
 row tip just at the earth’s center. 
 
 In brief, then, for Dante and contemporary 
 churchmen, hell is inside the earth, as for Greek 
 and Jew; the heavens, including the highest of 
 all, surround the earth on all sides; paradise is 
 beyond the moon. There are virtually no Bibli¬ 
 cal elements in the cosmology. 
 
 Milton compromised. “Paradise Lost” re¬ 
 peats the old Biblical-Egyptian doctrine with 
 its three-storied arrangement, though the uni¬ 
 verse, for Milton, has grown to almost Alexan¬ 
 drian dimensions. But the space between the 
 roof of hell and the floor of heaven is not the 
 habitable earth and the air above it. The earth 
 itself, surrounded by the ten crystal spheres of 
 the Alphonsine system, hangs suspended in the 
 midst of chaos, Jerusalem up, by gold chains 
 from the floor of the empyrean. 
 
 Thus, for Milton, the highest heaven, unlike 
 the rest does not surround the earth; hell, older 
 than the earth, is below, not inside, it; and there 
 
 56 
 
milton’s universe, 1667-1674 
 
 Adapted from Gurteen. 
 
THE COSMOLOGY OF THE CREEDS 
 
 is no purgatory. There is reason for think¬ 
 ing that this entire scheme, so far from being 
 original with Milton, is to be traced back, 
 substantially unmodified, as far as the Anglo- 
 Saxon Caedmon of the seventh century. “Para¬ 
 dise Lost” is, to be sure, poetry; but it reflects 
 what men did once really believe. It reflects 
 also the Weltanschauung of the men who largely 
 made for us our Protestant theology. 
 
 The long battle between the Roman astron¬ 
 omy and the older Alexandrian, which Coperni¬ 
 cus revived after 1540 and Galileo, Kepler, and 
 Newton argued out, is too familiar to need sum¬ 
 mary. We miss, however, most of the point of it 
 all, unless we bear in mind that science won its 
 battle largely with theological weapons. 
 
 “ In Adam’s fall 
 We sinned all,” 
 
 and the resulting corruption involves the whole 
 of nature as far out as the sphere of the moon. 
 Beyond this and including the moon itself, s 
 
 “Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke 
 
 Sind herrlich , wie am ersten Tag . 
 
 The floor of the lowest heaven is the boundary 
 between nature and the supernatural. Every¬ 
 thing in the celestial realm is perfect and un¬ 
 changing. 
 
 The Copernicans, therefore, being quite un¬ 
 able to prove directly that the earth moves, 
 and being, in fact, for some seventy years after 
 
 58 
 
THE COSMOLOGY OF THE CREEDS 
 
 Copernicus’s death, equally unable to reconcile 
 their theory with the observed behavior of the 
 planets, concentrated their attack on proving 
 changes and imperfection in the wrong place. 
 Tycho Brahe, already wakened from his dog¬ 
 matic slumbers by the remarkable temporary 
 star of 1572, was able to show that the great 
 comet of 1577 lay beyond the moon, because, un¬ 
 like the moon, it did not measure any larger 
 when directly overhead than when low in the 
 sky, although some four thousand miles nearer. 
 So the heavens do alter; and comets are not 
 caused “by the ascending from the earth of 
 human sins and wickedness, formed into a kind 
 of gas, and ignited by the anger of God.” What 
 was practically more important, they are not to 
 be frightened off by any ringing of church bells 
 or suppressed by papal bulls. 
 
 “ He was a great magician, Tycho Brahe.” 
 
 After 1610, Galileo’s opera glass showed 
 mountains on the moon, and so proved that one 
 at least of the heavenly bodies is not smooth and 
 perfect. In vain did the churchmen of the day 
 maintain that the lunar peaks are not at the 
 moon’s surface, but are overlain by an invisible 
 crust as smooth as doctrine demands. Galileo re¬ 
 torted with invisible mountains ten times higher 
 than the real ones! Very properly, under the cir¬ 
 cumstances, contemporary theologians refused to 
 
 "59 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 view the moon at all. There are, of course, no 
 mountains there, else Aristotle would have men¬ 
 tioned them. Still, if we did look, unquestion¬ 
 ably the Devil would make us see mountains. 
 So why risk being led into temptation? 
 
 Finally, Kepler proved that the planets do 
 not move in circles at all, but in ellipses; and the 
 whole system of crystal spheres came crashing 
 down about the ears of saints and angels, greatly, 
 no doubt, to their astonishment. 
 
 All this somewhat lengthy tale has three very 
 practical results. 
 
 In the first place, no man can read the Bible, 
 no man can interpret any historic creed, to make 
 out whether he believes it or not, until he can 
 place text or article in its astronomical setting. 
 ‘‘For in him,” for example, says St. Paul, “dwell- 
 eth all the fulness of the godhead bodily.” But 
 the “fulness,” the “pleroma,” is the region above 
 the planetary heavens, substantially Milton’s 
 empyrean, where dwells the Unknowable God, 
 ministered to by seven or eighteen or some 
 other number of his personified attributes — 
 Wisdom, Reason, Life, Thought, Righteousness, 
 Peace, Truth, and the rest. Not to know this is 
 to miss much of the apostle’s point. So, too, for 
 another example, with the last half of the Apos¬ 
 tles’ Creed. It presupposes the Jerusalem astron¬ 
 omy. Without this, it has no meaning. Or, again, 
 the whole half-religious pseudo-science of as- 
 
 60 
 
THE COSMOLOGY OF THE CREEDS 
 
 trology, out of which even Kepler made a living, 
 and which has still so much following that the 
 “Atlantic Monthly” has been carrying the ad¬ 
 vertisement of a professional astrologer, has no 
 point at all unless the human soul, coming down 
 from God at birth, passes through the planetary 
 heavens, and so picks up the special qualities of 
 the beings who inhabit each. 
 
 In the second place, the entire Biblical story 
 and nine tenths of Christian history are based on 
 a universe that does not in the least resemble 
 that in which we actually live. The story would 
 have been differently written, the theology de¬ 
 rived from it would have taken a different 
 turn, the dogmas added to it would have been of 
 quite a different sort, if the men who wrote out 
 the story and thought out the doctrine had 
 known as much, let us say, as Aristarchus knew 
 before 200 B.c. Our traditional theology rests on 
 an astronomy which we have not believed for 
 two hundred years and shall never believe 
 again. Therefore, our religion hangs in the air. 
 That is, in no small part, what is the matter with 
 us all. 
 
 And, finally, not only our formal doctrines, 
 but much of our poetry and especially our 
 hymns, much of our art, much of our prose lit¬ 
 erature, all these portions of the Bible which we 
 quote and read, everything, in short, which 
 gives the emotional color to our religious ideas, 
 
 61 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 all fit a universe which we do not believe to exist 
 and which we cannot imagine in any such vivid 
 fashion as our fathers did. Who nowadays fears 
 a hell which is only a metaphor? How shall men 
 strive for a heaven that is only a figure of speech? 
 Men can see an undiscovered country with the 
 eye of faith and order their mortal lives so as to 
 find it, whether they put this country under the 
 earth, or in the sky, or on the blessed isles some¬ 
 where between the Persian Gulf and the west 
 coast of Ireland. They can also look with hope¬ 
 ful mind to a hereafter in a world of pure ideas 
 with no local habitation. But they cannot do 
 both. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 1 THE FOUR SOURCES OF OPINION 
 
 But how, after all, do men find the answer to 
 any question? How do we make out, for example, 
 the shape of the earth, or the number of the 
 stars, or the location of purgatory, or the date of 
 creation, or the size of the moon, or anything 
 else that we happen to want to know? Practi¬ 
 cally, of course, and immediately, we ask some¬ 
 body else. Ultimately, men have depended on 
 one or other of four different methods of arriving 
 at truth. 
 
 First, apparently, both as the reaction of the 
 individual to a new situation, and historically 
 for the race as a whole, comes the method of 
 common sense. Any fool can see, we say — and 
 go ahead. If the event proves that the guess was 
 right, we do the same thing next time. If we 
 guessed wrong, we guess again. Given time 
 enough, somebody will find the answer to every 
 practical problem, and know the answer to be 
 right because it works. 
 
 “A burnt child dreads the fire.” In addition, 
 the burnt child acquires certain information con¬ 
 cerning heated bodies and flame. If enough 
 people carry through the same experiment, the 
 
 63 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 results get included in our folk-lore or assembled 
 into such documents as the Book of Proverbs. 
 If the matter is vital enough to have survival 
 value, natural selection takes the matter in 
 hand, and builds the information into the nerv¬ 
 ous system. All knowledge among the lower 
 animals seems to be of this sort, from the pro¬ 
 tozoa up. Either the creature itself tries some act 
 at random, tries it again if it works, or tries 
 something else if it does not, until the habit 
 forms; or else whatever causes there are that do 
 such things evolve an instinct. Nine tenths of 
 our own human knowledge is also of this same 
 burnt child type, habit or instinct or tradition, 
 built up by the method of trial and error. 
 
 A few persons, among favored races, on a few 
 special subjects, and then, not often, reason. 
 When they do reason, practically and historically 
 the reasoning takes one or other of three forms. 
 
 Given the more or less spontaneous ideas of 
 common sense, we may analyze these systemat¬ 
 ically, criticize each in the light of all the rest, 
 reject at least one of each contradictory pair, 
 and thus, in the course of time, develop a set 
 of opinions that are internally self-consistent, 
 however much they quarrel with the common- 
 sense aspects of the outer world with which they 
 started. This is the method of philosophy. 
 Historically, it is the first advance from the pre¬ 
 human ‘‘method of fumble and succeed.” The 
 
 64 
 
OUR FOUR SOURCES OF OPINION 
 
 Greeks, of course, especially the Ionians, were 
 the first western people who really did anything 
 noteworthy with this method of transcending 
 experience. 
 
 Or, again, we may take the data of common- 
 sense experience, and criticize this in the light 
 of other experience of the same sort. We shall 
 speculate as freely as any philosopher; but we 
 shall check our speculations, not by inner con¬ 
 sistency, but by outward fact. We shall, in such 
 case, hunt after facts which do not come of 
 themselves; and when we can, we shall experi¬ 
 ment. This is the method of science. This also 
 was an invention of the Greeks. 
 
 Common sense, science, and philosophy are, 
 then, three different levels of insight into the na¬ 
 ture of the universe. Crude common sense takes 
 the endless confusion of this buzzing, booming 
 world, and sorts it out into some workable 
 order. The device, therefore, comes to its limit 
 when it has made the world livable. Science, 
 thereupon, takes the assumptions of common 
 sense and criticizes these in the light of more ac¬ 
 curate and wider knowledge. Science comes in its 
 turn to its limit so far as the world becomes pre¬ 
 dictable. Then, finally, philosophy criticizes the 
 assumptions of science, endeavoring to make the 
 world comprehensible. Thus far, on the whole, 
 philosophy has been rather less successful than 
 its partners. 
 
 65 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 There remains, however, still a fourth method 
 of acquiring information, which does not belong 
 anywhere in the common-sense-science-philos¬ 
 ophy series — the method of theology. Theology 
 employs the same free speculation as the other 
 three. It rejects its failures in the same fashion. 
 But its test of truth is neither workability, nor 
 the facts of nature, nor inner consistency, but 
 conformity to some datum assumed as already 
 fixed. 
 
 This ultimate authority is, of course, widely 
 diverse for different theologies. It may be the 
 Old Testament. It may be the New Testament. 
 It may be the Church, teaching a great deal 
 which is not in either. It may be the Koran. It 
 may be the works of Aristotle. But always and 
 everywhere the theological method of discover¬ 
 ing truth assumes that some one or more persons 
 know something important about the universe 
 which the rest of mankind cannot possibly dis¬ 
 cover for themselves. 
 
 One gets the sharpest idea of the relations 
 among these four methods of exploring the uni¬ 
 verse by considering an actual case which, his¬ 
 torically, has been handled in succession by 
 them all. 
 
