_Border-land Cults_
The cults which we have so far considered are the outstanding forms of
modern free religious movements, but they do not begin to exhaust the
subject matter. Even the outstanding cults have their own border-lands.
New Thought is particularly rich in variants and there are in all
American cities sporadic, distantly related and always shifting
movements--groups which gather about this or that leader, maintain
themselves for a little and then dissolve, to be recreated around other
centers with perhaps a change of personnel. The Masonic Temple in
Chicago is said to be occupied on Sundays all day long by larger or
smaller groups which may be societies for ethical culture or with some
social program or other, or for the study of Oriental religions. One
would need to attend them all and saturate himself far more deeply than
is possible for any single investigator in their creeds or their
contentions to appraise them justly. Their real significance is neither
in their organization, for they have little organization, nor in their
creed, but in their temper. They represent reaction, restlessness and
the spiritual confusion of the time. They can be explained--in part at
least--in terms of that social deracination to which reference has
already been made. They represent also an excess of individualism in the
region of religion and its border-lands.
An examination of the church advertisement pages in the newspapers of
New York, Detroit, Chicago or San Francisco reveals their extent, their
variety and their ingenuity in finding names for themselves. On Sunday,
February 25th, the Detroit papers carried advertisements of Vedanta,
Spiritist and Spiritualist groups (the Spiritist group calls itself "The
Spirit Temple of Light and Truth"), The Ultimate Thought Society, The
First Universal Spiritual Church, The Church of Psychic Research, The
Philosophical Church of Natural Law, Unity Center, The Culture of
Isolan, Theosophy, Divine Science Center, and Lectures on Divine
Metaphysics. Their leaders advertise such themes as: The Opulent
Consciousness, The Law of Non-Attachment, Psychic Senses and
Spirituality, The Continuity of Life, The Spiritualism of Shakespeare,
The Voiceless Code of the Cosmos, The Godlikeness of Divine Metaphysics
in Business. Their themes are not more bizarre, it must be confessed,
than some of the topics announced for the orthodox churches. (Indeed the
church advertisement page in cities whose churches indulge generously in
display advertisements is not altogether reassuring reading.) But, in
general, this list which can be duplicated in almost any large city is
testimony enough to a confusion of cults and a confusion of thought. As
far as they can be classified, according to the scheme of this study,
they are variants of New Thought, Theosophy and Spiritualism. If they
were classified according to William James' "Varieties of Religious
Experience" they would be seen as mystical rather than rational,
speculative rather than practical.
Fort Newton, who speaks of them perhaps more disrespectfully than they
deserve as "bootleggers in religion," finds in these lesser movements
generally a protest against the excessively external in the life of the
Church to-day and a testimony to the quenchless longing of the soul for
a religion which may be known and lived out in terms of an inner
experience. But this certainly is not true of all of them.
_Bahaism_
There is, however, one other larger and more coherent cult, difficult to
classify, which deserves a more extended notice. That is Bahaism, which,
as it is now taking form, is a leaven rather than a cult. It is an
attempt after spiritual unity and the reduction of religion to very
simple and inclusive forms and a challenge to the followers of religions
widely separated on the surface to be more true to what is deepest in
their faith. It has a long and stirring history and curiously enough is
drawn from Mohammedan sources. Its basal literatures are Arabic and
Persian, "so numerous and in some cases so voluminous that it would
hardly be possible for the most industrious student to read in their
entirety even those which are accessible, a half dozen of the best known
collections in Europe."
We find its genesis, historically, in certain expectations long held by
Persian Mohammedans akin to Jewish Messianic expectations held before
and at the time of Christ. There has been, we know, a tradition of
disputed succession in Mohammedanism ever since the death of the
prophet. Persian Mohammedans believed the true successor of Mohammed to
have been unjustly deprived of his temporal supremacy and they trace a
long line of true successors whose divine right would some day be
recognized and reestablished. Perhaps we might find a parallel here
among those Englishmen who believe that the true succession of the
English throne should be in the house of the Stuarts, or those royalists
in France who champion the descendants of one or the other former
reigning houses. But the Persian faithful have gone farther than that.
They believe that the last true successor of Mohammed who disappeared in
the tenth century never died, but is still living in a mysterious city,
surrounded by a band of faithful disciples and "that at the end of time
he will issue forth and 'fill the earth with justice after it has been
filled with iniquity.'" A parallel here would be the old stories of
Frederick Barbarossa who waits in his cave for the proper time to come
forth and reassert his imperial power. This curious Persian belief has
worked itself out in a time scheme much like the time schemes of other
Apocalyptic beliefs, the detail of which is difficult enough.
But in substance this hidden and true successor of the prophet has had
from time to time those through whom he reveals himself to the faithful
and makes known his will, and these are known as Babs or gates; "the
gate, that is, whereby communication was reopened between the hidden one
and his faithful followers." The practical outcome of this would be that
any one who could convince Persian Mohammedans that he was the Bab or
"gate" would possess a mystic messianic authority. Such a confidence
actually established would give him an immense hold over the faithful
and make him a force to be reckoned with by the Mohammedan world.
