The religions that hitherto have served over wide regions and for
considerable periods of time to sustain men in more or less orderly,
honest, decent and progressive societies, have been presented to the
generality and accepted by the generality in extremely attenuated
forms. In their beginnings they were all intense and uncompromising.
Christianity, for example, began with the completest communism,
Buddhism with an entire renunciation of earthly desire, Islam with the
passionate and forcible dedication of the whole world to Allah. Sooner
or later, however, the propagandist came to terms with human weakness
and struck a bargain for a cheaper form of common proselyte.
But though the creed and practice might need lightening and fitting to
customary humanity before they could be universally accepted, there
appeared no essential conflict in the process between the intense and
the superficial form. The common man assented to everything in the
doctrine, and merely asked to have the more difficult and onerous terms
deferred or mitigated. His plea for his personal insufficiency was
weakness and not dissent.
In their completeness, in their esoteric forms, in the life that was
professionally _religious_, religions have always demanded great
subordinations of self. Therein lay their creative usefulness. There
is no such thing as a self-contained religion, a private religious
solo. Certain forms of Protestantism and some mystical types come
near to making religion a secluded duet between the individual and
his divinity, but here that may be regarded as a perversion of the
religious impulse. Just as the normal sexual complex excites and stirs
the individual out of his egotism to serve the ends of the race, so the
normal religious process takes the individual out of his egotism for
the service of the community. It is not a bargain, a “social contract,”
between the individual and the community; it is a subordination of
both the existing individual and the existing community in relation to
something, a divinity, a divine order, a standard, a righteousness,
more important than either. What is called in the phraseology of
certain religions “conviction of sin” and “the flight from the City
of Destruction” are familiar instances of this reference of the
self-centred individual and the current social life to something far
better than either the one or the other.
This is the third element in the religious relationship, a hope, a
promise, an objective which turns the convert not only from himself
but from the “world” as it is, towards better things. First comes
self-disregard, then service, and then this reconstructive creative
urgency.
For that minority of minds which I have already spoken of as the
salt of the earth, this aspect of religion seems to have been its
primary attraction. One has to remember that there is a will for
religion scattered throughout mankind. Religion has never pursued its
distinctive votaries; they have come to meet it. The desire to give
oneself to greater ends than the everyday life affords, and to give
oneself freely, is clearly dominant in that minority and traceable in
an incalculable proportion of the majority.
_Chapter III_