not really mean to affirm that anything entitled to be called religion
is ever mere knowledge or mere belief; on the contrary, they proceed
on the supposition that feeling and volition will correspond to the
knowledge or belief. They define religion as knowledge or belief, and
not as affection or volition, because, regarding religious knowledge
or belief as the ground of religious feeling and willing, they think
they may treat the two latter, not as constituents, but as consequences
of religion. Then, although a few of those who have defined religion
as feeling have written as if they supposed that the feeling rested
upon no sort of apprehension or conviction, they have been very
few, and they have never been able to explain what they meant. In
presence of the Power which is manifested in the universe, or of the
moral order of the world, they have felt an awe or joy, it may be,
irresistibly raising them above themselves, above the hampering details
of earth, and "giving fulness and tone to their existence;" and being
unaccustomed to analyse states of consciousness, although familiar
with the mechanics and chemistry of matter, they have overlooked the
obvious fact, that but for an intellectual perception of the presence
of an all-pervading Power, and all-embracing order, the awe and joy
could never have been excited. Mere feeling cannot tell us anything
about what is out of ourselves, and cannot take us out of ourselves.
Mere feeling is, in fact, mere absurdity. It is but what we should
expect, therefore, that all those capable of reflecting in any measure
on mental processes who have placed the essence of religion in feeling,
have always admitted that the religious feeling could not be wholly
separated either from the power of cognition on the one hand, or the
exertion of will on the other. Men like Schleiermacher and Opzoomer
argue strenuously that religion is feeling and not knowledge or
practice; but it is expressly on the ground that, as there can be
what is called religious knowledge and practice without piety, the
knowledge is a mere antecedent, and the practice a mere consequent.
Those, again, who make religion consist essentially in an act of will,
in the self-surrender of the soul to the object of its worship, do so,
they tell us, because pious feeling, even though based on knowledge, is
only religiousness, not religion--the capacity of being religious, not
actually being so; and religion only exists as a reality, a completed
thing, when the will of man submits itself to the Divine Will. But
this is to acknowledge, you observe, that both thought and feeling are
present and presupposed wherever religion exists.
Now, if the facts be as I have just stated, obviously the controversy
as to whether religion is essentially knowing, feeling, or willing,
is mainly verbal. It turns on an undefined use of the term
essential. Thought, feeling, and will--knowledge, affection, and
self-surrender--are admitted to be indissolubly united, inseparably
present, in religion, even by those who will not admit them to be all
its equally essential constituents. But in these circumstances, they
should carefully explain what they mean by essential and non-essential,
and tell us how we are to distinguish among inseparable states those
which are essential from those which are non-essential. This they never
do; this they cannot do. All facts which always go together, and are
always equally found in any state or process, are its equally essential
components. When we always find certain elements together, and can
neither discover nor imagine them apart, we have no right to represent
some of them as essential to the compound into which they enter, and
others as non-essential. They are all essential.
The conclusion to which we are thus brought is, that religion belongs
exclusively to no one part or province, no one disposition or faculty
of the soul, but embraces the whole mind, the whole man. Its seat is
the centre of human nature, and its circumference is the utmost limit
of all the energies and capacities of that nature. At the lowest it has
something alike of intellect, affection, and practical obedience in it.
At its best it should include all the highest exercises of reason, all
the purest and deepest emotions and affections, and the noblest kind of
conduct. It responds to its own true nature only in the measure that
it fills the whole intellect with light, satisfies the reverence and
love of the most capacious heart, and provides an ideal and law for
practical life in all its breadth. There is, then, a general notion of
religion which includes all religions, and that notion both suggests
to us that the various religions of the world are of very different
values, and points us to a standard by which we may determine their
respective rank, and estimate their worth. The definition of religion,
in other words, though not to be confounded with the type or ideal of
religion, is connected with it, and indicates what it is. The type is
the normal and full development of what is expressed in the definition.
It is the type, of course, and not the definition, which is the
standard--the medium and measure of comparison. And the type or ideal
of religion is the complete surrender of the heart, and strength, and
soul, and mind of man to Deity. Only a religion which admits of a full
communion of the reason, affection, and will of the worshipper with
the object of his worship--only a religion which presents an object of
worship capable of eliciting the entire devotion of the worshipper's
nature, and at the same time of ennobling, enlarging, refining, and
satisfying that nature--fully realises the idea of religion, or, in
other words, can claim to be a perfect religion.[8]
[8] See Appendix VII.
II.
Applying the very general idea of religion which has now been reached,
it soon becomes apparent that no religion can possibly claim to conform
to it which does not present to man as the true and supreme object
of his adoration, love, and obedience, the One Infinite Personal
God--almighty, all-wise, and all-holy; or, in other words, that it is
only in a theistic religion that whatever in religion is fitted to
satisfy the reason and affections of man, and to strengthen and guide
his will, can find its proper development.
