After all, the only standard of value which we need apply to anything is the amount and quality of Happiness it yields. This alone can concern Man anywhere and at any time. His religions should be measured by no other mete-yard. All were created by man, for the happiness of man; though all claim another, a superhuman, origin, and pretend to bear the sign-manual of the Divine.
They are right, and what seems a paradox is a sober fact. As much the productions of human hands and brains as are the robes and paintings in which they are bedecked, they have something in them which no externals can represent, and which lifts them above their material drapery. Human beyond all else that man has devised, for that very reason they are superhuman.
The strange law of Evolution is, that nothing in nature reaches its perfection but by becoming something else. The species in attaining its utmost development is transformed into another species. Man would not be the noblest product of the earth did he not feel himself too noble for it; did not the presage and aura of a higher destiny forever float around his thoughts, making themselves felt at the moments of the utmost tension of his faculties; as when behind the parapet of Chillon one rises on extreme tip-toe, and catches a glimpse of the glittering lake and massive Alps beyond.
The vital principle, the motive power, which has created and maintained all religions is the Ideal of Humanity. Each age has had its own, each individual has his own, no two the same. Creeds and churches do but formulate and endeavor to materialize the average conceptions of a period or a class; but their labor is vain. Rejecting the old, putting on the new, the race marches forward to loftier ideals, the milestones of its progress being the wrecks of temples and the ruins of churches. Religions rise and fall and disappear; but Religion grows forever, because it is the inseparable associate, aye, the very expression, of that mysterious impulse on which man’s future development depends, and which makes him part and parcel of the infinite Energy in which he lives and moves and has his being.
Time and Truth will reconcile all religions; but the time will be long and the truth will be slow to make its way. The schools of dogmatic doctrine claim to have embalmed in a creed and confined in a code the whole truth necessary for the happiness of man; not perceiving that they are like children to whom a magician hands a box in which he seems to have shut a pigeon; they open it cautiously, to discover that it is empty, and he points to the bird soaring up to the sky. Only they take good care not to open the box. Their schools and teachers resemble those feeble-minded folk who imagine they increase in knowledge by constantly talking to themselves.
Always boasting of their devotion to truth, they steadily repudiate it. That alone is true which will bear repeated, free, and unbiased investigation; but dogmatists cry,—“Never discuss your faith; never doubt your creed; for he that doubteth is damned.” What progress they make is not from within, but is forced on them from without by the free spirit of inquiry; and what they thus unwillingly accept, they audaciously claim as the product of their own efforts. Everywhere the spirit of ecclesiasticism is the secret or open foe of strict and complete veracity; and yet no permanent alleviation of the sufferings of mankind can come except from veracity. And from this it will come. No matter what the weather is, this seed is sure to grow.
What unspeakable unhappiness religions have brought on the race! Altars dripping with the blood of human victims, mothers casting their babes into the fires of Moloch, teachers crucified by the rabble whom they sought to instruct, millions perishing between the Crescent and the Cross, hideous chambers of the Inquisition, Bruno burning alive in Catholic Rome, and Legate in Protestant London,—a thousand such historic events would give no notion of the miseries which religions have inflicted on mankind, and continue to inflict.
Worse than these have been their blighting breath on individual minds, darkening them with terrors of the supernatural, with racking doubts, despair, and madness; destroying the natural and beautiful growths of the affections; frowning on the attractions of the arts of beauty; crushing the desire of knowledge and the love of investigation; urging men in the ignoble egotism of self-salvation to sacrifice their own happiness and that of those nearest and dearest to them. These influences still exist; they are ever in the spirit of clericalism and dogmatism, and are restrained from plunging mankind again into the dark ages only by that higher and real religion which acknowledges neither form nor creed nor dogma, but only the might and right of Truth and Love.
I would ask what teachings do religions—and I have those in mind which are prevalent in civilized countries to-day—impart, which in any way compensate for the enormous unhappiness and intellectual degradation thus caused?