 Such, for example, is our old problem of the 
 figure of the earth. Common sense, of course, 
 always answers at once that the earth is flat; 
 and proves its case by the fact that men do, on 
 
 66 
 
OUR FOUR SOURCES OF OPINION 
 
 that assumption, find their way across country 
 and from port to port. After all, the earth really 
 is flat within the probable error of the original 
 data; and it is not round within the probable 
 error of the data now available. So we really do 
 not now know what shape it is. What we do 
 know nowadays is science. 
 
 But the Greek philosophers attacked the prob¬ 
 lem from another side. What, they asked them¬ 
 selves, is the perfect figure, the ideal solid? If 
 we can decide on that, then we shall know the 
 shape of the earth. The perfect solid, said some, 
 is the cube; therefore the earth is a cube, and we 
 live on the upper surface. Not so, responded 
 others; the ideal figure is the sphere, and the 
 earth is round. Thereupon arose Anaximander, 
 the Hegel of his day, and pointed out that, since 
 the cylinder combines the properties of both 
 cube and sphere, the cylinder is the ultimate 
 figure, and the inhabited earth is the upper sur¬ 
 face of that geometrical solid. Philosophy, in 
 the western world, was just trying its wings. 
 Naturally, it flapped. 
 
 As always, given a sufficient number of phi¬ 
 losophers, some one of them is bound to arrive at 
 the correct opinion on every possible question. 
 The practical difficulty is to make out, in any 
 special case, which philosopher it is. In the end, 
 the one who happened to guess right commonly 
 gets rather more credit than he really deserves. 
 
 6 7 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 Nevertheless, taken in the long run, the method 
 of philosophy has abundantly justified itself by 
 its results. 
 
 We have already seen at some length the re¬ 
 sults of applying the method of theology to 
 a comparatively simple astronomical problem. 
 The '‘sacred theory of the earth” which cul¬ 
 minates in the cosmology of “Paradise Lost” is 
 one of the outstanding monuments of human 
 folly. It sent several scientific men to prison and 
 two or three to death; and it held back the prog¬ 
 ress of Europe for a century. And yet, once 
 granted the truth of the main presupposition of 
 all theology, there is no escape from the opinion 
 that John Milton was right and Sir Isaac, his 
 contemporary, wrong. 
 
 Here, then, is the basal weakness of all theol¬ 
 ogy, that it is always at the mercy of historical 
 accident. If the men who wrote the Bible had 
 chanced to know less about Babylonian science 
 and more about Greek — having no science of 
 their own in either case — the whole history of 
 Christian thought might have been profoundly 
 different. No man, for example, who knew the 
 inside of the Alexandrian observatory could have 
 written the Revelation of St. John the Divine. 
 
 Or suppose the story in the Synoptic Gospels 
 shifted a hundred years forward or back in time, 
 or a hundred miles east or west in space. As they 
 stand, the Synoptic Gospels teem with devils. 
 
 68 / 
 
OUR FOUR SOURCES OF OPINION 
 
 Half the incidents of Mark are concerned with 
 them. But there are no demons in the Fourth 
 Gospel. The Synoptic narrative happens just to 
 hit a psychic epidemic. Therefore, for some 
 seventeen hundred years, Christian theology 
 made the existence of devils a cardinal doctrine 
 of Christian faith. Incidentally, the doctrine 
 caused the death of a good many thousands of 
 entirely innocent persons accused of witchcraft. 
 
 One gets a particularly good idea of what 
 theology was like in its palmy days from one of 
 the important happenings in the early history of 
 modern science, the trial of Michael Servetus at 
 Geneva in 1553. Servetus was the leading natu¬ 
 ralist of his day, and among other important 
 labors he had brought out an edition of Ptol¬ 
 emy’s old geography, that being still, on the 
 whole, in spite of its more than a thousand years 
 of age, rather more reliable than any contem¬ 
 porary work. The indictment against Servetus 
 specified, among other high crimes and misde¬ 
 meanors, none of them of the least consequence, 
 that the defendant had, in this work, described 
 the Holy Land as a rather sterile country, not in 
 the least given to flowing with milk and honey. 
 
 To this, the defendant made answer that, 
 whether the statement was correct or not, he 
 himself was in no wise responsible, since he was 
 not the author, but only the editor, of the work 
 in question. The court, on this point, ruled for 
 
 69 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 the plaintiff. If a heathen author contradicts 
 Holy Writ, a Christian editor who lets the text 
 go unaltered makes himself equally guilty. 
 
 Overruled on this point, the defense fell back 
 on the matter of fact, and submitted abundant 
 evidence from travelers and others, to the effect 
 that Ptolemy was right and the Bible, as a con¬ 
 temporary document, quite in error. Palestine, 
 in the late Middle Ages, was demonstrably not in 
 the least a garden of the Lord. Again the court 
 ruled against the accused. On questions involv¬ 
 ing points of doctrine, all testimony as to mat¬ 
 ters of fact is excluded. 
 
 So they burned Servetus in the city square; 
 and the war was on, the three hundred years’ 
 war between evidence and authority. 
 
 The result is that, to-day, we have n’t any 
 theology. Nominally, indeed, we have; but what 
 little we pretend to is only a survival from the 
 past, with no life of its own. The whole con¬ 
 ception of a uniquely and literally inspired text, 
 or a uniquely and infallibly guided church, em¬ 
 powered to set limits to the range of opinion, 
 which is the basis of all theology, has simply dis¬ 
 appeared, and that within hardly more than a 
 single generation. An old-fashioned doctrinal 
 sermon cannot be preached to-day, because no 
 modern clergyman knows enough Christian 
 doctrine to last out the hour. If it were, it 
 would empty the pews. Neither clergy nor laity 
 
 70 
 
OUR FOUR SOURCES OF OPINION 
 
 have so much as heard the names of most of 
 those essentials of the Christian faith for which 
 holy men of old endured exile, prison, and 
 death. Most of us, to-day, know just about as 
 much concerning Anabaptists, Homoousians, 
 and Semi-Arians as we know concerning kobolds, 
 afrits, and warlocks — and we commonly care 
 rather less. 
 
 Only once before in history has so vast a sys¬ 
 tem so completely and so suddenly collapsed. 
 Magic, in its day, was also “Queen of the 
 Sciences.” It had its practitioners and its 
 schools. It was believed “ semper , ubique , ab 
 omnibus .” In fact, time has been when theol¬ 
 ogy and magic together covered just about the 
 ground now taken care of by philosophy and 
 science. Theology explained the universe; magic 
 controlled practically the forces of nature. A 
 great theologian of the Middle Ages spoke to 
 the learned world with the authority which now 
 belongs to the great investigator. A great 
 magician had much the popular following of 
 Edison and Marconi. Yet only students of his¬ 
 tory nowadays know that there ever was any 
 such thing as magic. The generation now grow¬ 
 ing up is only dimly aware that there was ever 
 any such thing as theology. 
 
 And the world is vastly better off! Think, for 
 example, how much more mercifully, and how 
 much more efficiently, we care for the insane, 
 
 71 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 now that we have ceased to believe in devils; 
 how much better we are beginning to handle 
 concrete evils and definite negligences and ig¬ 
 norances, as we get clear of the theological ab¬ 
 straction, “sin”; how much faster is the prog¬ 
 ress of useful knowledge, now that discoverers 
 no longer face an interview with any Court of 
 Inquisition. Think how much better off the 
 Mohammedan world would be if only it would 
 stop believing the Koran. 
 
 Theology, in short, the whole conception of 
 any sort of past that has authority to set limits 
 to opinion in the present, does not belong to our 
 world-view. So far as theology explains the re¬ 
 ligious life, that task is much better done by 
 psychology, historical science, and the philos¬ 
 ophy of religion. So far as theology explains the 
 universe, it merely keeps alive the bad science 
 and the bad history and the bad philosophy of 
 the days of ignorance. Men were religious long 
 before they discovered dogma. The most devout 
 men and the most righteous have commonly 
 bothered their heads least over points of doc¬ 
 trine. The race which has done most for religion 
 had, in its best days, neither theology nor phi¬ 
 losophy nor science. The great prophets of 
 Israel were conspicuously persons who did not 
 make anybody’s creed their jailor. 
 
 So really, to-day, in spite of too numerous 
 survivals, we have only three sources of opinion, 
 
 72 
 
OUR FOUR SOURCES OF OPINION 
 
 not four. Practically, much that passes for 
 theology is really philosophy, or history, or 
 Biblical exegesis, or sometimes rather bad nat¬ 
 ural science. Proper theology, as the world knew 
 it two centuries ago, is as far away from us now 
 as the magic of two centuries earlier than that. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 SCIENCE AND THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 
 
 The end of science is prediction. Any branch of 
 knowledge “arrives” finally, just so far as it can 
 say with certainty that such-and-such phenom¬ 
 ena are about to occur. 
 
 Unfortunately, no one of the actual sciences 
 ever quite attains this ideal, not even astronomy, 
 which on the whole comes closest. The theory 
 of the moon’s motion is still so far incomplete 
 that the predicted declinations and right ascen¬ 
 sions have to be adjusted from time to time to 
 match the place where the lady actually is in the 
 sky. In fact, the lunar tables of the Nautical 
 Almanac for 1923 had to be entirely refigured 
 just before the volume went to press; and the 
 solar eclipse of the autumn before was fifteen 
 seconds off schedule. 
 
 The object of this scientific prediction is, in 
 part, practical convenience. When we know 
 what is going to occur, we can commonly more 
 or less adjust ourselves to the inevitable. More¬ 
 over, with the progress of knowledge, we are 
 able more and more to control the future for 
 ourselves, so that, if we do not happen to like 
 what is apparently coming, we can have some- 
 
 74 
 
SCIENCE AND THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 
 
 thing else instead. The method of science justi¬ 
 fies itself by the fact that its predictions do 
 nearly always come off almost right. 
 
 For this, they have to be pretty specific. If 
 we build a bridge of such-and-such material, 
 after such-and-such a design, the structure will 
 stand up under such-and-such a load. Whoever 
 takes the trouble to be present at precisely such- 
 and-such a point on the earth, at precisely such- 
 and-such future date and time of day, will see 
 the sun darkened for just so many minutes and 
 seconds. The litter of a white rabbit with long 
 ears, mated to a short-eared black, the ancestry 
 of both being known, will contain such-and-such 
 a proportion of black-and-white young, having 
 such-and-such a length of ear. If the Govern¬ 
 ment prints so many paper bills, so much gold 
 will go out of circulation. “The entire task of 
 science,” writes Ostwald, “is to establish such 
 relations among measurable quantities that, 
 some of these quantities being given, the others 
 may be deduced.” 
 
 Much of the work of science is, so to say, 
 backward prediction. If competent astronomers 
 had been present on the earth at a series of past 
 dates some seventy-odd years apart, they would 
 have recognized, in the awful portent of the sky, 
 the same old Halley’s comet on another periodic 
 return. If there were men in eastern North 
 America toward the end of the Pleistocene, they 
 
 75 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 saw a lobe of the Labrador ice sheet lying with 
 its southern edge on Cape Cod. If we ever do re¬ 
 cover the original autograph of the Gospel ac¬ 
 cording to St. Mark, it will not have the ending 
 which is the basis of that in King James’s ver¬ 
 sion. 
 
 Much scientific prediction, moreover, virtu¬ 
 ally all of it in the applied sciences, takes the 
 form — not, given the premises, what will be the 
 result; but, given the desired result, what con¬ 
 ditions must be selected to bring this about? 
 The sailor, for example, properly equipped, can 
 always answer the question: Suppose I steer in 
 this direction, where shall I strike land? But he 
 actually does set himself the problem: In which 
 direction must I steer in order to reach the port 
 where I desire to go? Both forms of the prob¬ 
 lem, however, involve prediction; the second 
 quite as truly as the first. Science, as it grows 
 more practical year by year, tends more and 
 more to make its predictions of the second type. 
 
 Now it would be quite possible, given a highly 
 scientific astronomy, geography, oceanography, 
 and the rest, to help out the silly sailor, by 
 printing him a list of all ports, with instructions 
 for reaching any one of them from any of the 
 rest. Practically, this in not done. The sailor 
 has his chart, on which is represented in quite 
 arbitrary symbols a vast deal of accurate infor¬ 
 mation concerning sea and land. With the aid of 
 
 76 
 
SCIENCE AND THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 
 
 this, the sailor, even in unfamiliar waters, finds 
 his way wherever he desires to go. The chart, 
 then, is a highly convenient but also highly con¬ 
 ventional representation of actual land and 
 water, by means of which the navigator attains 
 his ends vastly better than he could by attend¬ 
 ing only to the real water and the actual land. 
 