Look at polytheism--the worship of more gods than one. Clearly religion
can only be very imperfectly realised in any polytheistic form; and
still more clearly are most of the forms which polytheism has actually
assumed unspeakably degrading. Think for a moment of a human being
worshipping a stock or a stone, a plant or a tree, a fish or serpent,
an ox or tiger--of the negro of Guinea beating his gods when he does
not get what he wishes, or the New Zealander trying to frighten them by
threatening to kill and eat them--of the car of Juggernaut, the fires
of Moloch, the sacrifices to the Mexican war-god, the abominations
ascribed to Jupiter, the licentious orgies so widely practised by the
heathen in honour of their deities. Reflect on such a scene as is
brought before us in the forty-fourth chapter of Isaiah. The language
of the prophet is so graphic that one almost seems to see the man whom
he depicts choosing his tree in the forest and hewing it down--to see
the smith working at it with his tongs among the coals, and hear the
ring of his hammer--to see the carpenter with adze and line and compass
shape it into an ugly monstrous shape, bearing faint resemblance to
the human--to see the workman with one part of the tree kindling a
fire, and baking bread, and roasting roast, and eating it, and then
going up to the ugly, wooden, human shape that he has fashioned out of
another part of the same tree, prostrating himself before it, feeling
awed in its presence, and praying, "Deliver me; for thou art my god."
The prophet obviously painted from the life, and his picture is still
true to the life where polytheism prevails. But what could be more
calculated to inspire both horror and pity? How awful is it that man
should be able so to delude and degrade himself! As a rule, the gods
of polytheists are such that, even under the delusion that they are
gods, little improving communion with them is possible. As a rule, the
religion of polytheists consists of vague, dark, wild imaginations,
instead of true and reasoned convictions--of coarse, selfish desires,
fear and suspicion, instead of love, and trust, and joy--and of
arbitrary or even immoral rites and practices, instead of spiritual
worship, and the conformity of the will to a righteous law.
Then, at the very best, polytheism must be far from good,--at its
highest, it must be low. Were it much better than it has ever been--had
it all the merits of Greek polytheism, without any of its faults,
save those which are inherent in the very nature of polytheism--it
would still be but a poor religion, for its essential and irremediable
defects are such as to render it altogether incapable of truly
satisfying the nature of man. It is a belief in more gods than one.
This of itself is what reason cannot rest in--what reason is constantly
finding out more clearly to be false. The more the universe is examined
and understood, the more apparent does it become that it is a single,
self-consistent whole--a vast unity in which nothing is isolated or
independent. The very notion, therefore, of separate and independent
deities, and still more, of course, of discordant or hostile deities,
ruling over different departments of nature, is opposed to the
strivings and findings of reason. The heart will no less vainly seek
satisfaction in the belief of many gods. Its spiritual affections
need a single Divine object. To distribute them among many objects is
to dissipate and destroy them. The reverence, love, and trust which
religion demands are a whole-hearted, absolute, unlimited reverence,
love, and trust, such as can only be felt towards one God, with no
other beside Him. The will of man in like manner requires to be under
not a number of independent wills, but a single, all-comprehensive,
perfectly consistent, and perfectly righteous will. It cannot serve
many masters; it can only reasonably and rightly serve one. It can
only yield itself up unreservedly to be guided by One Supreme Will.
If there be no such will in the universe, but only a multitude of
independent and co-ordinate wills, that full surrender of the will of
the worshipper to the object of his worship, in which religion should
find its consummation, is impossible.
Further, polytheism is not only the belief in more gods than one, but
in gods all of which are finite. There can be no true recognition of
the infinity of God where there is no true recognition of His unity.
But the mind of man, although finite itself, cannot be satisfied with
any object of worship which it perceives to be finite. It craves an
infinite object; it desires to offer a boundless devotion; it seeks an
absolute blessedness. The aim of the religious life is the communion
of the finite with the infinite; and every religion, however otherwise
excellent, which suppresses the infinite, and presents to the finite
only the finite, is a failure.