Most sects calling themselves Christian will at once reply that the happiness they promise is not of this world but of the next, and that he who looks for enjoyment here will forfeit it hereafter. Yet when the evidence for this daring statement is asked for, not an iota can be offered on which there is unanimous concurrence among the sects themselves.
What they do offer, and what gives them their real control over men’s minds, may be summed up as follows: A belief in the Divine government of the world and the paternal care of God over each believer in Him; greater cheerfulness in the acceptance of the misfortunes of life as the wise and ultimately beneficent decisions of His will; an expectation of a life after death; the hope that sins will be forgiven; and the improvement in morals which follows these convictions.
These are undoubtedly valuable aids to human happiness. The question is, what part of them belong to Religion and what to religions; in other words, will not the religious sentiment itself, freed from the shackles of dogmatic belief, yield to man all the happiness offered by sectarian doctrines, relieved of the misery to which they condemn him? When I think of the mental agony caused in millions of lives by the pictures of hell, of eternal damnation, of the last judgment, and of a cruel and merciless God, which most Christian teachers hold before their congregations, I long for the time predicted by that apostle of the new life, Giordano Bruno,—“When the gods shall lie in Orcus, and the dread of everlasting punishment shall vanish from the world.”
Reason has no conflict with religion. Science is based on the assumption that the order of the Universe is one of intelligence, and of an intelligence identical with ours. All force is directed by reasoning energy, which means that it is purposive. Why seek further? Call it Energy or Force or God, the thought is the same.
Whether that share which we possess in the energy of the All remains in personality after physical death, what dogma can prove? what science deny? Enough that in the beautiful words of the burial service of the Protestant Episcopal Church, we are justified in retaining “a reasonable and holy hope” that the victory of the grave is not eternal. Should it be so, what is the dread of it but a delusion of the imagination, which pictures non-existence as felt in non-existence?
The sense of sin, the story of the fall and its expiation by a divine sacrifice; is it not strange that no one word that this was His mission escaped the lips of Him who is said to have been the willing victim? The notion of sin as taught in dogmatic belief has no existence in the unwarped mind nor in scientific psychology. Men are involved in a chain of cause and effect from which they have little chance of escape; and even human justice revolts at administering punishment for involuntary acts. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner; that infinite Mind, which sees before and after, asks the blood of no victim to understand and to pardon the blind gropings of the wretched children of men.
What abuse has been made of the doctrine of Faith! Its upas-shade has harbored the grossest growths of superstition. Faith is either laziness or cowardice. We accept the opinions of others to save ourselves the trouble of forming our own, or to escape the pains of doubt. But doubt is painful only to him who accepts on authority, not to him who honestly seeks, truth through the efforts of his own powers.
But piety, morality, how can these be secured without dogmatic religions? This is the answer so often hurled as final in their defense. The history of sectarianism shows anything but a clean bill of morality, as I have already hinted; if there is any one corner-stone to the edifice of ethics, it is the honest pursuit of verifiable truth, and that no dogmatic religion dares to advocate. History shows that every great reformer of the morals of his day has been called a schismatic by the Churches.
The arch error is, however, not in these directions, but in the universal assumption that the moral life, that piety, is the chief end of man and an object in itself. Nothing of the kind. The moral law neither exhausts nor completes the nature of man. It is but one strand in the many-fibred thread of his existence; and to suspend his whole life and destiny from this will always, as it always has in the past, lead to the fall and the destruction of his noblest aspirations. Piety, a devout morality, the culture of the religious sentiment, these are only some and far from all of the means and steps to the highest culture of the individual life.
