BY religion I mean a living sense that man proposes and God disposes,
that we must watch and pray that we enter not into temptation, that he
who thinketh he standeth must take heed lest he fall, and the countless
other like elementary maxims which a man must hold as he holds life
itself if he is to be a man at all.
If religion, then, is to be formulated and made tangible to the people,
it can only be by means of symbols, counters and analogies, more or less
misleading, for no man professes to have got to the root of the matter
and to have seen the eternal underlying verity face to face—and even
though he could see it he could not grip it and hold it and convey it to
another who has not. Therefore either these feelings must be left
altogether unexpressed and, if unexpressed, then soon undeveloped and
atrophied, or they must be expressed by the help of images or idols—by
the help of something not more actually true than a child’s doll is to a
child, but yet helpful to our weakness of understanding, as the doll no
doubt gratifies and stimulates the motherly instinct in the child.
Therefore we ought not to cavil at the visible superstition and absurdity
of much on which religion is made to rest, for the unknown can never be
satisfactorily rendered into the known. To get the known from the
unknown is to get something out of nothing, a thing which, though it is
being done daily in every fraction of every second everywhere, is
logically impossible of conception, and we can only think by logic, for
what is not in logic is not in thought. So that the attempt to symbolise
the unknown is certain to involve inconsistencies and absurdities of all
kinds and it is childish to complain of their existence unless one is
prepared to advocate the stifling of all religious sentiment, and this is
like trying to stifle hunger or thirst. To be at all is to be religious
more or less. There never was any man who did not feel that behind this
world and above it and about it there is an unseen world greater and more
incomprehensible than anything he can conceive, and this feeling, so
profound and so universal, needs expression. If expressed it can only be
so by the help of inconsistencies and errors. These, then, are not to be
ordered impatiently out of court; they have grown up as the best guesses
at truth that could be made at any given time, but they must become more
or less obsolete as our knowledge of truth is enlarged. Things become
known which were formerly unknown and, though this brings us no nearer to
ultimate universal truth, yet it shows us that many of our guesses were
wrong. Everything that catches on to realism and naturalism as much as
Christianity does must be affected by any profound modification in our
views of realism and naturalism.