 Not otherwise is it with the chart of the uni¬ 
 verse which we call the body of scientific theory. 
 Modern science is a highly conventional, very 
 detailed, extraordinarily accurate model, by 
 means of which men remember, or describe, or 
 anticipate, or control occurrences incomparably 
 better than they ever dreamed of doing in pre- 
 scientific days. But the world of science is not 
 the real world, any more than the blue areas on 
 the seaman’s chart are real sea. The painted 
 ocean of the navigator is, for certain special pur¬ 
 poses, a great deal better than the real sea — 
 but one cannot catch fish out of it. So the ideal 
 world of natural science is, for very many uses, a 
 great deal more illuminating than the real world 
 of experience — but human beings do not live 
 in it. 
 
 Science is, then, for the last three hundred 
 years, engaged in constructing an imaginary 
 world, which so far corresponds, bit by bit, with 
 the real world, that men get on by its aid in the 
 real world as much better than they used, as a 
 modern coastwise freighter has the advantage 
 
 77 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 over the ships of Cabot and Champlain. But 
 men of science and sea captains alike, sail by 
 their charts, not on them. 
 
 Our physics, for example, deals with friction¬ 
 less fluids, weightless levers, rigid solids, perfect 
 gases, none of which exist in the real world, but 
 are parts of an ideal universe which science has 
 spun out of its own head for the sake of dealing 
 handily with the excessive complexities of things 
 as they actually are. Even our time of day is not 
 based on any behavior of the real earth out of 
 which we dig a living; but on the revolution 
 about the sun of a purely fictitious and scientific 
 earth, which for only four instants in the year 
 coincides in position with the real one. Our sun¬ 
 dials belong to the real world. But our watches 
 record only an abstraction of the astronomical 
 mind. 
 
 Practically, this imaginary universe of science 
 has to be eased off a good deal in places to fit 
 things as they are. Virtually no “law of science,” 
 for example, ever holds quite to the limit of the 
 best observation, and even then only through 
 the middle range of the phenomena. Boyle’s law, 
 notoriously, breaks down for gases anywhere 
 near the boiling points of their liquids. Play¬ 
 fair’s law does not hold for a country that has 
 been glaciated. The Relativists rejoice especially 
 over showing why Prout’s law never really 
 works. Mendel’s law is very far from taking all 
 
 78 • 
 
SCIENCE AND THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 
 
 the uncertainty out of horse-racing. In short, 
 the whole conception of a universe “ governed 
 by law,” and of “laws of nature,” universal, 
 immutable, which have to be “overruled,” or 
 “set aside,” or interfered with by “the opera¬ 
 tion of higher laws,” belongs entirely to theol¬ 
 ogy, and has no place whatever in science. 
 
 In other words, while the facts of science are, 
 in large part, facts of the real world, the theories 
 of science and the laws of science are constructs 
 of the scientific mind. Sometimes, as conspicu¬ 
 ously in the natural history 7 sciences, these con¬ 
 structs probably match somewhat closely the 
 reality. But, even here, a scientific “species,” 
 for example, has no objective existence. The 
 ph ysical sciences, on the other hand, have quite 
 frankly cut loose from all semblance of reality. 
 The concept of the ether, not only flatly con¬ 
 tradicts all that we have experienced concerning 
 the properties of bodies; it is not even consistent 
 with itself — a perfect fluid more rigid than 
 steel, a weightless substance heavier than lead. 
 Or, to jump across the great gulf between mind 
 and matter, there is the subconsciousness — the 
 thoughts that nobody is thinking. All this 
 troubles no scientific person — though report 
 has it that Huckleberry Finn was a good deal 
 put out to discover that lands, red on the map, 
 may be green in reality. 
 
 The method by which science constructs its 
 
 79 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 ideal world is, of course, by successive abstrac¬ 
 tions. We select some few aspects of the actual 
 universe; then we imagine another universe in 
 which these particular aspects of the world we 
 know would appear, uncomplicated by all those 
 other aspects which always bear them company 
 in reality. This abstraction may be compara¬ 
 tively slight, as in the historical and social 
 sciences. It may be carried to the last extreme, 
 as in mathematics, where nothing whatever re¬ 
 mains of the world of experience except points 
 and lines and abstract number, none of which 
 occur at all in the real world. Between these ex¬ 
 tremes lie the rest of the various sciences. But 
 they all abstract something. None of them pre¬ 
 tend to match the complexity of things as they 
 are. 
 
 Nor is this method of abstraction in the least 
 confined to natural science. All literature does 
 it; and all art. 
 
 Of the graphic arts, for example, photography 
 in color comes closest to reality. But painting 
 begins by dropping out most of the detail. A 
 crayon drawing in black and white goes another 
 step along the same path. A pen-and-ink sketch 
 consists entirely of lines, not one of which occurs 
 anywhere in nature. Yet people buy etchings 
 when they might have photographs. 
 
 Even our moralities are an abstraction. The 
 Sermon on the Mount discusses the problem: 
 
 80 
 
SCIENCE AND THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 
 
 What sort of conduct would be appropriate for 
 the kingdom of heaven, supposing this to be 
 already present and universal, with all wicked 
 persons conveniently out of the way? Thus, by 
 the same method by which the Christian world 
 has come to its science, it has come also to its 
 ethics. But the world in which men may wisely 
 resist not evil and turn the other cheek is still an 
 ideal, an abstracted and artificially simplified 
 picture of reality. In the world of everyday con¬ 
 duct, as in the various branches of engineering, 
 there is always “the factor of safety.” 
 
 I have been writing, all along, as if we men 
 have to do with only two worlds, a real world of 
 common-sense experience and an ideal world 
 of science that is a simplified model of it. This, 
 however, has been only for convenience. Every¬ 
 body nowadays is supposed to know that the 
 everyday world of common sense is itself only 
 phenomenal. The true reality, the world of 
 things-in-themselves, is pretty certainly some¬ 
 thing quite different. So, ultimately, we have to 
 take account of three worlds, not two. 
 
 Just how far we of the phenomenal world have 
 also direct access to the other world of realities, 
 is not a matter on which it is wise to be too cer¬ 
 tain. Kant held the moral law to be part of 
 things-in-themselves. Many religious people 
 have believed that they have personal and in¬ 
 communicable experiences that take them for 
 
 81 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 the moment behind the veil and show them 
 transcendental truth. The followers of Herbert 
 Spencer were convinced that they knew at least 
 enough about the Absolute to be sure that no¬ 
 body will ever find out anything more. 
 
 However these may be, modern opinion is 
 pretty unanimous that we are citizens of three 
 countries, concerned by turns with the affairs 
 now of one and now of another. Sometimes we 
 dwell in the world of science, with its predictable 
 future, its forces and laws, its “uniformity.” 
 Mostly, we dwell in the phenomenal world, 
 which for common purposes we treat as the real 
 world, a world of freedom and struggle and hope. 
 But we are supposed to reflect, occasionally, that 
 the properties of this phenomenal world will not 
 stand critical analysis. How far, as philosophers, 
 we are capable of transcending both the world of 
 phenomena and the world of science, is one of the 
 matters which serious-minded men ought dili¬ 
 gently to consider. 
 
 At any rate, we are concerned with three as¬ 
 pects of experience; and propositions true con¬ 
 cerning any one of the three are not necessarily 
 true concerning either of the others. An excel¬ 
 lent device, therefore, for attaining to the acme 
 of confusion, is to ignore all distinction among 
 the relative, the absolute, and the scientific, and 
 to treat the remarks of wiser persons concerning 
 one of these as if they were intended to apply to 
 
 82 
 
SCIENCE AND THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 
 
 another or to all. A great deal of the hostility of 
 many excellent persons to both philosophy and 
 science has no other basis than this. 
 
 Or, if one does not like philosophizing, there is 
 always the “double aspect” doctrine. 
 
 Every event of the phenomenal world looks 
 two ways, has, in fact, two sides. Symphonies, 
 sonnets, sunsets, various other interesting things, 
 are all describable in terms of wave lengths and 
 wave forms and time intervals and various 
 specially shaped black marks on white paper. 
 But one need not point out that if symphonies, 
 sunsets, and sonnets had no other aspect than 
 this, men would never have bothered to notice 
 one portion of these, nor have gone to the labor 
 of creating the other. All have another side, in 
 which vibration numbers and printers’ ink have 
 no part. 
 
 The aspect of “description” and the aspect 
 of “appreciation ” are the technical terms, which, 
 in English, designate these two sides of all oc¬ 
 currences. The words are not altogether happy; 
 but there is no doubt what they mean. 
 
 One cannot say that either aspect of things is 
 more “real” than the other. Each has its place 
 in our mental life. Each serves its special pur¬ 
 pose. Science is, obviously, limited absolutely to 
 the descriptive aspect of everything. If science 
 should ever attempt to transcend this limit, it 
 would forthwith break down. There never will 
 
 83 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 be any such attempt, because this distinction 
 between the two aspects of nature, and the lim¬ 
 itation of natural knowledge to one aspect only, 
 have been commonplaces of the scientific world, 
 even from the days of Aristotle. 
 
 On the other side of the line lies the “world of 
 appreciation,” “God, freedom, and immortal¬ 
 ity,” and all the rest of the “spiritual values” — 
 though all these have, of course, also their “de¬ 
 scriptive” side. But, unfortunately, the persons 
 who have most especially concerned themselves 
 with the appreciative side of things have seemed 
 to be, by nature, an uncommonly muddle- 
 headed lot, to whom any sort of logical distinc¬ 
 tion is a sealed book. They have, therefore, felt 
 free to use any word in the language in any 
 sense that pleased them, figurative or literal, and 
 to attribute to other more careful persons what¬ 
 ever opinions emerge from the process. They 
 jump back and forth from “appreciation” to 
 “description” without noticing which side of 
 the fence they are, for the instant, on. They re¬ 
 peat statements, obviously true in one sense, as 
 if they had any significance in another. Much of 
 the regrettable “conflict between religion and 
 science,” much of the regrettable hostility of 
 sincerely religious people to all forms of “mod¬ 
 ernism,” has no other basis than this carrying 
 across of indisputable truths of the world of 
 description into the world of appreciation, by 
 
 84 
 
SCIENCE AND THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES 
 
 people who have never heard of the differ¬ 
 ence. 
 
 The wise man, therefore, whether scientific or 
 not, and whether he chooses to think of himself 
 as dwelling by turns in three worlds, or as shar¬ 
 ing two aspects of one, will always ask himself 
 concerning any proposition which he is asked to 
 accept: To which world, or to which aspect of 
 the world, is this formula intended to apply? 
 For the rest, the non-scientific person will do well 
 to bear in mind that all the conclusions of nat¬ 
 ural science with which he has any concern are 
 already printed in some standard text or refer¬ 
 ence book. What cannot be found in these, and 
 cited chapter and verse, is gossip and rumor and 
 obiter dicta , for which the scientific world is not 
 responsible. These two simple rules will save 
 many worthy persons from a great deal of quite 
 unnecessary sorrow of heart — and from a great 
 deal of quite unnecessary confusion of mind. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 PRIMITIVE SOULS AND GHOSTS 
 
 The only way really to grasp any general idea is 
 to turn historian. When one knows where the 
 idea came from, who originated it and why, and 
 how and why it has altered since at the hands of 
 other men, then one may be reasonably sure 
 that his mental teeth have bitten in. Anything 
 much short of this leaves us still uncertain 
 whether, after all, we may not, somehow, have 
 missed the point. 
 
 All this is especially the case with very old 
 ideas. These have nearly always changed their 
 shape with the progress of the centuries, and 
 therefore, as they now lie in our minds, contain 
 remnants and survivals from many strata of 
 past belief. Our words tend to persist long after 
 the ideas have altered. Of no opinion is this 
 more true than of our present-day conceptions 
 of the soul. None, moreover, is more funda¬ 
 mental for religion. Concerning none is it more 
 important that each of us should be fully per¬ 
 suaded in his own mind. 
 