_The Bab and His Successors_
As far as our own present interest is concerned, the movement dates from
1844 when a young Persian merchant announced himself as the Bab. If we
are to find a parallel in Christianity he was a kind of John the
Baptist, preparing the way for a greater who should come after him, but
the parallel ends quickly, for since the Mohammedan Messiah did not
appear, his herald was invested with no little of the authority and
sanctity which belonged to the hidden one himself. The career of the
first Bab was short--1844 to 1850. He was only twenty-four years old at
the time of his manifestation, thirty when he suffered martyrdom and a
prisoner during the greater part of his brief career. The practical
outcome of his propaganda was a deal of bloody fighting between
antagonistic Mohammedan factions. The movement received early that
baptism of blood which gives persistent intensity to any persecuted
movement. His followers came to regard him as a divine being. After his
execution his body was recovered, concealed for seventeen years and
finally placed in a shrine specially built for that purpose at St. Jean
d'Acre. This shrine has become the holy place of Bahaism.
During one period of his imprisonment he had opportunity to continue his
writings, correspond with his followers and receive them. He was thus
able to give the world his message and we find in his teachings the germ
of the gospel of Bahaism. Before his death he named his successor--a
young man who had been greatly drawn to him and who seemed by his youth,
zeal and devotion to be set apart to continue his work. To this young
man the Bab sent his rings and other personal possessions, authorized
him to add to his writings and in general to inherit his influence and
continue his work. This young man was recognized with practical
unanimity by the Babis as their spiritual head. Owing to his youth and
the secluded life which he adopted, the practical conduct of the affairs
of the Babi community devolved chiefly on his elder half-brother
Baha'u'llah. What follows is a confused story of schism, rival claimants
and persecution but the sect grew through persecution and the control of
it came in 1868 into the hands of Baha'u'llah.
During the greater part of his life Baha'u'llah was either an exile or a
prisoner. From 1868 until his death in 1892 he was confined with seventy
of his followers in the penal colony of Acca on the Mediterranean coast.
Meanwhile the faith which centered about him changed character; he was
no longer a gate or herald, he was himself a "manifestation of God"
with authority to change all earlier teaching. He really universalized
the movement. Beneath his touch religion becomes practical, ethical,
less mystic, more universal. He was possessed by a passion for universal
peace and brotherhood. He addressed letters to the crowned heads of
Europe asking them to cooperate in peace movements. It has been
suggested that the Czar of Russia was influenced thereby and that we may
thus trace back to Baha'u'llah the peace movement which preceded the
war.
Pilgrims came and went and through their enthusiasms the movement
spread. After his death there was the renewal of disputes as to the
proper succession and consequent schisms. The power came finally into
the hands of Abdul-Baha who was kept under supervision by the Turkish
government until 1908. He was freed by the declaration of the New
Constitution and carried on thereafter with real power a worldwide
propaganda. He had an unusual and winning personality, spoke fluently in
Persian, Arabic and Turkish and more nearly than any man of his time
filled the ideal role of an Eastern prophet. He died in November, 1921,
and was buried on Mt. Carmel--with its memories of Elijah and
millenniums of history--his praises literally being sung by a most
catholic group of Mohammedans, Jews and Eastern Christians.
_The Temple of Unity_
Bahaism as it is held in America to-day is distilled out of the writings
and teachings of Baha'u'llah and Abdul-Baha. Naturally enough, in the
popularization of it its contradictions have been reconciled and its
subtleties disregarded. What is left fits into a variety of forms and is
in line with a great range of idealism. The twelve basic principles of
Bahaism as announced in its popular literature are:
The Oneness of Mankind.
Independent investigations of truth.
The Foundation of all religions is one.
Religion must be the cause of unity.
Religion must be in accord with science and reason.
Equality between men and women.
Prejudice of all kinds must be forgotten.
Universal Peace.
Universal Education.
Solution of the economic problem.
An international auxiliary language.
An international tribunal.
A program inclusive enough for any generous age. These principles are
substantiated by quotations from the writings of Abdul-Baha and the
teachings of Baha'u'llah. Many things combine to lend force to its
appeal--the courage of its martyrs, its spaciousness and yet at the same
time the attractiveness of its appeal and its suggestion of spiritual
brotherhood. Since the movement has borne a kind of messianic
expectation it adjusts itself easily to inherited Christian hopes. There
are real correspondences between its expected millennium and the
Christian millennium.
How far its leaders, in their passion for peace and their doctrine of
non-resistance and their exaltation of the life of the spirit, are in
debt to the suggestions of Christianity itself, or how far it is a new
expression of a temper with which the Orient has always been more in
sympathy than the West, it would be difficult to say, but in some ways
Bahaism does express--or perhaps reproduces--the essential spirit of the
Gospels more faithfully than a good deal of Western Christianity as now
organized. Those members of Christian communions which are attracted to
Bahaism find in it a real hospitality to the inherited faith they take
over. It is possible, therefore, to belong to the cult and at the same
time to continue one's established religious life without any very great
violence and indeed with a possible intensification of that life.