Religion can no more attain to its proper development in pantheism
than in polytheism. For pantheism denies that the One Infinite Being
is a person--is a free, holy, and loving intelligence. It denies even
that we ourselves are truly persons. It represents our consciousness
of freedom and sense of responsibility as illusions. God, according
to pantheism, alone is. All individual existences are merely His
manifestations,--all our deeds, whether good or bad, are His actions;
and yet, while all is God and God is all, there is no God who can
hear us or understand us--no God to love us or care for us--no God
able or willing to help us. Such a view of the universe may have its
attractions for the poet and the philosopher in certain moods of mind,
but it assuredly affords little foundation for religion, if religion be
the communion of the worshipper and the worshipped. What communion of
reason can a man have with a being which does not understand him, or
of affection with a being which has no love, or of will with a being
which has no choice or freedom, and is the necessary cause both of good
and evil? Pantheism represents absorption in Deity, the losing of self
in God, as the highest good of humanity; but this is a mere caricature
of that idea of communion with God in which religion must find its
realisation, as pantheism leaves neither a self to surrender, nor a
personal God to whom to surrender it. The absorption of the finite
in the infinite which pantheism preaches is as different from that
surrender of the self to God, which is the condition of God dwelling in
us and we in God, as night is from day, as death is from life.
We find ample historical confirmation of what has just been said in the
very instructive fact, that widespread as pantheism is, it has never in
itself been the religion of any people. It has never been more than the
philosophy of certain speculative individuals. India is no exception,
for even there, in order to gain and retain the people, pantheism
has had to combine with polytheism. It is the personal gods of Hindu
polytheism and not the impersonal principle of Hindu pantheism that
the Hindu people worship. The Sankhya and Vedanta systems are no more
religions than the systems of Spinoza, Schelling, or Hegel. They are
merely philosophies. Buddhism has laid hold of the hearts of men to a
wonderful extent; not, however, in virtue of the pantheism, scarcely
dis-tinguishable from atheism, which underlies it, but because of the
attractiveness of the character and teaching of the Buddha Sakyamuni
himself, of the man-god who came to save men. The human heart cries out
for a living personal God to worship, and pantheism fails miserably as
a religion because it wholly disregards, yea, despises that cry.
* * * * *
We are compelled to pass onwards, then, to theism. And here, applying
the same view of religion as before, it soon becomes obvious that
of the three great theistic religions--Judaism, Christianity, and
Mohammedanism--the last is far inferior to the other two, and the first
is a transition to and preparation for the second. Although the latest
of the three to arise, Mohammedanism is manifestly the least developed,
the least matured. Instead of evolving and extending the theistic
idea which it borrowed, it has marred and mutilated it. Instead of
representing God as possessed of all spiritual fulness and perfection,
it exhibits Him as devoid of the divinest spiritual attributes.
Although the Suras of the Koran are all, with one exception, prefaced
by the formula, "In the name of Allah, the God of mercy, the merciful,"
there is extremely little in them of the spirit of mercy, while they
superabound in a fierce intolerance. Allah is set before us with
clearness, with force, with intense sincerity, as endowed with the
natural attributes which we ascribe to God, but only so as to exhibit
very imperfectly and erroneously His moral attributes. He is set
before us as God alone, beside whom there is none other; as the first
and the last, the seen and the hidden; as eternal and unchanging; as
omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient; as the Creator, the Preserver,
and the Judge of all;--but He is not set before us as truly righteous
or even as truly reasonable, and still less as Love. He is set before
us as an infinite and absolute arbitrary Will, the acts of which are
right simply because they cannot be wrong, and which ordains its
creatures and instruments to honour or dishonour, heaven or hell,
without love or hate, without interest or sympathy, and on no grounds
of fitness or justice.
His infinite exaltation above His creatures is recognised, but not His
relationship to and interest in His creatures. His almighty power is
vividly apprehended, but His infinite love is overlooked, or only seen
dimly and in stray and fitful glimpses. His character is thus most
imperfectly unveiled, and even seriously defaced; and, in consequence,
a whole-hearted communion with Him is impossible. As an unlimited
arbitrary Will He leaves man with no true will to surrender to Him.
Inaccessible, without sympathy, jealous, and egoistic, His appropriate
worship is servile obedience, blind submission--not the enlightened
reverence and loving affection of the true piety in which mind and
heart fully accord; unquestioning belief, passionless resignation,
outward observances, mere external works--not the free use of reason,
not the loving dependence of a child on its father, not an internal
life of holiness springing from a divine indwelling source. God and
man thus remain in this system, theistic although it be, infinitely
separate from each other. Man is not made to feel that his whole
spiritual being should live and rejoice in God; on the contrary, he
is made to feel that he has scarcely any other relation to God than
an inert instrument has to the hand which uses it. Submission to the
will of God, whatever it may be, without recognition of its being the
will of a Father who seeks in all things the good of His children, is
the Mussulman's highest conception either of religion or duty, and
consequently he ignores the central principle of religious communion
and the strongest motive to moral action.