 Now it happens that the difference between 
 a living man and a dead man is one of the few 
 scientific questions which early man felt called 
 
 86 
 
PRIMITIVE SOULS AND GHOSTS 
 
 upon to answer. By way of this problem — 
 which is still unsolved — our forbears of the 
 stone age took the first step of the long journey 
 that has led to civilization. And since all of us 
 men, everywhere on earth and throughout all 
 known time, are brothers under our skins, virtu¬ 
 ally all of us, confronted with the same situation, 
 have thought it through to much the same end. 
 
 So long as a man is “alive/’ his heart beats. | 
 The more alive he is — as, for example, when he 
 follows his quarry in hunt or confronts his enemy 
 in battle — the harder and faster his heart 
 pumps. Moreover, all strong emotion obviously 
 affects the circulation. On the other hand, when 
 a man is “dead,” then his heart beats no more. 
 
 Here, then, is a good working hypothesis: 
 The “life” is in the heart, along with other qual¬ 
 ities, good and bad. Presumably, therefore, if 
 we devour the heart of strong beast or brave foe, 
 all sorts of excellences will be added unto us. 
 
 But men do not stand to the aurochs nor wax 
 valiant in fight, without picking up a certain 
 amount of anatomy. The heart has a great deal 
 to do with the blood; a bleeding man grows 
 weaker, and then dies. Most peoples have fol¬ 
 lowed the inevitable logic. The heart gets its 
 properties by virtue of its relation to the blood. 
 “The blood is the life.” 
 
 Oddly enough, as it turns out, the vital fluid is 
 really about the least alive of all our tissues, and 
 
 87 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 about the least essential to that “continuous ad¬ 
 justment of internal relations to external rela¬ 
 tions,” which is Herbert Spencer's definition of 
 life. Many times more than half the living 
 creatures on the earth have no blood. But pre- 
 scientific man does not know either of these 
 facts; and, given the facts that he does know, his 
 reasoning is sound so far. 
 
 On the other hand, there is no more pervasive 
 fallacy, nor more persistent, than that which ex¬ 
 plains a function by inventing an entity. We 
 wonder how we remember; and we invent a 
 “faculty of memory” to account for the mys¬ 
 tery, and flatter ourselves that we are any farther 
 along than we were before. Our love for our off¬ 
 spring has been referred to an “organ of philo¬ 
 progenitiveness.” Even well up toward the end 
 of the last century, scholarly men could suppose 
 that we differ from the brutes by virtue of a 
 “power” of reason and a “gift” of speech, acting 
 under the impulsion of a “will.” We still attri¬ 
 bute specific unrighteousness to a “state of sin.” 
 
 Naturally, in less critical times, the same 
 deep-seated human weakness resulted in the con¬ 
 ception of a blood-soul. 
 
 One meets the idea in all sorts of forms. The 
 clever damsel in Grimm’s familiar marchen , to 
 conceal her elopement, pricks her finger and 
 leaves behind three drops of blood which an¬ 
 swer in turn for her. “The voice of [Abel] thy 
 
 88 
 
's i pvxv, winged and diminutive, flutters above the corpse. 
 From a Greek vase. 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” 
 “And his soul,” runs Homer’s formula, “through 
 the stricken wound, sped hastily away.” Even 
 the great Harvey, founder of modern physiol- 
 ogy, placed the soul in the blood. 
 
 Such conceptions are universal in early re¬ 
 ligions. Wine is the blood of Dionysos; whoso 
 drinks it becomes as the immortal gods. The 
 initiate into the mysteries of Mithra gains his 
 new soul by way of the bath in bullock’s blood, 
 which in turn connects with the mystic bull 
 slain before the foundation of the world, from 
 whose blood and body sprang all the kindly 
 fruits of the earth. Doubtless, in all this there 
 is a certain element of instinct; since men do 
 have, apparently, an instinctive dread of blood 
 similar to our fear of high places and snakes. 
 Moreover, it is often difficult to separate the 
 idea of a blood-soul from the magic properties of 
 blood. Nevertheless, in most folk-lore, and in 
 most primitive religion, and even in our own 
 science in its callow days, there is a blood-soul 
 which is not the blood itself. 
 
 Unfortunately for the clarity of mind of both 
 the ancient world and ourselves, precisely the 
 same reasoning that proves the life to be in the 
 blood, proves it also to be in the breath. And 
 breath is wind. And wind is air. And air is a 
 great mystery, present yet impalpable, matter, 
 and yet a finer sort. “And Javeh Elohim,” says 
 
 90 
 
PRIMITIVE SOULS AND GHOSTS 
 
 the author of most of the second chapter of 
 Genesis, “formed man out of the dust of the 
 ground, and blew the wind into his nose, and man 
 became alive/’ 
 
 But whether the life inheres in the blood or in 
 the breath, this “life,” for simple-minded antiq¬ 
 uity, is never any “delicately balanced system 
 of bio-chemical functions.” The “life” is the 
 same thing as the “soul,” and the “soul” is 
 always a material object. Naturally, therefore, 
 any body which moves, or has any interesting 
 properties of any sort, has also a “soul.” Hence 
 follows the universal primitive animism. 
 
 Inevitably, also, our physiological psychology 
 had to be preceded by a psychological physi¬ 
 ology. Descartes, for example, whose mathe¬ 
 matics certainly was not in the least primitive, 
 held that the soul, to move the body, runs out 
 through trapdoors in the floor of the ventrical, 
 flows along tubes within the nerves, and stimu¬ 
 lates the muscles to contract. As for the loca¬ 
 tion of the soul in the body, men who fight with 
 pointed weapons put it usually somewhere in the 
 trunk, as Aristotle, for example, in the heart. 
 But cruder peoples, who bash one another’s 
 heads with clubs, put the soul in the brain, 
 quite in the Cartesian manner. Samson’s soul 
 was, partly, in his hair. Even the parings of the 
 nails falling into the hands of an enemy may 
 give him a hold on one’s life.. 
 
 91 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 No reason, however, appears to the unso¬ 
 phisticated mind, why men or beasts or swords 
 or stars should have only one soul apiece. The 
 “life” which is in the breast and makes the 
 heart beat need not be identical with that which 
 dwells in the belly and is strengthened after 
 meat. Early man, therefore, commonly has 
 many souls, distributed variously over the body. 
 Or sometimes, as among the Egyptians — a 
 conception which survives among us still — 
 each of the various souls, which in this particu¬ 
 lar case happen to be seven in number, occupies 
 the entire body, and each has the complete 
 shape of the body. But they are in successions 
 of finer and finer matter, each interpenetrating 
 all those less subtile than itself. So there are 
 souls and ghosts and doubles and shades and 
 spirits and astral bodies without end. 
 
 Names, also, are souls. For the name, for 
 primitive man, is no mere assemblage of black 
 marks in the telephone book, but a portion of the 
 mysterious air, shaped by the lips into sound, a 
 part of the man’s own living breath, pregnant 
 with all magic. Thus, for certain ancient Egyp¬ 
 tians, the name-soul holds the other six souls to¬ 
 gether and gives the personal unity, while name 
 taboos play so large a part in primitive life that 
 we shall probably never know how the ancient 
 Hebrews actually pronounced the dread name of 
 their God. Glimpses of the name-soul still ap- 
 
 92 
 
PRIMITIVE SOULS AND GHOSTS 
 
 pear in such divers places as Grimm’s tale of 
 “ Rumpelstiltskin ” and the familiar formula of 
 Christian baptism. 
 
 Nor need a soul be inside the body at all. 
 
 The shadow is, of course, one of the souls. So 
 are the footprints. There are social circles where 
 it is very bad form, indeed, to step on another 
 man’s shade, where “may your shadow never 
 grow less” is by no means a figure of speech, and 
 where men feel distinctly easier in their minds at 
 night and morning than at noon. Men, also, 
 lose their shadows, as they lose their other souls. 
 One wants to look out lest some shadowless 
 person steal his; and, in general, any being who 
 does not cast a shadow is always under suspi¬ 
 cion. 
 
 Not a few savages, before setting out on a 
 journey or going into battle, take precaution to 
 deposit one or more of their souls in the care of 
 the local medicine man against their safe return. 
 Ogres, giants, and the like, it is well known, often 
 hide their souls in some distant or unlikely spot, 
 and so remain invulnerable, until the hero of the 
 tale discovers the secret and squeezes out the 
 life. The rational soul of “ Orlando Furioso ’’flew 
 away to the moon, and Orlando went crazy un¬ 
 til his friends brought it back to him in a bottle, 
 and uncorked the bottle under his nose. 
 
 All guardian angels, “good angels,” daemons, 
 fravashis, and the like, are essentially such ab- 
 
 93 . 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 sent souls, which may keep near their owners as 
 Doppelganger, or, like those of Matthew 18:10, 
 may dwell always with the gods until their 
 bodies join them. Certain ancient Egyptians, 
 for example, believed in an invisible guardian 
 companion, which walks by each man’s side 
 throughout life, leaves him shortly before death, 
 precedes him to the future world, prepares a 
 place for him there, and welcomes him on ar¬ 
 rival. Then, for the first time, the two are united 
 and live happily forever afterwards, the double 
 providing the new “spiritual” body to replace 
 that left behind in the grave. 
 
 But once given the idea of a soul outside its 
 body, it is only the shortest of steps to the idea 
 of non-human intelligences, spirits that have 
 never had flesh-and-blood bodies. Angels, devils, 
 and certain types of gods are of this origin. An¬ 
 gels, originally a Persian discovery, have bodies 
 of flame, and connect interestingly with the 
 shooting stars. 
 
 On the other hand, there are those strange 
 creatures of our folk-lore — gnomes, elves, fair¬ 
 ies, and the rest — who have all the attributes 
 of personality, but have no souls, and, therefore, 
 though they live a thousand years, finally go out 
 like a candle. There are 
 
 “. .. the dancers of the woods, 
 
 That know not the hard burden of the world, 
 Having but breath in their kind bodies ...” 
 
 94 , 
 
PRIMITIVE SOULS AND GHOSTS 
 
 who yet 
 
 “would love as men do, 
 
 And be as patient and as pitiful.” 
 
 Who does not recall those touching stories, 
 found in various parts of the world, in which, as 
 in the “Thousand and One Nights,” the soulless 
 elemental being shows so much goodness and 
 fortitude and constancy, that the All-Merciful, 
 in the end, grants her a soul, that she may dwell 
 with her lover in paradise? It has been a long 
 process by which men have come to associate 
 either the intelligence or the moral nature with 
 the “life”; and we still sing 
 
 “My soul, be on thy guard!” 
 
 — as if our souls were not really us. 
 
 With us mortals, obviously, at least one of the 
 souls departs from the body during sleep, wan¬ 
 ders about, and meets all sorts of strange adven¬ 
 tures in a world which to primitive man is just 
 as real as the waking one. To add to the excite¬ 
 ment of the dream, the wandering soul is always 
 taking the chance that, on returning to its body 
 at daybreak, it may find its habitation occupied, 
 perhaps by the soul of another sleeper, or of a 
 dead man, or, more likely still, by an evil spirit, 
 who, having no body of its own, has slipped into 
 an open mouth. The soul of the Reverend Fa¬ 
 ther Alberigo, in Dante’s account, has gone to its 
 rest in the ninth circle of hell, while his body, in- 
 
 95 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 habited by a demon, is doing business as usual 
 in the upper world. 
 
 Hence, in all ages, the need of casting out 
 devils. As late as James I, in England, the Con¬ 
 vocation, to avoid scandal, forbade the lesser 
 clergy from exorcising possessed persons except 
 by permission of their bishops. For the student 
 of obsolescent opinion, there is no more bizarre 
 chapter in history than that which deals with the 
 relation of spirits to other bodies than their own. 
 