It is difficult, therefore, to distinguish between Bahaism as it is held
by devout groups in America, so far as ethics and ideals go, from much
that is distinctive in the Christian spirit, though the influence of
Bahaism as a whole would be to efface distinctions and especially to
take the force out of the Christian creeds.
Chicago, or rather Wilmette, is now the center of the movement in
America and an ambitious temple is in the way of being constructed
there, the suggestion for whose architecture is taken from a temple in
Eskabad, Russia. This is to be a temple of universal religion,
symbolizing in its architecture the unities of faith and humanity. "The
temple with its nine doors will be set in the center of a circular
garden symbolizing the all-inclusive circle of God's unity; nine
pathways will lead to the nine doors and each one coming down the
pathway of his own sect or religion or trend of thought will leave at
the door the dogmas that separate and, under the dome of God's oneness,
all will become one.... At night it will be brilliantly lighted and the
light will shine forth through the tracery of the dome, a beacon of
peace and unity rising high above Lake Michigan."
This study has led us into many curious regions and shown to what
unexpected conclusions the forces of faith or hope, once released, may
come, but surely it has revealed nothing more curious than that the old,
old controversy as to the true successor of Mohammed the prophet should
at last have issued in a universal religion and set the faithful to
building a temple of unity on the shores of Lake Michigan.
If this work were to be complete it should include some investigation of
the rituals of the cults. They are gradually creating hymns of their
own; their public orders of service include responsive readings with
meditations on the immanence of God, the supremacy of the spiritual and
related themes. In general they dispense with the sacraments; they have
no ecclesiastical orders and hardly anything corresponding to the
Catholic priesthood or the Protestant ministry, though the Christian
Science reader has a recognized official place. They meet in
conferences; they depend largely upon addresses by their leaders.
Spiritualistic movements organize themselves around seances. They use
such halls as may be rented, hotels, their own homes; they have not
generally buildings of their own save the Christian Science temples
which are distinctive for dignity of architecture and beauty of
appointment in almost every large city.
_General Conclusions; the Limitations of the Writer's Method_
It remains only to sum up in a most general way the conclusions to which
this study may lead. There has been a process of criticism and appraisal
throughout the whole book, but there should be room at the end for some
general statements.
The writer recognizes the limitations of his method; he has studied
faithfully the literature of the cults, but any religion is always a
vast deal more than its literature. The history of the cults does not
fully tell their story nor does any mere observation of their worship
admit the observer to the inner religious life of the worshippers. Life
always subdues its materials to its own ends, reproduces them in terms
of its own realities; there are endless individual variations, but the
outcome is massively uniform. Religion does the same thing. Its
materials are faiths and obediences and persuasions of truth and
expectations of happier states, but its ultimate creations are character
and experience, and the results in life of widely different religions
are unexpectedly similar. Both theoretically and practically the truer
understanding or the finer faith and, particularly, the higher ethical
standards should produce the richer life and this is actually so. But
real goodness is everywhere much the same; there are calendared saints
for every faith.
There is an abundant testimony in the literature of the cults to rare
goodnesses and abundant devotion, and observation confirms these
testimonies. Something of this is doubtless due to their environment.
The Western cults themselves and the Eastern cults in the West are
contained in and influenced by the whole outcome of historic
Christianity and they naturally share its spirit. If the churches need
to remember this as they appraise the cults, the cults need also to
remember it as they appraise the churches. Multitudes of Catholics and
Protestants secure from a religion which the cults think themselves
either to have corrected or outgrown exactly what the cults secure--and
more. Such as these trust God, keep well, go happily about their
businesses and prove their faith in gracious lives. There is room for
mutual respect and a working measure of give and take on both sides.
The writer is inclined to think the churches at present are more
teachable than the more recent religious movements. For a long
generation now the churches have been subject to searching criticism
from almost every quarter. The scientist, the sociologist, the
philosopher, the publicist, the discontented with things as they are and
the protagonist of things as they ought to be, have all taken their turn
and the Church generally, with some natural protest against being made
the scapegoat for the sins of a society arrestingly reluctant to make
the Church's gospel the law of its life, has taken account of its own
shortcomings and sought to correct them. The cults are as yet less
inclined to test themselves by that against which they have reacted. But
this is beside the point. The movements we have been studying can only
be fairly appraised as one follows through their outcome in life and
that either in detail or entirety is impossible. But it is possible to
gain from their literature a reasonable understanding of their
principles and interrelations and this the writer has sought to do.