The theism of the Old Testament is incomparably superior to that of
the Koran. It possesses every truth contained in Mohammedanism, while
it gives due prominence to those aspects of the Divine character which
Mohammedanism obscures and distorts. The unity and eternity of God, His
omniscience, omnipresence, and inscrutable perfections, the wonders of
His creative power, His glory in the heavens and on the earth, are
described by Moses and the author of the Book of Job, by the psalmists
and the prophets, in language so magnificent that all the intervening
centuries have been unable to surpass it. And yet far greater stress
is justly laid by them on the moral glory of God, which is reflected
in so dim and broken and disproportionate a way through the visions
of Mohammed. It is impossible to take a comprehensive view of the Old
Testament dispensation without perceiving that its main aim, alike in
its ceremonial observances, moral precepts, and prophetic teaching, was
to open and deepen the sense of sin, to give reality and intensity to
the recognition of moral law, to make known especially that aspect of
God's character which we call His righteousness, His holiness. At the
same time God is set forth as merciful, long-suffering, and gracious;
as healing our diseases, redeeming our life, and crowning us with
loving-kindnesses; as creating in us clean hearts, and desiring not
sacrifice but a broken spirit.
Before the close of the Old Testament dispensation, a view of God's
character had been attained as complete as could be reached through
mere spiritual vision and expressed through mere words. The character
of God was so disclosed that His people longed with their whole hearts
for the blessedness of true spiritual communion with Him, and worthily
apprehended what that communion ought to be. But with the widening of
their views and the deepening of their longings as to this the supreme
good, they realised the more how far they were from the attainment of
it. From the beginning Judaism looked beyond itself and confessed its
own preparatory and transitional character. And this consciousness grew
with its growth. In the days of the later prophets men knew far better
what spiritual communion with God ought to be than in the days of the
patriarchs, but they did not actually enjoy even the same measure of
childlike communion with Him. The law had done its work; it had made
men feel more than ever the need of being in communion with God, but
it had made them realise also the distance between God and them, and
especially the awful width of the gulf between them caused by sin.
That gulf no mere spiritual vision of man could see across, and no
mere declarations of love and mercy even from God Himself could bridge
over. The reason of man could only be enlightened--the heart of man
could only be satisfied--as to how God would deal with sin and sinners,
by an actual self-manifestation of God in humiliation, suffering, and
sacrifice, which would leave men in no doubt that high and holy as God
was, He was also in the deepest and truest sense their Father, and that
they were His ransomed and redeemed children. It was only when this was
accomplished that religion and theism were alike perfected. Then the
character of God was unveiled, the heart of God disclosed, and in such
a manner that the most childlike confidence in Him could be combined
with the profoundest sense of His greatness and righteousness. Perfect
communion with Him in trustful love no longer supposed, as it did in
earlier times, an imperfect knowledge, on the part of the worshipper,
either of God's character or of his own. It required no overlooking
of the evil of sin, for it rested on the certainty that sin had been
overcome. Only the life hid with God in Christ can completely realise
the idea of religion, for only in Christ can the heart of sinful man
be sincerely and unreservedly yielded to a holy God. "I am the way,
the truth, and the life; no man cometh unto the Father, but by me,"
are words of the Lord Jesus which can only be denied by those who do
not understand what they mean--what the truth and the life are, what
fatherhood signifies, and what is involved in coming to a Father.
Christian theism alone gives us a perfect representation of God.
It precedes and surpasses reason, especially in the disclosure of
the depths of fatherly love which are in the heart of the infinite
Jehovah; but it nowhere contradicts reason--nay, it incorporates
all the findings of reason. It presents as one great and brilliant
light all the scattered sparks of truth which scintillated amidst
the darkness of heathendom; it combines into a living unity all the
separate elements of positive truth which are to be found in systems
like pantheism, deism, rationalism; it excludes all that is false
in views lower than or contrary to its own. Whenever it maintains a
truth regarding God, reason finds that it is defending a principle of
Christian theism; whenever it refutes an error regarding Him, it finds
itself assailing some one of the many enemies of Christian theism.
III.
Theism, I argued in last lecture, can never be reasonably rejected in
the name of religious liberty. I may now, I think, maintain that it
can never be reasonably thrown off in the name of religious progress.
It can never be an onward step in the spiritual life to pass away
from the belief which is distinctive and characteristic of theism.
The highest possible form of religion must be a theistic religion--a
religion in which the one personal and perfect God is the object of
worship. Fetichism, nature-worship, humanitarian polytheism, and
pantheism, are all very much lower forms of religion, and therefore to
abandon theism for any of them is not to advance but to retrograde,
is not to rise but to fall. We can turn towards any of them only by
turning our back on the spiritual goal towards which humanity has
been slowly but continuously moving through so many ages. There is no
hope or possibility of advance on the side of any of the old forms of
heathendom.