They are not individual in the sense that their culture can be successfully conducted in solitude or by mystical meditation. True religion never isolates, but unites. Not the happiness of himself in another world, but the happiness of others in this, is the aim of the true believer. From theirs, he derives his own. The “Communion of Saints,” the “Congregation of the Righteous,” the “Society of Friends,”—these are the expressions which indicate the direction of the religious sentiment in unimpeded activity. In such “solemn troops and sweet societies,” it yields that joy to man which his nature is capable of receiving only in its highest moments of exaltation, and which it would be sad to think he could ever be deprived of.
But this we need not fear. A religion that is not afraid of free investigation, but courts it; one that dismisses the supernatural because it recognizes that no law can be higher than that of nature; whose maxim is the utmost veracity in thought and action at all costs; whose aim is to produce as much visible happiness and to prevent as much misery as possible; which binds men together through united sympathies for these aims; which constantly prompts to healthful and fruitful activity; which is truly an inspiration, and sanctifies by its presence the equally true inspirations of the highest art and the purest science; and whose clearly recognized purpose is to promote the ideal perfection of humanity as represented in the individual man;—this is the Religion of the Future, and one that the future will not allow to perish.
The aim of science is the Real; of art, the Ideal; of action, Happiness. It is for religion to unite this trinity into a unity in each individual life.
Man’s highest efforts in art or thought or life are in themselves religious, because they represent elements in the better future life of the race. This is what Michael Angelo meant when he said, “Who strives after perfection in Art, strives after something Divine.”
The divine is not the superhuman, but the ideally human. The infinite must become incarnate to be intelligible. It is so in all great religious acts and works.
The ideally true is the potentially true.
Physical science is opposed to both religion and metaphysics, and yet is forever attracted toward them; because, struggle as it may, in them alone can it find its own completion.
The religious sect that condemns reason, condemns itself; and the latter sentence is the only one which will be executed.
The poetry of science will be the inspiration of the religion of the future.
Were there a religion other than human, it could not appeal to humanity.
The human cannot get along without the divine in some form. The least religious men, such as gamblers, are the most superstitious. As Novalis says, “Where the gods are not, ghosts take their place.”
The aim of classic religions was the salvation of the State; of Christianity, the salvation of certain individuals, the Elect; of the religion of the future, the salvation of the whole race of man.
A religious doctrine should compel belief, like a theorem in geometry. Most doctrines are accepted because their believers know too much to disturb their tranquillity by examining them, or too little to comprehend them.
As in dreams the impressions of childhood continue to recur, so in modern religions conceptions belonging to the childhood of the race are still urged upon us.
The dogmatists prefer to frame rules, rather than give reasons; because the latter will be judged on their merits, while the former are accepted on authority.
Half-true is harder to refute than wholly false. The defenders shield themselves behind the part that is true. Not the mud at the bottom, but the stain in the water, clouds the stream. This is why numerous sects continue to survive, perpetuating many errors by means of a few truths.
There is something comical in a man making a business of religion, levying a charge on this world for his services to the next. The Quakers must have had a vein of humor in their opposition to all sorts of paid priests.
The priests of the Church of the Future will be the spiritual leaders of their generation, those educators, poets, scientists, physicians, journalists, and others, who practice their avocations with a view to the interests of others as well as their own.
Eating your dinner is as sacred as saying your prayers, and making your living is as noble as dying for your faith.
I heard Walt Whitman once say that life without immortality would be like a railroad train made up entirely of engines. The forces of individuality seemed to him too mighty, to conceive as possible their limitation to this world.
The spirit of Christ’s teachings is too democratic to be in hearty sympathy with either science, philosophy, art, or the pursuit of pleasure.
Piety is sometimes merely the last passion; sometimes merely the last fashion.
The devout are the disappointed.
Prayer refreshes and relieves the mind by strengthening the confidence, by diverting the thoughts, and by admonishing the soul of higher themes. The Jew prays to Jehovah, most Christians to the Virgin or the Saints, the Buddhist to himself; all are consoled and benefitted; equally so is he who meditates on the laws, the life, the love, and the power, manifested in the universe of matter and mind around him.