_The Cults Are Aspects of the Creative Religious Consciousness of the
Age_
Certain conclusions are thus made evident. These movements are the
creation of the religious consciousness of the time. They are aspects of
the present tense of religion. Since religion is, among other things,
the effective desire to enter into right relationships with the power
which manifests itself in the universe there are two variants in its
content; first, our changing understanding of the power itself and
second, our changing uses of it. The first varies with our knowledge and
insight, the second with our own changing sense of personal need. Though
God be the same yesterday, to-day and forever, our understandings of Him
cannot and ought not to be the same yesterday, to-day and forever. Our
faith is modified by, for example, our scientific discoveries. When the
firmament of Hebrew cosmogony has given way to interstellar spaces and
the telescope and the spectroscope plumb the depths of the universe,
resolving nebulae into star drifts, faith is bound to reflect the change.
The power which manifests itself in the universe becomes thereby a
vaster power, operating through a vaster sweep of law. Our changed
understandings of ourselves must be reflected in our faith and our
ethical insights as well. And because there is and ought to be no end to
these changing understandings, religion itself, which is one outcome of
them, must be plastic and changing.
What we ask of God is equally subject to change. True enough, the old
questions--Whence? Whither? and Why? are constant. As we know ourselves
to be living in a world which is less than a speck in an immensity
wherein the birth and death of suns are ephemeral, we may rightly
distrust our own value for the vaster order. We shall, therefore, the
more insistently ask Whence? and Whither? and Why? But, none the less,
there is always a shifting emphasis of religious need. Our own time is
manifestly more concerned about well-being in the life that now is than
a happy issue in the life which is to come. Temperament also qualifies
experience. The mystic seeks conscious communion with God as an end in
itself; the practical temper asks the demonstration of the love of God
in happy material conditions. In general, action and reaction govern
this whole region. The Puritan was supremely concerned about his own
salvation and the struggle consequent thereto; his descendants were
chiefly interested in the extension of knowledge and the conquest of the
physical order and we react against this in a new return upon ourselves
and the possibilities of personality.
Now these changing understandings of the power which manifests itself in
the universe on the one side and our own changing senses of need on the
other, give to religion a constantly fluctuating character and what is
most distinctively religious in any period must be the outcome of the
combination of these two variants. What an age asks of the God whom it
knows colours the whole of its religious life. These cults and movements
do not wholly represent the creative religious consciousness of our
time, of course; a great deal of that same creative religious
consciousness has given new quality to the organizations and orthodoxies
of the churches. But within the frontiers of historic Christianity it
has been rather the working over of the deposit of faith than an actual
adventure in the making of religion. The cults and movements have not
been thus limited. They have challenged old understandings, broken away
from the older organizations and taken their own line, using such
material as seems proper for their purpose.
They are not wholly independent of the past; some of them have taken the
immemorial speculations of the East for their point of departure though
introducing therein a good many of the permissions or conclusions of
modern science and something of the spirit of Christianity itself. Those
taking their departure from Christianity have claimed rather to
reinterpret and modernize it than to supplant it by their own creations.
Yet when all this is recognized these cults and movements are
particularly the creation of our own time. So accepted, they reveal
strongly the persistence of religion. All these conjectures and
confidences and reachings through the shadows are just a testimony that
few are content to go on without some form of religion or other.
All religion has, in one phase or another, gone through much the same
process. There has been for every religion a time when it took new form
out of older elements, a time when the accepted religions had little
enough sympathy for and understanding of what was taking place about
them while those committed to new quests were exultant in the
consciousness of spiritual adventure and discovery and heard the morning
stars sing together for joy. What is thus begun must submit always to
the testimony of time. In the end a religion is permanent as it meets
the great human needs and adjusts itself to their changing phases. It is
imperial and universal as it meets these needs supremely. If in addition
it be capable of organization, if there be within it room for expansion,
and if, on the whole, it justifies itself by the outcome of it in life
and society it will persist, and if it persists through a long period of
time and creates for itself literatures, dogmas and authorities, it
becomes as nearly fundamental as anything can be in this world. It
creates cultures, shapes civilizations, colours art, establishes ideals
and fills the whole horizon of its devotees.
If a religion is to endure it must meet a wide range of need; it must be
plastic and yet invest itself with the sanctions of History. For the
conservative it must possess the note of authority and at the same time
promise freedom to the liberal. It must persuade the forward-looking
that it holds within itself the power to meet changing conditions. It
must offer a satisfying experience to the mystic and the practically
minded and deliverance to the despairing. It must be able to build into
its structure new sciences and philosophies and yet it must touch the
whole of life with some sense of the timeless, and above all, it must
include the whole of life, nor depend upon particularized appeals or
passing phases of thought. Historic Christianity has more nearly met all
these tests than any other religion, for though under the stress of
meeting so great a variety of needs and conditions it has organized
itself into forms as different as Latin Catholicism and the Society of
the Friends, so losing catholicity of organization, it has secured
instead a catholicity of spirit and a vast elasticity of appeal which
are the secret of its power and the assurance of its continuing and
enduring supremacy.
_Their Parallels in the Past_
Now by such tests as these what future may one anticipate for such cults
as we have been studying? Are they likely to displace the historic forms
of Christianity, will they substantially modify it, or will they wear
away and be reabsorbed? Evidently one of these three things must happen.