 Fortunately, however, for us, the peoples 
 with whom, historically, we have most to do, 
 finally reduced all these multifarious sorts of 
 soul to two only in addition to the mind, both, 
 so to say, resident in the body. These are, in 
 ancient terms, the pneuma and the psyche; or, as 
 we are wont now to call them, the breath-soul 
 and the body-soul. Both are, of course, ulti¬ 
 mately identical with the life, and explain why 
 living creatures act as they do. Both, more¬ 
 over, however tenuous, are always somewhere in 
 space, and therefore are “matter’’ and not 
 “mind.” 
 
 The body-soul inheres especially in the flesh 
 and bones and blood. People who believe in a 
 body-soul commonly bury their dead. They 
 may decorate the tomb with pictures, for the 
 soul’s amusement. They may kill slaves or 
 wives at the grave, that their body-souls may 
 minister to the departed. Almost always they 
 
 96 
 
PRIMITIVE SOULS AND GHOSTS 
 
 set out food, at least once, and often from time 
 to time, or pour out libations on the ground for 
 whatever souls happen to be near. Luckily for 
 the archaeologist, they commonly bury orna¬ 
 ments and weapons; though unluckily they 
 frequently “kill” these latter, by breaking off 
 their points to let out their animce. 
 
 The body-soul is thought of as lingering near 
 the grave, sid, tumulus, or cairn, or as actually in 
 it, in shape more or less like the original man in 
 life or the skeleton to which he is shortly re¬ 
 duced. The mourner goes to the burial-place to 
 weep, leaves flowers there, or burns paper 
 images, as his own birthplace chances to be. Our 
 own ceremonial laying of corner stones, with ob¬ 
 jects buried under them, survives from a day 
 when men were buried in the similar location in 
 order that their body-souls might guard the 
 building. 
 
 Our own ghosts are, of course, body-souls. We 
 fear graveyards between midnight and cock 
 crow, because that is the time when body-souls 
 are out, and who knows what they might not do 
 if they caught us? For special reasons, body- 
 souls, instead of keeping near their tombs, may 
 haunt their old abodes. On special occasions 
 they may “squeak and gibber in the Roman 
 streets.” On very special occasions, indeed, they 
 may return to their former bodies, which there¬ 
 upon rise up and walk, to the considerable em- 
 
 97 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 barrassment of the timid living. In fact, no small 
 part of primitive theology is concerned with 
 devices for keeping the ghosts out of the villages; 
 and the first tombstones seem to have been to 
 hold the dead man down. 
 
 In general, fortunately, the body-soul stands 
 faithfully by its bones — hence the virtue of 
 saints’ relics. But it will also associate itself with 
 other personal property — hence the value, for 
 the psychometrizing medium, of gloves, hand¬ 
 kerchiefs, photographs, and locks of hair. In 
 fact, body-souls seem to be glad to get inside 
 anything. The costliest idol that ever came out 
 of Philadelphia has no special virtue until some 
 homeless spirit enters in and dwells there. 
 
 People who believe in a breath-soul take just 
 the opposite tack. They do not bury food or 
 weapons. They do not embalm. On the con¬ 
 trary, they commonly burn the dead body, to 
 get it out of the way as quickly and as thor¬ 
 oughly as possible, so that the breath-soul, cut 
 free from earthly entanglements, may fly away 
 to its everlasting habitation. 
 
 Unfortunately, however, not many races have 
 held either theory of the soul and the hereafter 
 without some admixture of the opposite opinion. 
 Cultures migrate, are borrowed back and forth, 
 are impressed by conquest; with the practical 
 result that most of us, confronted with a choice 
 of opinions, choose both. 
 
 98 
 
PRIMITIVE SOULS AND GHOSTS 
 
 The well-greaved Achaeans, for example, are 
 descendants of a primitive people who believed 
 in a breath-soul and burned their dead; but they 
 overran a more advanced race that believed in a 
 body-soul and buried theirs. So they compro- 
 
 THE SOUL-WEIGHING (xpvxotrratrla) OF HECTOR AND 
 
 ACHILLES 
 
 As the heroes face each other in battle, Hermes, in the presence of 
 Zeus and Thetis, tests their psyches to determine which is to fall. 
 
 From a Greek vase. 
 
 mised the matter by believing one way and act¬ 
 ing the other, quite in the modern manner. In 
 the end, they achieved a ritual which first burned 
 the dead man to get rid of his body, and then 
 carefully preserved his ashes, as if they had 
 buried him. 
 
 Nobody knows what Christians nowadays do 
 
 99 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 believe. Our ordinary language hints at a breath- 
 soul which goes, at death, straight to heaven or 
 hell — unless it lands in purgatory. But our 
 burial customs suggest a body-soul that has a 
 very special interest in its grave. Most of us are 
 opposed to cremation. Few of us are quite at 
 ease in a churchyard in the dark. Apparently, 
 somewhere in the back of our minds is the im¬ 
 memorial doctrine of two souls, one of which re¬ 
 mains near the body while the other flies away. 
 But since, this side of the thirteenth century, we 
 are supposed, as a matter of theology, to be lim¬ 
 ited to a belief in one soul only, most people, so 
 far as one can make out, fuse pneuma and 
 psyche , and think of their dead as simultaneously 
 both in the grave and in heaven. One cannot 
 but wish that there could be somewhat more 
 general agreement on some of these points. 
 
 But whatever we think now, we can hardly 
 understand much that men have written in the 
 past unless we keep in mind the ancient tri¬ 
 chotomy of body, soul, and spirit. 
 
 One can hardly, for example, get the whole 
 force of several of St. Paul’s most striking pas¬ 
 sages, unless one reads, in some measure, with the 
 eye of a first-century Corinthian, familiar from 
 his youth up with breath-souls on one side of the 
 diaphragm and body-souls on the other. “For 
 who among men,” writes the apostle, “knoweth 
 the things of a man save the pneuma of a man 
 
 ioo 
 
PRIMITIVE SOULS AND GHOSTS 
 
 which is in him. . . . But the psychic man re- 
 ceiveth not the things of the pneuma . . . and 
 he cannot know them because they are pneumat¬ 
 ically judged.” “There is a psychic body; and 
 there is a pneumatic body. ... So also it is 
 written, The first man Adam became a living 
 body-soul, the last Adam became a quickening 
 breath. Howbeit that is not first which is of the 
 breath-soul, but that which is of the body-soul 
 and afterwards that which is of the pneuma.” 
 
 Or take the long controversy in the early 
 church over the origin of the soul. The opinion 
 which finally came to be orthodox, and which, 
 therefore, we are all supposed to hold, is that 
 whatever besides the body finally survives death, 
 for better or for worse, is a breath-soul, new- 
 created for the occasion, and sucked into our 
 lungs with the first mouthful of air, there to re¬ 
 main till it goes out with the last. But, for 
 Traducians like Tertullian, the immortal being is 
 a body-soul, always material, sometimes visible, 
 begotten of one parent and conceived by the 
 other precisely like the body which it animates. 
 But Origen, who remained always half heathen, 
 held to an immaterial “mind-soul,” preexistent, 
 as mind-souls commonly are, and subject to 
 metempsychosis into other bodies. 
 
 So is it everywhere with most of our litera¬ 
 ture, especially our hymns, with most of our 
 half-subconscious thinking, and with most of 
 
 IOI 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 the history of thought. One cannot dip into 
 these anywhere without striking shortly, along 
 with some bit of primitive astronomy, some 
 other equally primitive idea of our having one or 
 more souls. 
 
 But, unfortunately, souls, in any ancient sense, 
 simply do not belong anywhere in our present- 
 day world-view. A generation of compulsory 
 physiology in the common schools has made the 
 public familiar with the modern scientific con¬ 
 ception of the human body as a very compli¬ 
 cated machine, though only persons who devote 
 their lives to its study have any idea how com¬ 
 plex it is, with its single nerve cells like winter 
 trees against the sky, and its more separate 
 parts than there are in all the automobiles that 
 ever came out of Detroit. But, after all, the 
 body is essentially a system of levers and pipes 
 operated by a gas engine, and regulated — cer¬ 
 tainly in part — by an elaborate system of auto¬ 
 matic controls, that are not fundamentally dif¬ 
 ferent from the temperature compensation of a 
 good watch. Sometimes the machine gets out of 
 gear. Its parts sometimes break. In the end, it 
 wears out and stops. There is not the least evi¬ 
 dence that any soul, spirit, breath, psyche, 
 pneuma, or the like, is anywhere involved. 
 
 There is, to be sure, a considerable body of 
 fact which goes to show that the more or less 
 self-conscious “mind,” which, as a matter of ex- 
 
 102 ■ 
 
PRIMITIVE SOULS AND GHOSTS 
 
 perience, does, apparently, pull a muscle when 
 we wiggle a finger, is also concerned, less con¬ 
 sciously, when we mend a broken bone, and 
 does, in some fashion, oversee all the bodily proc¬ 
 esses. But this New Vitalism, which belongs, 
 of course, to our present-day Weltanschauung , 
 is altogether a different matter from the ancient 
 doctrine of spirits. The old vitalism, which as¬ 
 sumed some sort of soul, vital principle, or the 
 like, survives only in the vocabulary of religion. 
 Between a bodily machine that runs and a mind 
 that runs it, there is nothing left for souls to do. 
 Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine causa. 
 
 Along with souls there must inevitably go by 
 the board all spirits, devils, angels, and witches. 
 Devils were convenient to explain storms, dis¬ 
 ease, especially mental diseases, and the perver¬ 
 sity of men who do not believe as their betters 
 tell them. But even criminal indictments no 
 longer read “by instigation of Satan”; and, as 
 Laplace remarked in a similar connection, we 
 “have no need of that hypothesis.” With devils 
 went, of course, witches. 
 
 Yet how recent it all is! The King of England 
 who gave his name to our version of the Scrip¬ 
 tures was a zealous witch-finder, who made ex¬ 
 istence very burdensome to certain of his sub¬ 
 jects whom he suspected of endangering the 
 royal life by blowing up a storm when the king 
 was on his way home from Denmark. Eminent 
 
 • 103 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 ecclesiastics, Wesley among them, stood val¬ 
 iantly by witches and devils almost up to the 
 time when the old vitalism began to break down 
 as the result of Lavoisier’s work on the body 
 temperature of warm-blooded animals, shortly 
 after the American Revolution. The diabolical 
 control of bodies and the divine right of kings 
 went out about together. 
 
 Angels belong to a cosmology in which an ab¬ 
 sentee God, a sort of Business Manager of the 
 Universe, sits aloft in the highest of his heavens, 
 dispatching his messengers or blowing his breath 
 whenever he wants anything done. They have 
 no place in our modern conception of an imma¬ 
 nent deity who acts directly and continuously on 
 the world. Sir Isaac Newton’s time marks about 
 the end of the old theory that brought in angels 
 to account for any natural phenomenon — un¬ 
 less, of course, we count as essentially angels the 
 personified Natural Laws by means of which, 
 in certain quarters, God is still supposed to 
 work. 
 
 Kepler, for example, after he had worked out 
 his laws of planetary motion, shortly after 1600, 
 still took it for granted that a special angel 
 carries each planet round the sun. Old astron¬ 
 omies, discussing the new theory of a revolving 
 earth, show an angel turning a crank at the 
 north pole; and Milton, as late as 1667, could 
 still write 
 
 104 
 
PRIMITIVE SOULS AND GHOSTS 
 
 “Some say he bid his angels turn askance 
 The poles of earth, twice ten degrees and more, 
 From the sun’s axle; they with labour pushed 
 Oblique the centric globe.” 
 
 But all this has gone by. 
 
 Naturally, then, the more such words as 
 “soul,” “spirit,” “angel,” or “Satan” appear 
 in sermons and hymns, save when they are 
 clearly seen to be only figures of speech, the 
 more unreal does our religion tend to become. 
 We find ourselves saddled with four or five words 
 which once expressed living and important ideas. 
 But these ideas are now dead. There are no 
 angels or devils in our modern world. We do 
 not really believe in either souls or spirits. The 
 first pair we have frankly dropped. For the 
 second, we have hunted up factitious meanings, 
 making them suggest vaguely so much of the 
 mind as is concerned, let us say, in reading the 
 Bible. But nobody is giving any coherent ac¬ 
 count of how the soul or the spirit differs from 
 the mind, or how each is related to the other or 
 to the body. Neither word has, for us, anything 
 of its immemorial meaning. So there we are with 
 our religion resting on two figures of speech, a 
 house built upon the sand. 
 
