life and of its theory we must never lose, more and more difficult though its even approximate realization has of necessity become.
There is next the middle, Christian contribution, directly moral and religious, deep and dim and tender, slow and far-reaching, immensely costly, infinitely strong; with its discovery and exemplification of the mysterious depth and range and complexity of human personality and freedom, of conscience and of sin; a view profoundly concrete and at bottom libertarian. The goodwill here first precedes, and then outstrips, and determines the information supplied by the intellect: “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.” And the strength of this position consists in its being primarily not a view, but a life, a spiritual, religious life, requiring, implying, indeed proclaiming, definite doctrines concerning God and man, and their relations to each other, but never exhausted by these doctrines even in their collectivity, inexhaustible though these in their turn are by their union with the life of the spirit, their origin and end.
There is finally the modern, Scientific contribution, intensely impersonal and determinist, directly neither metaphysical nor religious, but more abstract even than the Greek view, in the mathematical constituent of its method, and more concrete in a sense than Christianity itself, in the other, the sensible-experiment constituent of its method. The most undeniable of abstractions, those of mathematics, (undeniable just because of their enunciation of nothing but certain simplest relations between objects, supposing those objects to exist,) are here applied to the most undeniable of concretions, the direct experiences of the senses. And this mysterious union which, on the surface, is so utterly heterogeneous, is itself at all explicable only on mental, metaphysical assumptions and on the admission of the reality and priority of Mind. It is a union that has turned out as unassailable in its own province, as it is incapable of suppressing or replacing the wider and deeper truths and lives discovered for us respectively by Hellenism and Christianity.
Only in the case that man could but reckon mathematically and observe with his senses, or in the case that man were indeed provided with other faculties, but that he found Reality outside him and within him to be properly apprehensible by the mathematico-experimental process alone, could there be any serious question of such a final suppression of by far the greater and deeper portion of himself. Instead of any such deadlock the facts of these last four centuries bear out the contention that neither can the religious life suppress or do without the philosophical and the scientific, nor can either of these other two lives suppress or permanently do without its fellow or without religion.
But all this and its detailed practical application will, I trust, become much clearer as we proceed.
CHAPTER II
THE THREE ELEMENTS OF RELIGION
Introductory.
We have found then that all life and all truth are, for all their unity, deeply complex, for us men at all events; indeed that they are both in exact proportion to their reality. In this, our second chapter, I should like to show the complexity special to the deepest kind of life, to Religion; and to attempt some description of the working harmonization of this complexity. If Religion turned out to be simple, in the sense of being a monotone, a mere oneness, a whole without parts, it could not be true; and yet if Religion be left too much a mere multiplicity, a mere congeries of parts without a whole, it cannot be persuasive and fully operative. And the several constituents are there, whether we harbour, recognize, and discipline them or not; but these constituents will but hinder or supplant each other, in proportion as they are not somehow each recognized in their proper place and rank, and are not each allowed and required to supplement and to stimulate the other. And though no amount of talk or theory can, otherwise than harmfully, take the place of life, yet observation and reflection can help us to see where and how life acts: what are the causes, or at least the concomitants, of its inhibition and of its stimulation and propagation, and can thus supply us with aids to action, which action will then, in its turn, help to give experimental fulness and precision to what otherwise remains a more or less vague and empty scheme.
I. The Three Elements, as they successively appear in the Child, the Youth, and the Adult Man.
Now if we will but look back upon our own religious life, we shall find that, in degrees and in part in an order of succession varying indefinitely with each individual, three modalities, three modes of apprehension and forms of appeal and of outlook, have been and are at work within us and around.[34]
1. Sense and Memory, the Child’s means of apprehending Religion.
In the doubtless overwhelming majority of cases, there came first, as far as we can reconstruct the history of our consciousness, the appeal to our infant senses of some external religious symbol or place, some picture or statue, some cross or book, some movement of some attendant’s hands and eyes. And this appeal would generally have been externally interpreted to us by some particular men or women, a Mother, Nurse, Father, Teacher, Cleric, who themselves would generally have belonged to some more or less well-defined traditional, institutional religion. And their appeal would be through my senses to my imaginative faculty first, and then to my memory of that first appeal, and would represent the principle of authority in its simplest form.
All here as yet works quasi-automatically. The little child gets these impressions long before itself can choose between, or even is distinctly conscious of them; it believes whatever it sees and is told, equally, as so much fact, as something to build on. If you will, it believes these things to be true, but not in the sense of contrasting them with error; the very possibility of the latter has not yet come into sight. And at this stage the External, Authoritative, Historical, Traditional, Institutional side and function of Religion are everywhere evident. Cases like that of John Stuart Mill, of being left outside of all religious tradition, we may safely say, will ever remain exceptions to help prove the rule. The five senses then, perhaps that of touch first, and certainly that of sight most; the picturing and associative powers of the imagination; and the retentiveness of the memory, are the side of human nature specially called forth. And the external, sensible, readily picturable facts and the picturing functions of religion correspond to and feed this side, as readily as does the mother’s milk correspond to and feed that same mother’s infant. Religion is here, above all, a Fact and Thing.
2. Question and Argument, the Youth’s mode of approaching Religion.
But soon there wakes up another activity and requirement of human nature, and another side of religion comes forth to meet it. Direct experience, for one thing, brings home to the child that these sense-informations are not always trustworthy, or identical in its own case and in that of others. And, again, the very impressiveness of this external religion stimulates indeed the sense of awe and of wonder, but it awakens curiosity as well. The time of trustful questioning, but still of questioning, first others, then oneself, has come. The old impressions get now more and more consciously sought out, and selected from among other conflicting ones; the facts seem to clamour for reasons to back them, against the other hostile facts and appearances, or at least against those men in books, if not in life, who dare to question or reject them. Affirmation is beginning to be consciously exclusive of its contrary: I begin to feel that I hold this, and that you hold that; and that I cannot do both; and that I do the former, and exclude and refuse the latter.
Here it is the reasoning, argumentative, abstractive side of human nature that begins to come into play. Facts have now in my mind to be related, to be bound to other facts, and men to men; the facts themselves begin to stand for ideas or to have the latter in them or behind them. The measuring-rod seems to be over all things. And religion answers this demand by clear and systematic arguments and concatenations: this and this is now connected with that and that; this is true or this need not be false, because of that and that. Religion here becomes Thought, System, a Philosophy.
3.