This is not the first time in the Western world that historic and
authoritative Christianity has been challenged. We should have, perhaps,
to go back to the fourth century to find an exact parallel and then we
should find in the vast and confused movement of Gnosticism an
unexpected parallel to a great deal of what is happening about us.
Gnosticism was the effort of a reason excessively given to speculation,
undisciplined and greatly unrestrained by any sense of reality to
possess and transform the Church. Various forces combined to build its
fabric of air-born speculation and though for the time it gave the
patristic Church the hardest fight of its existence, the discipline of
the Church was too strong for it. Its own weaknesses proved eventually
its undoing and Gnosticism remains only as a fascinating field of study
for the specialist, only a name if even so much as that for the
generality of us and valuable chiefly in showing what speculation may do
when permitted at will to range earth and sky, with a spurious
rationalism for pilot and imagination for wings.
There have been, beside, in the history of the Church many other
movements possessing a great staying power and running in some cases for
generations alongside the main current of religious development, until
they finally disappeared with the changing centuries. Arguing from such
historical precedents as these one might easily assume a like fate for
the Gnosticism of our own time, and yet a note of caution is needed here
for there are divisive religious movements which have as yet neither
failed nor been absorbed in that from which they took their departure.
The expectation of the Catholic Church that Protestantism will spend its
force and be lost again in the majestic fabric of Latin Catholic
Christianity as it is continued amongst us, is as far from realization
to-day, or farther, than at any time in the last 300 years. We need to
remember also that conditions change. The right of individual initiative
and judgment once secured in the region of religion is not likely ever
to be lost. A good many divergent movements have literally been whipped
back into line or else put out in fire and blood. Nothing of that sort
is likely to happen now.
No student of history should be blind to the sequence of action and
reaction. A period of excessive dependence upon authority may follow a
period of undue self-assertion, but it is not likely that we shall ever
find recreated exactly the conditions of the past or that religion can
hereafter be held, as it has heretofore, in relatively well marked
channels under the stress of accepted authorities. Prophecy is hazardous
business but it is safe to assume that these modern religious cults and
movements represent the beginnings of a freer, more diffused, less
formal religious faith. The peculiar cults themselves may reach their
term but the temper which produced them is likely to continue and with
other groupings of forces produce something in the future which will at
least be their parallel.
_The Healing Cults Likely to be Adversely Influenced by the Scientific
Organisation of Psycho-therapy_
As far as the fortunes of the distinctive cults themselves go, one's
conclusions may be less tentative. For the most part the foundations
upon which they are built are not big enough to carry an ample and
secure structure. They have been made possible not only by marked
limitations in historic religion itself, but also by contemporaneous
tempers which, one may sincerely hope, are self-limiting, and this is
said not through undue prejudice against the cults themselves, but
simply because one is loath to believe that the want of critical
faculty which has made some of these cults possible will not in the end
yield to experience and a really sounder education. Since, moreover,
some of them--and Christian Science, preeminently--depend upon faith and
mental healing, whatever helps us to a clearer understanding of the
nature and limits of psycho-therapy will greatly affect their future.
All faith healing cults have heretofore depended very greatly upon the
atmosphere of mystery with which they have been able to surround
themselves. The fact that they have been able to secure results with no
very clear understanding of the way in which the results have been
secured has invested them with awe and wonder, so essential to every
religion.
But as psycho-therapy itself becomes organized, works out its laws,
develops its own science and particularly as the knowledge of all this
is extended and popularized, they will lose their base of support. For
this reason the writer believes that the final explanation of all faith
and mental healing in terms of some form of suggestion which is just now
strongly in evidence will prove a distinct service to us all.
The intimate association of religion and healing has, on the whole, been
good neither for religion nor health. Of course, this statement will
probably be sharply challenged but it is maintained in the face of
possible challenge. As far as religion goes it has withdrawn the
interest of the religious, thus influenced, from the normal expressions
of the religious life to border-land regions; it has stressed the
exceptional rather than the sweep of law, and the occult rather than the
luminously reasonable. Where it has failed in individual cases, as it
is bound to fail, it has left those thus disillusioned without any sound
basis for their faith and generally has driven them away from religion
altogether. It has tempted religious teachers to win a hearing by signs
and wonders. Even the Founder of the Christian religion grew weary of
this, as the records show plainly enough, in that He saw His true work
to be thereby not helped but hindered, and if this be true of the
Founder it is by so much the more true of His followers.
On the scientific side this temper has hindered honest thinking,
laborious investigation and that specialization which is absolutely
necessary to the furtherance of any great division of human effort.
Medicine made little progress until it got itself free of the Church.
Specifically the average minister is neither by training nor temperament
fitted for healing work and those laymen who have assumed that office
have generally been wanting in balance and self-restraint. This is not
to deny the reality of a power not ourselves making for health and
well-being generally, or the power of faith, or the efficacy of prayer.
Least of all is God, upon this understanding, to be shut out of life.
But the power not ourselves which makes for faith and healing is best
known through laborious investigation, the discovery of methods and
obediences to ascertained law. When we have clearly come to see the
nature of psycho-therapy, the occult authority of healing cults will in
the end yield to this understanding and the cults themselves be greatly
weakened or displaced.