 Practically, then, we ought frankly to recog¬ 
 nize that the only profitable significance now at¬ 
 tachable to the old term “soul” is the somewhat 
 technical psychological meaning, “self.” What- 
 
 105 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 ever words we sing, what we really mean is al¬ 
 ways, 
 
 “ Myself be on my guard,” 
 
 taking “soul” in the first line of the quatrain no 
 more literally than “skies” in the last. 
 
 As for “spirit,” a term whose connotation 
 ranges all the way from “breath” to “disposi¬ 
 tion,” and which denotes things so different as 
 the second alcohol of the paraffin series and the 
 Third Person of the Athanasian Trinity, lends 
 itself much too easily to the bombardment of un¬ 
 fortified minds. The meaning in ancient texts is 
 clear, and the word is useful. But when any 
 modern person uses “spirit” or “spiritual,” 
 then look out for every sort of fallacy and equiv¬ 
 ocation! 4 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF SURVIVAL 
 
 Our belief in immortality rests primarily on our 
 dreams. 
 
 The body, perhaps with various souls still in 
 it, has lain asleep in cave or tent. Meanwhile, at 
 least one of our souls has been off seeing the 
 world. We know what the vagrant spirit has 
 been doing. We have to ask concerning the 
 body. Therefore, are we the one and not the 
 other. Inevitably, then, most peoples have 
 identified the self with the soul rather than with 
 the body. 
 
 But if the soul can be away from the body be¬ 
 tween sleep and waking, if, moreover, the spirit¬ 
 ual eye can see other men who have been dead 
 for years, nothing can be clearer than that a 
 “life” can go on living indefinitely. And since 
 men can always imagine something a little better 
 than they have yet experienced, and hope springs 
 eternal in the human breast, mankind as a whole 
 has always looked forward to a blessed here¬ 
 after. The soul, therefore, tends to be distin¬ 
 guished from the bodily life and to become the 
 vehicle of immortality. 
 
 To this, however, there are numerous ex- 
 
 107 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 ceptions; one of which, inconveniently enough, 
 happens to be the Hebrews of Old Testament 
 times. 
 
 The Hebrews, as distinguished from the Jews, 
 did not believe that the self is the soul or that 
 the soul survives. In fact, it is pretty difficult to 
 make out in just what sense the Old Testament 
 worthies can be said to have believed in any 
 sort of soul whatever. “There is,” to be sure, 
 “a breath in man, and the wind of the Almighty 
 giveth him understanding.” But, after days 
 that are as grass, “shall the dust return unto the 
 earth as it was, and the breath go back to God 
 who gave it.” “The hand of the Lord was upon 
 me,” says that extraordinary passage in Eze¬ 
 kiel, “. . . and set me down in the midst of the 
 valley; and it was full of bones; . . . and lo, they 
 were very dry. ... So I prophesied as I was 
 commanded . . . there was a thundering and . . . 
 an earthquake, and the bones came together, 
 bone to his bone . . . but there was no breath in 
 them. . . . Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto 
 the wind, . . . and say unto the wind, Thus saith 
 the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O 
 wind, and breathe upon these slain. ... So I 
 prophesied . . . and the breath came unto them 
 and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an 
 exceeding great army.” Clearly, the life is in the 
 breath. But the breath comes close to being 
 only ordinary wind — so far, that is to say, as, 
 
 108 
 
THE PROBLEM OF^SURVIVAL 
 
 for simple-minded men, any sort of wind is in 
 any sense ordinary. 
 
 The soul of man, in other words, tends always 
 more or less to identify itself with the atmos¬ 
 phere of the earth. The winds are the breath of 
 God, or of several gods or giants, blowing from 
 the borders of the world. But the earth’s at¬ 
 mosphere is also the Spiritus Mundi; or at least 
 it contains the Holy Spirit very much as “spirits 
 of wine,” evaporated into the air, are still dis¬ 
 cernible. 
 
 A living creature, therefore, draws its breath 
 for the sake, in part, of extracting from the air 
 those “vital spirits” which animate its body. 
 The animal soul is a part of the World-Soul. 
 The last of the animal spirits goes off with the 
 last breath, virtually undistinguished from the 
 dying soul. Even the great Harvey held sub¬ 
 stantially this view, making the animal heat 
 ethereal like the bodies of the angels and the 
 stars. 
 
 “ Inspiration,” then, for most of mankind, has 
 meant literally a “breathing in” of the divine 
 influence out of the air. Our own figurative 
 meaning is entirely modern. 
 
 This general conception of an atmosphere 
 filled with impalpable intelligences, of the wind 
 as the breath of divinity, of an Anima Mundi 
 present in the air, of spirit in men’s breath, helps 
 to make clear why the ancient world found it so 
 
 109 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 much easier than we do now to believe in virgin 
 births. 
 
 Back of our precise modem knowledge of the 
 way we living things actually do come about — 
 which, after all, is no older than 1840 — lies that 
 other and quite different theory which appears 
 everywhere in Bible, creed, and all ancient 
 documents of our civilization. Back of that, in 
 turn, lies a still older and still more erroneous 
 idea, the so-called “spirit theory.” 
 
 Early man, pretty universally, seems to have 
 taken it for granted that he has only one parent 
 — of course, his mother. All offspring are wan¬ 
 dering spirits of the air, frequently ancestral 
 ghosts, sometimes, pathetically, the souls of dead 
 brothers, often “spirit-children,” newly created 
 and waiting to be born. They lie in ambush for 
 their mothers in the groves and among the rocks; 
 and the girls who do not want babies, when they 
 go by, pick up staves and hobble along, pre¬ 
 tending to be old women. But those who desire 
 children expose their bodies to the wind from 
 sacred grottos, visit graves, or stand in the 
 shadow of an idol. Most commonly, such being 
 the way of spirits, the child-to-be gets into the 
 mother’s food or drink or the savor of the 
 cooking meal; it falls on her back as a banana 
 blossom; it lurks in the water and enters her 
 body when she dips a foot. Serpents are a 
 favorite vehicle, especially among the Greeks. 
 
 no 
 
THE PROBLEM OF SURVIVAL 
 
 In the final stage of the decaying opinion, the 
 spirit-child degenerates into a mere dream, like 
 the six-tusked white elephant of Buddha’s birth 
 stories. 
 
 Naturally, the spirit-child has no concern to 
 select a wife rather than a maid. Hence the be¬ 
 lief, once well-nigh universal, in occasional vir¬ 
 gin births. Primitively, in fact, all children are 
 fatherless and all births virgin, if we use “vir¬ 
 gin” in the extended and somewhat technical 
 sense of “parthenogenetic.” In Syria they still 
 believe that a woman may bear children to a 
 long dead husband, a departed saint, or a jinn. 
 
 It is, however, by no means impossible that 
 in the more sophisticated accounts of virgin 
 births there is still another element. 
 
 After civilized man has largely abandoned the 
 idea of spirit-children, and has learned that 
 human reproduction is, in general, biparental, 
 he still tends to retain the theory that the child’s 
 mother provides its body, but its father its 
 vires formativce or soul. Thus Harvey, discuss¬ 
 ing the “efficient cause of the chick,” is quite 
 at loss as to “the manner how the cock and 
 its seed doth mint and coine the chicken out 
 of the egge.” The Roman genius inhered in 
 the paterfamilias , and passed on to his sons. 
 The same general doctrine still survives in the 
 vulgar error that children favor their mothers in 
 looks, but their fathers in disposition. 
 
 hi 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 But the “soul” which the father transmits to 
 his offspring, is, after all, only his own anima 
 which he himself obtains from the air. Thus, 
 by a roundabout path, a portion of the divine 
 spirit passes from the lungs of the living man 
 into the growing tissues of his unborn child. 
 
 Great men, however, are not like common 
 mortals. They have the divine spark in uncom¬ 
 mon measure. They partake more fully than 
 ordinary men of the nature of the gods. What 
 more logical, then, than to suppose such beings 
 without mortal fathers, taking the Spirit un¬ 
 diluted and at first hand? How else, indeed, can 
 one account for eminence? 
 
 Thus, apparently, reasoned the ancient world, 
 holding always to a consistent world-view. It is 
 characteristic of our theology to preserve an 
 idea as a dogma long after it has been forgotten 
 as an opinion. 
 
 Just what is it, then, which, having lost its 
 “breath,” goes down into Sheol, no longer to 
 praise the Lord, nor to have “any more a remem¬ 
 brance forever in anything that is done under 
 the sun ” ? It is not quite the body, whose bones, 
 at least, are known to be in the sepulcher. It is 
 not the soul, because the Hebrew tongue recog¬ 
 nizes only such media for the self as heart and 
 breath, and has no word for self-conscious soul. 
 The most that one can say is that the ancient 
 Hebrews seem almost, but not quite, to identify 
 
 II2 
 
THE PROBLEM OF SURVIVAL 
 
 the personality with the body. So long as this 
 has air in its lungs, it goes to and fro on the 
 earth. Afterwards, it both lies in the grave, and 
 goes down to the common grave of the righteous 
 and the wicked in Sheol. “And shall they not,” 
 says Ezekiel, “lie with the mighty that are 
 fallen, . . . which are gone down to hell with their 
 weapons of war, and have laid their swords under 
 their heads, and their iniquities are upon their 
 bones.” It all boils down to saying that the Old 
 Testament writers, before Israel came under 
 Persian influence, merely retained, quite un¬ 
 critically, vague survivals of the general primi¬ 
 tive belief in survival, and never really faced the 
 problem at all. 
 
 Iran, in unknown antiquity, but apparently 
 somewhere this side of Zarathushtra, attacked 
 the old problem from a new side. The “life” 
 goes, and we are dead. May not the life come 
 back, and we live again? 
 
 On this line, the Persians developed an elab¬ 
 orate eschatology. There is no all-embracing 
 Sheol. If the living man has in his day done con¬ 
 spicuously more evil than good, his soul, three 
 days after death, drops down to hell. If the man 
 has been conspicuously righteous, his soul makes 
 its way to heaven, to sit on a throne in the pres¬ 
 ence of Ahura Mazda. Most of us will not do 
 either. Our good deeds just about offset our 
 bad ones, and the somewhat automatic judg- 
 
 113 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 ment of their balance will send our souls to 
 rather a colorless limbo to await the general 
 resurrection. 
 
 At the end of the age, the old heaven and the 
 old earth will pass away. The Shaoshyant, of the 
 seed of Zarathushtra, will come in the clouds to 
 judge the earth. All souls, good, bad, and indif¬ 
 ferent, will return to their former bodies, which 
 have been preserved for them, bones in the 
 ground, blood in the water, hair in the plants, 
 life in the fire. The wicked will have expiated 
 their sin; and hell will be annexed to the new 
 earth, to make room for the generations of men. 
 All mankind will then dwell in an earthly para¬ 
 dise for ever and ever. 
 
 Nobody seems to have made out whether the 
 Jews borrowed this ancient set of ideas bodily 
 during and after the exile; or whether, shortly 
 before New Testament times, given the same 
 problem and the same stage of civilization, they 
 worked out a good deal the same conclusion on the 
 basis of nothing more than a few hints. At any 
 rate, this “messianic” eschatology is conspicuous 
 enough in the earlier portions of the New Testa¬ 
 ment text; for nearly a century afterwards it had 
 a considerable place in Christian doctrine; and 
 it persisted up to about St. Augustine’s day. 
 
 In fact, it seems never to have entirely died out, 
 so that every once in a while it has revived. The 
 end of the tenth Christian century was such a 
 
 114 
 
THE PROBLEM OF SURVIVAL 
 
 time. So, too, is the present, as we get in sight of 
 the end of our second millennium. Pastor Russell’s 
 “The Divine Plan of the Ages” circulates in 
 twenty languages, five million copies in English 
 alone. Islam, also, has always held close to the 
 ancient Persian faith; while a modern Christian 
 theologian has worked out a neat chemical theory, 
 according to which all the dry solids of the body, 
 after becoming C 0 2 , return to the general at¬ 
 mosphere, much as did the old “breath” when 
 the body died. This, in time, is picked up by 
 growing vegetation, and finally built into the 
 wood of long-lived trees there to await the final 
 judgment. 
 