One must recognize, on the other hand, the staying power of any
well-established religious system. Through nurture and those profound
conservatisms which hold more tenaciously in the region of religion than
anywhere else, it is possible to continue from generation to generation
the unreasonable or the positively untrue, and this holds in the Church
as well as outside it. None the less, the most coherent systems must
reckon with their own weaknesses. Christian Science may have before it a
long period of solid going or even marked growth, but its philosophy
will at last yield to the vaster sweep of a truer philosophic thought.
Its interpretations of historic Christianity will come up again and
again for examination until their fallacies become apparent and its
force as a system of psycho-therapy will be modified by simpler and more
reasonable applications of the same power.
_New Thought Will Become Old Thought_
New Thought is likely to take a different course but it also will have
to reckon with changing sciences and philosophies. What is New Thought
to-day will be old thought to-morrow; it will be challenged by new
expressions of the spirit which begot it. It will endure, therefore,
only as it is open, flexible and possesses a great power of
accommodation. But as long as understandings and ideals are fluid, as
long as religion is under bonds to take account of all the elements
which must be incorporated in it in order to enlarge and continue it, as
long, in short, as the human spirit outgrows fixed forms in any region
there is likely to be in religion itself something corresponding to the
New Thought of to-day, but this will be true only as New Thought is not
a cult at all but something larger--a free and creative movement of the
human spirit.
Of all these cults it has made the soundest contribution to religion as
a whole. It is also more easily assimilated, more easily absorbed. Its
own distinct field will be limited by the increasing hospitality of
Christian thought to contemporaneous truth. A wholly open-minded church
will go a long way toward taking from New Thought its raison d'etre. Its
future depends, therefore, very largely upon the open-mindedness of the
older and more strongly established forms of religion.
The future of Spiritualism is greatly open to conjecture. We have
already seen the alternatives which Spiritualism is called upon to face
and the uncertainties which attend its conclusions. A fuller
understanding of the possibilities of abnormal personality and the reach
of automatism are likely to work against Spiritualism. If we find
ascertainable causes for its phenomena resident within personality
itself there will be no need of calling in the other world in order to
explain what is happening in this. On the other hand, if there should
evidence an increasing and tested body of facts which can be explained
only in terms of spiritistic communications, Spiritualism will naturally
make headway. But we are certainly standing only upon the threshold of a
scientific interpretation of spiritistic phenomena and until the whole
region has been very much more carefully worked through and far more
dependable facts are in hand, one can only say that Spiritism is a
hypothesis which may or may not be verified, and attend the outcome.
It is hard to believe that Theosophy and kindred speculation will ever
get a strong hold upon the practical Western mind. It owes what force it
has either to an excessive love of the speculative on the part of a few,
or else to that particular temper which always wants something else and
something new, or else to wearinesses and misunderstandings of the more
shadowed side of life. Theosophy is greatly at the mercy of the
positive, practical temper; it will always find a prevailing competitor
in the Christian doctrine of immortality. Whatever, moreover, explains
the apparent inequalities of life in more simple and reasonable terms
will cut the roots of it. The movement toward religious syncretism of
which Bahaism is just now the expression will not be so easy to dispose
of. There will always be a temper impatient of the past, eager for
unity, anxious for something big and interpenetrating. Historically this
temper has from time to time emerged, particularly in the latter phases
of Roman paganism, and there is likely to be a larger interchange of
religious faith and understanding in the future than there has been in
the past.
In general, this desire for a universal religion, simple and wanting in
distinctive characters, follows a weakening of conviction, a loss of
passion for accepted forms. If anything should deepen again amongst us
in religion what corresponds just now to the passion for nationality
these more general religious quests would suffer. A strong feeling for a
church or a creed or one's own movement would displace them. They have,
on the other hand, in their favour the general tendency of all religion
toward simplicity, the reduction of faith, that is, to a few broad and
generally shared elements. But there is no reason to anticipate a speedy
breakdown of what one may call particularist religion and the
substitution therefor of a faith built up out of many diverse elements
and held in common by widely separated tempers.
_There is Likely to be Some Absorption of the Cults by a Widening
Historic Christianity_
If the past supplies analogy or suggestion there will be some tendency
for the cults and movements to be reabsorbed by the dominant religious
forms from which they have broken off. A careful analysis of this
statement would involve the consideration of a finality of Christianity
as now held in the Western world. That is impossible in the range of a
study like this. Any general statement is of course coloured by the
temper of the one who makes it and to a certain extent begs the whole
great question. But a careful and dispassionate examination of
present-day cults would seem to indicate that they really have nothing
to offer which the dominant Christianity does not possess either
explicitly or implicitly. There is a solidity of human experience behind
its forms and creeds which cannot be lightly left out of account. They
represent the travail of twenty centuries and have behind them far
older confidences and hopes. If Christianity should widen itself to the
full limit of its possibilities, it would leave little room for that
which seeks to supplant it and would meet the needs which have begotten
the cults in far richer and more reasonable ways.
As far as the cults are mistakenly distinctive, as far as they cannot
stand a careful examination, they represent what must be corrected and
cannot be absorbed. Christianity can absorb New Thought far more easily
than Christian Science. Theosophy in its extremer forms it cannot absorb
at all. It is more hospitable to the quest for a universal religion for
it seeks itself to be a universal religion and can never achieve its
ideal unless it takes account of the desire for something big enough to
include the whole of life, East as well as West, and to make room within
itself for a very great variety of religious tempers.
_But Christianity is Being Influenced by the Cults_
If Christianity is not to reabsorb the cults in their present form, it
must, as has been said over and over again, take account of them and it
is not likely to go on uninfluenced by them. Already it has yielded in
some directions to their contentions. If it feels itself challenged by
them it must meet that challenge not so much by intolerance as by the
correction of conditions which have made them possible, and here its
most dependable instruments are education and self-examination. There is
need of a vast deal more of sheer teaching in all the churches. The
necessity for congregations and the traditions of preaching conspire to
make the message of the Church far less vital than it ought to be.
Preaching is too much declamation and far too much a following of narrow
and deeply worn paths.
The cults themselves represent a craving for light, especially in the
regions of pain and loss. Historic Christianity has lost out because it
has made religion too self-centered, not that the cults are a corrective
here, for they are even more self-centered--that is one of their great
faults. The individual is not the center of the world; he is part of a
larger order concerned for great ends for which his life can only be
contributory. The Church and the cults together have forgotten too
largely that life is sacred only as we lose it. We need in the churches
generally a braver personal note and a very much larger
unself-centeredness.
It is interesting to note that the movement of the cults, with the
possible exception of New Thought, has been away from rationalism rather
than in the direction of it. This is a consideration to be taken into
account. It would seem on the surface of it to indicate that what people
are wanting in religion is not so much reason as mysticism and that for
the generality religion is most truly conceived in terms not of the
known but of the unknown. If the Christian Church is to meet the
challenge of the cults with a far more clearly defined line of teaching,
it is also to meet the challenge of the cults with a warmer religious
life, with the affirmation of an experience not so much tested by crises
and conversions as by the constant living of life in the sense of the
divine--to use Jeremy Taylor's noble phrase: in the Practice of the
Presence of God. The weakness of the cults is to have narrowed the
practice of the presence of God to specific regions, finding the proof
of His power in health and well-being. If we can substitute therefor the
consciousness of God in the sweep of law, the immensity of force, the
normal conduct of life, in light and understanding, in reason as well as
mysticism and science as well as devotion, we shall have secured a
foundation upon which to build amply enough to shelter devout and
questing souls not now able to find what they seek in the churches
themselves and yet never for a moment out of line with what is truest
and most prophetic in Christianity itself.
Sir Henry Jones has a paragraph in his "Faith that Enquires" distinctly
to the point just here. "The second consideration arises from the
greatness of the change that would follow were the Protestant Churches
and their leaders to assume the attitude of the sciences and treat the
articles of the creeds not as dogmas but as the most probable
explanation, the most sane account which they can form of the relation
of man to the Universe and of the final meaning of his life. The
hypothesis of a God whose wisdom and power and goodness are perfect
would then be tried and tested, both theoretically and practically, and,
I believe, become thereby ever the more convincing. The creed would be
not merely a record of an old belief to be accepted on authority, but a
challenge to the skeptic and the irreligious. The Church, instead of
being a place where the deliverances of ancient religious authorities
are expounded, and illustrated by reference to the contents of one book
and the history of one nation--as if no other books were inspired and
all nations save one were God-abandoned--the Church would be the place
where the validity of spiritual convictions are discussed on their
merits, and the application of spiritual principles extended; where
enquiring youths would repair when life brings them sorrow,
disappointment or failure, and the injustice of man makes them doubt
whether there be a God, or if there be, whether he is good and has
power, and stands as the help of man. Recourse to their certified
spiritual guides, knowing that full and sympathetic justice will be done
to all their difficulties, ought to be as natural to them as their
recourse to the physical laboratory or the workshop of the mechanician
when an engine breaks down."[83]
[Footnote 83: "A Faith that Enquires," p. 82.]
_Medical Science Should Take a More Serious Account of the Healing
Cults_
Not only the churches but the schools and particularly Medical Science
need to take account of the cults. They constitute perhaps one of the
sharpest indictments of present-day education. Many of their adherents
are nominally educated above the average. They have secured for what
they follow the authority which always attaches, in the American mind,
to the fact that those who champion any movement are college bred, and
yet the want of clear vision, the power to distinguish and analyze,
along with the unexpected credulities which are thus made manifest,
seem to indicate arresting deficiencies in popular education. It has
left us unduly suggestible, much open to mass movement, at the mercy of
the lesser prophets and wanting in those stabilities and understandings
upon which a sound culture is to be built. When we consider what they
are capable of believing who have had college or university training, we
must conclude either that contemporaneous education is wanting in the
creation of sound mental discipline, or else that we have a strange
power of living in water-tight compartments and separating our faith
wholly from our reason.