 Materialism, however, whatever its form, has 
 always a structural weakness; so that, even 
 among so unphilosophical a people as the Jews, 
 the original form of the resurrection theory be¬ 
 gan to break down, somewhere between the 
 dates of Job and of the New Testament. 
 
 Among Jewish sectaries, the Pharisees es¬ 
 pecially were of the Zoroastrian opinion; while 
 the more conservative Sadducees clung to the 
 Old Testament doctrine that “there is no resur¬ 
 rection, neither angel nor spirit.” There are hints 
 in Daniel, there is clearly set forth in Baruch, a 
 pre-Christian Pharisaic theory of the resurrec¬ 
 tion body that meets most of the more obvious 
 difficulties of the older form. 
 
 All souls, according to Baruch, at the last 
 
 ii5 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 trump, will return to their original bodies, 
 which, thereupon, will arise from their graves 
 as restored personalities, to be recognized and 
 greeted by their risen friends. Later, apparently 
 more or less gradually, these “protoplasmic’* 
 bodies are to be altered into “ pneumatic ” 
 bodies, still material, to be sure, but of a finer 
 sort, and imperishable. Clothed in these spirit¬ 
 ual bodies, the redeemed will inherit the King¬ 
 dom of Heaven. 
 
 Such, in brief, seems to have been a widely 
 current Pharisaic opinion just before one of the 
 greatest of the Pharisees took up the problem 
 from a new angle. 
 
 St. Paul, as we sometimes forget, was brought 
 up in Tarsus. And Tarsus was “no mean city,” 
 but very much in the current of affairs, well 
 within the sphere of Greek ideas, and for a cen¬ 
 tury the seat of two different mystery cults. The 
 apostle, therefore, had the advantages of a pagan 
 education. To this, very possibly, we owe in part 
 the highly important step which St. Paul took — 
 his theory that the transformation of the proto¬ 
 plasmic into the pneumatic body takes place in 
 the grave itself. 
 
 In a way, therefore, this Pauline theory is a 
 synthesis between the breath-soul-self group of 
 primitive doctrines and the bodily resurrection 
 theories of his own day. On the whole, however, 
 in form at least, it belongs with the latter. The 
 
 116 
 
THE PROBLEM OF SURVIVAL 
 
 immortal soul does not, as in the other case, fly 
 away, leaving the body behind forever in the 
 grave. On the contrary, the body, qua body, 
 changing to spirit, disappears, leaving the grave 
 empty. On the empty tomb, therefore, hinges 
 the difference between St. Paul and, let us say, 
 Socrates. 
 
 However, the apostle himself has said all this 
 a great deal better than anybody else can say 
 it for him. Only one must be careful to take 
 the text just as it stands; and not try to read 
 back into it any Christian ideas which are not 
 there. 
 
 For the Christian world has, in this matter, 
 not taken altogether kindly to St. Paul. The 
 early church was essentially Roman — and the 
 Romans, by no means a subtile people, pre¬ 
 ferred their doctrines tough and raw. So the 
 “Apostles” of the Creed altered egeiretai soma 
 pneumatikon to carnis resurrectionem; and even 
 the Gospels, as their text now stands, seem to side 
 with the cruder doctrine. The Westminster Con¬ 
 fession has “all the dead shall be raised with the 
 self-same bodies, and none other.” The Thirty- 
 Nine Articles read: . . and took again his body, 
 
 with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to 
 the perfection of man’s nature.” All these docu¬ 
 ments, one hardly need point out, imply that the 
 “ hospes , cornesque corporis ,” as the Emperor Ha¬ 
 drian called it, is material. All picture crudely 
 
 ii 7 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 some millions of graves popping open at once, 
 and the dead stepping forth. 
 
 On the other hand, certain modern Spiritists, 
 with their theory of an etheric body, come very 
 close to the Pauline doctrine. According to Sir 
 Oliver Lodge, among others, since all matter is 
 only a state or function of the universal ether, 
 the selfsame ether, which now manifests itself to 
 eye and touch as our mortal protoplasm, may 
 conceivably take on another and immortal form, 
 without affecting in the least our self-conscious 
 identity. It may even, conceivably, alter back 
 and forth from body to spirit, or even, possibly, 
 take on more than one “spiritual” form. Of 
 course, the ether is itself hypothetical; and the 
 Relativists threaten to banish it for good and all. 
 Nevertheless, for the present, any general con¬ 
 ception is not to be treated lightly, that has the 
 support of two such thinkers as St. Paul and Sir 
 Oliver. 
 
 Modern scholarly opinion tends, on the whole, 
 to take the other horn of the ancient dilemma. 
 Our present world-view rather looks away from 
 any bodily resurrection, either as flesh or spirit, 
 and toward the quite antithetical doctrine of an 
 immortal, non-material mind. 
 
 To Socrates and to Plato belongs the merit of 
 being the first of mankind to dissociate the con¬ 
 scious self from any taint of spirit. The mind, 
 for Plato, is pure idea, altogether in a different 
 
 118 
 
THE PROBLEM OF SURVIVAL 
 
 category from any sort of matter, however ten¬ 
 uous, and, therefore, by nature, preexistent and 
 indestructible. Whether this “ mind-sour’ ties 
 up to various bodies successively, or to only one, 
 is a matter of detail. Plato himself, like the 
 great thinkers of the East who came still earlier 
 to the same general view, happens to hold the 
 former opinion. He chances, also, to believe in 
 two souls, besides the philosophic mind. 
 
 For the modern Platonist, then, our self-con¬ 
 sciousness is something essentially independent 
 of any sort of body. For some unknown reason, 
 we find it convenient to employ, for a few score 
 years at a time, a certain very elaborate set of 
 tools. But we are perfectly well able all the 
 while to drop one set and pick up another, or, 
 if occasion be, to get on just as well without 
 any implements whatever. For such a person, 
 therefore, resurrection of the flesh, conversion 
 into spiritual bodies, the whole idea of souls and 
 ghosts and shades and doubles and etheric 
 bodies has no meaning. The mind simply loses 
 interest in the body; and the body falls into 
 decay. 
 
 After all, what do we moderns mean by im¬ 
 mortality? Nothing at bottom more than this, 
 that, after we are dead and buried, and the 
 psycho-physical personality which our friends 
 once knew no longer walks the earth as it did, 
 some being, somewhere, will remember the oc- 
 
 119 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 currences of our lives as having happened to him. 
 However much more this being may recall is 
 quite beside the point. To Plato, largely, we owe 
 this simplification of our problem. 
 
 In a very real sense, then, all our controversy 
 for the last two and a half millenniums over the 
 nature of man and the conditions of the future 
 life reduces itself to the question whether our 
 complete personality — since we can never be 
 really interested in less — inheres in the mind 
 alone, or whether it requires also some sort of 
 body, or whether, in addition to both, there is 
 some sort of tertium quid which we most com¬ 
 monly call the soul. In other words, is man a 
 unity, or a duality, or a trinity? 
 
 The third opinion has, on the whole, pre¬ 
 vailed in Christian Europe. We still speak of 
 body, soul, and spirit, or of body, mind, and 
 soul; and pre-scientific physiology, up to the be¬ 
 ginning of the nineteenth century, made abun¬ 
 dant use of these concepts. 
 
 In fact, the first Christian thinker to cut loose 
 from all primitive ideas was the great Schoolman, 
 Thomas Aquinas, hardly more than six hundred 
 years ago. The “Summa” sets forth, in effect, 
 our modern dualism. We are body and mind — 
 and the mind is non-material. 
 
 St. Thomas still remains, for the majority of 
 Christians, the supreme authority on all these 
 questions; and we are all supposed to follow him. 
 
 120 
 
THE PROBLEM OF SURVIVAL 
 
 How many of us actually do, whole-heartedly, 
 is an interesting question. In any case, there is 
 this to be said for the Tomasian doctrine; we do 
 know a good deal directly about the human 
 mind, and we do know the human body a great 
 deal more in detail than we know any other ma¬ 
 terial object. On the other hand, concerning 
 souls, spirits, ghosts, shades, guardian angels, 
 kas, rans, fravashis, manes , doubles, “old men,” 
 astral bodies, etheric bodies, vampires, ecto¬ 
 plasms, pneumatic bodies, “controls,” and 
 daemons, our information is, for the present, in 
 much less satisfactory shape. So far, then, as it 
 is possible to account for the present and the 
 future life in terms of body and mind only, the 
 familiar Law of Parsimony is not without au¬ 
 thority. 
 
 The present-day result of all these survivals is 
 decidedly unfortunate; since we now find our¬ 
 selves saddled with three different and incom¬ 
 patible psychologies, two learned, one popular, 
 where two only would be ample. 
 
 Our scientific psychology presupposes an un¬ 
 divided psycho-physical personality, which acts 
 always as a whole; so that all parts of our nature, 
 body and mind alike, are involved in whatever 
 we do consciously, and even trying to read Ein¬ 
 stein is in part a muscular act. For all purposes 
 of scientific description, man is a complete unity, 
 to no part of which alone can any act be assigned. 
 
 121 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 Whatever happens, “we” do it. This psychol¬ 
 ogy is, of course, “soulless.” Persons who know 
 little of the methods of science assume that it 
 precludes survival. Sometimes they call it “ma¬ 
 terialism.” 
 
 But for much of our philosophy the great 
 gulf in the universe runs between “thoughts” 
 and “things”; though it is by no means clear 
 that our rigid distinction is not partly logical 
 rather than real. A strictly philosophical psy¬ 
 chology, therefore, marks off sharply the body 
 from the mind, and puts them in such different 
 worlds that any casual relation between them 
 either way is quite inconceivable. This is sub¬ 
 stantially Plato’s teaching. This also is, strictly, 
 “soulless.” 
 
 Finally, we have the popular “theological” 
 psychology, which is a survival of the old body- 
 mind-soul-spirit ideas of the Middle Ages. Soul 
 and spirit are only vaguely distinguished. Neither 
 seems to have much of anything to do in this 
 world; but one or both is, apparently, to fly 
 away to some sort of vaguely localized heaven, 
 which in its turn is a survival from an astronomy 
 of corresponding date. Persons who hold that 
 this spirit-soul is to return to the body do not 
 always get on comfortably with those who think 
 it will not. 
 
 The results of all this confusion of opinion are 
 distinctly unfortunate. One prominent clergy- 
 
 122 > 
 
THE PROBLEM OF SURVIVAL 
 
 man insists, following Plato, that we shall say, 
 “I am,” not “I have,” an immortal soul. An¬ 
 other computes that the State of Texas alone will 
 contain the rehabilitated protoplasm of all the 
 departed sons of men — since 4000 b.c. that is — 
 allowing thirty square feet to each. To-day, we 
 listen to an Easter sermon, based on a narrative 
 which, apparently, presupposes a return of the 
 soul to the body, a general resurrection, and a 
 final judgment. To-morrow, if there is a death 
 in the house, the same clergyman will console us 
 with the diametrically opposite picture of a com¬ 
 plete personality, sans judgment and sans body, 
 already in paradise. Next day, he will change 
 his mind once more, and read us the burial serv¬ 
 ice with extracts from Job, for whom the entire 
 problem is ultimately insoluble. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 “THE NEW REFORMATION” 
 
 Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide , 
 
 In the strife of Truth with Falsehood , for the good or evil side; 
 Some great cause , God's new Messiah , offering each the boon or 
 blight , 
 
 Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right , 
 And the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that light. 
 
 Nowhere does history repeat itself more mo¬ 
 notonously than in the field of religion. The 
 world, like the individual, has its hours of insight, 
 its lucky times, when everything drops into 
 place and all the clocks strike twelve. Great 
 ideas are in the air. Great leaders find followers 
 to match. Civilization, somewhat suddenly, 
 hitches forward to another age; and a revival of 
 religion goes along with the rest. 
 