The cults which are organized around faith and mental healing at once
challenge and in a measure indict modern medical science. In many
directions all these movements are reactions against an excessive
materialism; they affirm the power of personality as against its
environment, testify that the central problems of life may be approached
from the spiritual as well as from the physical and material side. It
would not for a moment be fair to say that modern Medicine is ignoring
this. There has probably always been a considerable element of mental
healing in any wise medical practice. But on the whole, the marvellous
successes and advances in Medical Science within the last thirty years
and the very great success which has attended the definition of all
diseases in terms of physical disarrangement has led physicians
generally unduly to underestimate or ignore the undoubted power of faith
and mind over bodily states.
Even as a matter of scientific investigation medicine as a whole has not
taken this line of approach seriously enough. The Society for Psychical
Research has something to teach the medical faculties just here. That
Society, as we have seen, set out in the most rigorous and scientific
way possible to find out first of all just what actual facts lay behind
the confused phenomena of Spiritualism. They have given a long
generation to just that. As they have finally isolated certain facts
they have, with a good deal of caution, undertaken to frame hypotheses
to account for them and so, with the aid of the students of abnormal
personality, they are gradually bringing a measure of order into the
whole region. Medical Science on the whole has not done this in the
region of faith and mental healing. We are, therefore, far too uncertain
of our facts. A good deal of this is open to correction. If a Society
for Psycho-Therapeutic Research should be organized, which would follow
up every report of healings with an accurate care, beginning with the
diagnosis and ending with the actual physical state of the patient as
far as it could be ascertained by the tests at their disposal, they
could greatly clarify the popular mind, prevent a vast deal of needless
suffering, save the sick from frustrated hope and secure for their own
profession a distinct reinforcement and an increased usefulness.
_A Neglected Force_
If they thus find--as is likely--that the real force of Psycho-therapy
has been largely overestimated, that imagination, wrong diagnosis and
mistaken report as to the actual physical condition have all combined to
produce confidences unjustified by the facts, we should begin to come
out into the light. And if, on the other hand, they found a body of
actual fact substantiating Psycho-therapy they would do well to add
courses therein to the discipline of their schools.[84] The whole thing
would doubtless be a matter for specialization as almost every other
department of medicine demands specialization. Every good doctor is more
or less a mental healer, but every doctor cannot become a specialist in
Psycho-therapy, nor would he need to.
[Footnote 84: But this is already being done.]
Temperamental elements enter here very largely. But we might at least
take the whole matter out of the hands of charlatans and the
half-informed and establish it upon a sound scientific basis. There is,
beyond debate, a real place for the physician who utilizes and directs
the elements of suggestion. They have gone farther, on the whole, in
this direction in France and Switzerland than we have in America.
Evidently we are standing only upon the threshold of marked advances
along these lines. Psycho-therapy can never be a substitute for a
medical science which deals with the body as a machine to be regulated
in its processes, defended against hostile invasion or reinforced in its
weaknesses, but there is also another line of approach to sickness. A
catholic medical science will use every means in its power.
_The Cults Must be Left to Time and the Corrections of Truth_
Beyond such general considerations as these there is little to be said.
The Christian churches will gain nothing by an intolerant attitude
toward expressions of faith and spiritual adventures beyond their own
frontiers. Just as there is a constant selective process in answer to
which the historic churches maintain their existences, a selective
process controlled by association and temper, in that some of us are
naturally Catholics and some Protestants, there are tempers which do not
take kindly to inherited organization, authority or creed. Such as these
are seekers, excessive perhaps in their individuality, but none the less
sincere in their desire for a faith and religious contact which will
have its own distinct meaning for their own lives. And if there may seem
to some of us elements of misdirection or caprice or unreason in their
quests, it is perhaps in just such ways as these that advances are
finally made and what is right and true endures.
If nothing at all is to be gained by intolerance, nothing more is to be
gained by an unfair criticism and, in general, all these movements must
be left to the adjustments of time and the corrections of truth.
We began this study by defining religion as the effective desire to be
in right relation with the power which manifests itself in the universe.
How vast this power is we are just beginning to find out. How various we
are in our temperaments and what unsuspected possibilities there are in
the depths of personality we are also just beginning to find out. There
is possible, therefore, a vast variation of contact in this endeavour to
be in right relation with the power which faith knows and names as God.
In an endeavour moving along so wide a front there is room, naturally,
for a great variety of quest. When we have sought rightly to understand
and justly to estimate the more extreme variants of that quest in our
own time, we can do finally no more than, through the knowledge thus
gained, to try in patient and fundamental ways to correct what is false
and recognize and sympathize with what is right and leave the residue to
the issue of the unresting movements of the human soul, and those
disclosures of the Divine which are on their Godward side revelation and
on their human side insight, understanding and obedience.
_Printed in the United States of America_