 The new religion, at the start, is fresh and 
 young and absorptive. It may have no creed, no 
 ritual, no hymns, no fixed ideas of any sort; or 
 if it does inherit such from its own past, it holds 
 them lightly and always subject to revision. It 
 picks up anything, anywhere, and grows by what 
 it feeds on. Therefore, do a new religion and a 
 flowering of civilization commonly go together. 
 
 This period of all-devouring youth seldom 
 lasts more than a couple of centuries. The new 
 religion promptly develops a theology. 
 
 124 
 
THE NEW REFORMATION 
 
 Now one of the great advantages which all 
 science enjoys, compared with most other meth¬ 
 ods of arriving at truth, is that all its doctrines 
 rest directly on evidence, and are always, there¬ 
 fore, even the most fundamental of them, under 
 examination. As a matter of fact, indeed, natu¬ 
 ral science has almost never had to take back 
 any of its main conclusions. But there is always 
 the chance that a New Psychology or a New 
 Physics may come up over the horizon ready to 
 blow the old out of the water. All science, there¬ 
 fore, natural, historical, and political alike, 
 though it stumble and stray, always in the end, 
 and of itself, finds its feet again and comes back 
 to the right path. 
 
 Not so is it with a theology. The shakiest 
 hypothesis, once discovered in Bible or Koran, 
 once passed upon by caliph, council, or pope, be¬ 
 comes forthwith a portion of the eternal verities, 
 to be questioned only at both temporal and 
 eternal peril. One by one, therefore, as time goes 
 on, all the various paths to new information are 
 blocked by dogmas. The prophet gives way to 
 the priest. Whatever world-view chances to be 
 the fashion of the day becomes the complete and 
 final revelation of all truth. 
 
 Meanwhile, secular opinion may also have 
 stood still, as it did in our own civilization for 
 more than a thousand years. All is then well with 
 the faith once delivered to the saints. Each gen- 
 
 125 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 eration finds itself in the same mental environ¬ 
 ment as its fathers. 
 
 On the other hand, the world may move — as 
 ours did after 1600. Naturally, then, in the 
 course of time, the ancient faith will consist 
 largely of outgrown world-views, discarded ter¬ 
 minologies, slogans of long-forgotten controver¬ 
 sies, forms of words which, however fresh and 
 living once, have now become mere cant. 
 
 Priest and scholar, therefore, have to fight 
 things out between them. The scholar argues his 
 case on the evidence. The priest retorts with the 
 customary persecution. In the end, commonly, 
 the man in the street takes a hand to see fair 
 play, and the scholar wins. 
 
 If the points at issue are not especially funda¬ 
 mental, the old system adjusts itself grudgingly 
 to the new opinion. From time to time, always 
 under compulsion, it drops a little of its impedi¬ 
 menta and staggers forward a few steps more. 
 Then, for a short while, the old religion seems to 
 recover a little of its youthful power of assimi¬ 
 lation ; but the growth is likely to be rather that 
 of a lifeless crystal than that of a living plant. 
 But if the difference of world-view is irreconcil¬ 
 able, then the old superstition has to go. The 
 repeated adjustments and the final collapse of 
 the primitive Roman paganism, shortly before 
 the Christian era, are perhaps the most striking 
 instances in history of both these processes. 
 
 126 
 
THE NEW REFORMATION 
 
 When an established religion does finally go 
 to smash, all the newer religions in the field, all 
 the importations from other lands, all the newer 
 sects of the old cult, struggle for the vacant place. 
 Nominally, the fittest of these survives. Actu¬ 
 ally, the one of them which gets the best start 
 absorbs the rest, retains the best in each and dis¬ 
 cards the remainder. No historic faith, then, is 
 ever the child of one other only. All efficient re¬ 
 ligions have been syncretic. 
 
 Our current Protestant fiction has it that our 
 own religion rests on the Old Testament. As a 
 matter of historical fact, it is, as to doctrines, a 
 synthesis of about equal parts of Pharisaism, 
 Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, and the common ele¬ 
 ment in all the mystery cults. Even the earlier 
 Fathers of the Church were not Jews. They were 
 for the most part heathen, converted in middle 
 life, after their ideas had set. Augustine, though 
 anything but early, was a Manichaean at thirty. 
 None of these ever gave up his philosophy. He 
 simply added on his Christain faith, and fused 
 the two. Our traditional picture of the conver¬ 
 sion of the Roman Empire, which shows the per¬ 
 secutions in detail but stops the film conven¬ 
 iently with Constantine’s discovery of the side on 
 which his bread was buttered, has small likeness 
 to what actually occurred. 
 
 After all, why should the Platonizing Fathers 
 give up either their old philosophies or their old 
 
 127 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 religions? Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, and Mithra- 
 ism embodied the best thinking and the high¬ 
 est aspiration of their day. That the Christian 
 Church, in the end, skimmed the cream off all 
 three, simply puts us so much to the good. 
 
 The early churchman, then, preserved all that 
 was sound and permanent in Judaism, but with¬ 
 out the less weighty matters of its Law. He 
 lifted bodily Isis and the infant Horus for his 
 Madonnas, and Mithra’s birthday for his Christ¬ 
 mas. He adopted the Stoic Logos , and much of 
 the Stoic ethic. His Trinity came out of Alexan¬ 
 dria. In general, like Old ’Omer, 
 
 .. . what he thought ’e might require, 
 
 ’E went and took ...” 
 
 like the philosopher he was. Naturally, a religion 
 that includes the best that has been thought and 
 done in four great civilizations ought properly to 
 inherit the earth. 
 
 But this “period of infancy” for the Church 
 lasted only a little more than a single century. 
 After the Platonizing Fathers came the Dog¬ 
 matic Fathers; and by Augustine’s day, Christi¬ 
 anity had grown up. There is less difference in 
 outlook and vocabulary between Augustine and 
 Calvin than between “Mark” and “John.” 
 
 To be sure, the Church has learned its lessons, 
 especially during the last hundred years, but al¬ 
 ways as an old man learns. Only once, in the 
 
 128 
 
THE NEW REFORMATION 
 
 sixteenth century, did it become, for the moment, 
 as a little child. 
 
 But the Protestant Reformation came almost 
 two hundred years too soon. It belongs, there¬ 
 fore, to the late Middle Ages, instead of to the 
 early modern period, and so is on the wrong side 
 of the great gulf that separates the darkness from 
 the light. The practical result is, that, while the 
 Reformation did clean up a few obvious abuses, 
 it left the entire sub-structure of mediaeval think¬ 
 ing untouched. Luther threw his inkstand at the 
 Devil, the Calvinists required their pastors to 
 confess the finger of God in every vowel point 
 of the Masoretic text. Only a few of our Protes¬ 
 tant clergy have even yet fully the layman’s 
 Weltanschauung. 
 
 If those famous theses could have gone onto 
 the door of Wittenberg Cathedral at about the 
 time, let us say, that Halley was figuring the orbit 
 of his equally famous comet, the situation in the 
 religious world might be very different to-day. 
 The dogmatic mind was then, for the moment, 
 loosened up. The theological world might then 
 have really assimilated the new science and the 
 new philosophy, and given us some sort of con¬ 
 sistent world-view that should include every¬ 
 thing. There might even have been some such 
 fundamental upheaval, some such permanent 
 rearrangement of ideas, as marked the second 
 Christian century. At the very least, something 
 
 129 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 of the new learning might have penetrated into 
 the old theology without such great personal 
 inconvenience to each modernizing scholar and 
 to the ecclesiastical persons who first took on 
 each new idea. 
 
 But as it was, the Church and the world failed 
 to synchronize. The Protestant Reformation 
 proved only a false dawn, and the whole job has 
 to be done over again from the bottom. The 
 only question now is, whether the second refor¬ 
 mation, unpleasant as it will undoubtedly be, 
 shall be got through with now, or wait till by 
 and by — when it may be too late. 
 
 So now there are two parties within the Chris¬ 
 tian Church, Roman and Protestant alike. One 
 of these hopes, by tightening the bonds of dis¬ 
 cipline, by censoring more rigidly the instruction 
 of youth, by calling in on occasion the secular 
 arm, still to keep the Christian world blind to 
 everything that the Middle Ages had not seen. 
 The other is trying to live up to the time-honored 
 formula of diplomacy: When in doubt, tell the 
 truth. And because this is certainly an age of 
 doubt, it proposes that we shall be taught 
 frankly all that the learned world now knows. 
 The first course of medicine is unquestionably 
 easier for the doctor, and probably pleasanter 
 for the patient. Unfortunately, in like crises thus 
 far in the course of history, the method has not 
 worked. 1 
 
 130 
 
THE NEW REFORMATION 
 
 And yet, as things are, most of us cannot be 
 quite whole-heartedly either ‘ ‘ Fundamentalists 1 * 
 or “Modernists.” 
 
 ‘‘Old things need not be therefore true, 
 
 O brother men, nor yet the new.” 
 
 We average laymen want both the old faith and 
 the new sight. But we want a real synthesis 
 between them; not any mere verbal compromise. 
 
 If this were the sixth century B.C., or the first 
 century a.d., or any one of various periods in his¬ 
 tory which it is not, we might hope for some 
 great prophet to arise to lead us out of our present 
 wilderness. Unfortunately, this sort of miracle 
 no longer happens. Our prophets are mostly 
 false, and paranoids besides. So, as things are 
 nowadays, we shall have to look to the general 
 drift of democratic opinion, led by a considerable 
 number of open-minded persons, no one of whom 
 alone will do very much toward putting the old 
 wine into the new bottles. Any one of us, in fact, 
 who cares to do so, may at least not hinder the 
 transfer. 
 
 The group which, in particular, is to take the 
 lead can hardly be conspicuously lay. We lay¬ 
 men are somewhat too busy, and a great deal too 
 ignorant. Neither will it, apparently, contain 
 any large proportion of the working clergy. 
 They also are too busy — and a priest is always 
 a priest. There remain, then, only the scholars 
 
 I3i 
 
THE UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION 
 
 of the theological schools. They only have the 
 learning, the insight, and the leisure. Besides, 
 it was they, largely, who brought us to our pres¬ 
 ent pass; it is for them to get us out. 
 
 I have already said that, as things now are, 
 no wise man will ever allow himself to accept as 
 “science” any utterance of any magazine or 
 newspaper or of any irresponsible individual, but 
 only such facts and opinions as carry the hall¬ 
 mark of the universities. The rule is even more 
 imperative in the field of divinity. These United 
 States are over-full, just now, with teachers of 
 silly religions and false prophets of wiser ones, 
 precisely as the Roman world was two millen¬ 
 niums ago. Doubtless, in the end, matters will 
 straighten out, as they did before; and we shall 
 all come to a common understanding of our 
 world and our duty in it. But, meanwhile, there 
 is no better service that we of shop and office can 
 render to the religion of the future than to make 
 ourselves acquainted at first hand with what is 
 actually taught in the leading seminaries of the 
 country, and accept this as the basis of our own 
 thinking. Amidst contemporary oratory, there 
 is nothing that the wayfaring man can better 
 trust than the general consensus of the learned 
 and pious experts of the theological faculties. 
 In the never-ending, three-cornered struggle 
 among priest, prophet, and scholar, we outsiders, 
 just now, will most wisely back the scholar. 
 
 132 
 
THE NEW REFORMATION 
 
 If we do this, whole-heartedly, we ought to be 
 ready for any event. After all, as Huxley once 
 remarked, “We don’t any of us know much about 
 the universe.” And the more one does know, the 
 less inclined is he to say that Plato or Kant or 
 Sir Oliver Lodge or Mrs. Eddy or anybody else 
 is wrong. If, therefore, holy men of old, saints 
 and martyrs and prophets and philosophers, have 
 seemed to see farther into realities than the rest 
 of us can do, I, for one, see no reason for treating 
 them any differently from the poets, artists, 
 musicians, and men of science, who certainly do 
 see and hear a great deal to which I am blind 
 and deaf. Speaking as a naturalist, I am pre¬ 
 pared to believe anything of a universe that 
 contains a blade of grass. 
 
 But come what may, we have always “the 
 starry heavens above us and the moral law 
 within,” the Ninth Symphony, the Taj Mahal, 
 the “Principia,” and the discourses in “Q.” 
 
 THE END 
 

 

 
 

 
 
 
 

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