RELIGIOUS PEOPLE.
It will not be denied, I think, that even in England, where we pride
ourselves so much upon our religiousness, where we have a hundred
religions and only one sauce, the only country except Russia where the
head of the State is also the head of the National Church, that even in
England religion is unevenly divided. Men do not take to it so much as
women, some men are attracted by it more than others, some women more
than the rest of women. We find it in all qualities, in all depths, from
the thin veil above the scepticism of many men of science to the deep
emotional feeling of the enthusiast, and it is nowhere a question of
class, of education, or of occupation. It would be very difficult, I
think, to assert, and quite impossible to prove, that religion affects
any one class more than another; for it must not be forgotten that,
although more perhaps of certain classes go to religious services than
of others, the explanation may not be any comparative excess of
religious feeling. In a class where the women greatly exceed the men in
numbers, there will be apparently comparatively more religion, and the
rank of society also influences the result. For some it is easier and
pleasanter to attend church or chapel than for others, and a class which
is not hardly worked during the week can more easily spare the leisure
for religious exercises than others to whom the need for air, for
exercise, for change, appeals more strongly. There may also be other
factors at work. But indeed it is unnecessary to press the matter
closely, for it will hardly be asserted, I think, that religion is ever
a question of class. _One_ religion may be so, but not religion broadly
speaking, not the religious temperament as it is called. To whom, then,
does religion appeal most, and to what side of their nature does it
appeal?
Generally speaking, I think, to the more emotional and less
intellectual.
That this is but a general rule, with many exceptions of which I will
speak later, I admit. But I think it will be admitted that it is a
general rule. Intellect, reason, whether cultivated or not, hard-headed
common sense, whether in the great thinker or the artisan, is seldom
strongly religious. Faith of a kind they may retain, but they usually
restrain it to such a degree that it is not conspicuous. Hard-headed
thinkers are rarely "deeply religious." But as you leave the domain
which is the more dominated by thought, and descend or ascend--I have no
wish to infer inferiority or the reverse,--to the natures more
accessible to sentiment, more governed by the emotions, religiosity
increases. Till finally you arrive at the fanatic, where reason has
disappeared and emotion is the sole guide.
They are easily recognised, these enthusiasts, by their lined faces, by
their nervous speech, but above all by their eyes. You can see there the
emotional strain, the too highly strung system which has abandoned
itself to the excesses of religion. But there seems to be another rule;
religion varies according to the interests a person has in life. A man,
or a woman, with many interests, with much work, living a full life in
the world, has but little time usually for religion; he can devote but a
small part of his life to it. Its call is to him less imperative, less
alluring; it is but one among many notes. But as the absorption in daily
life decreases, as the demands from without are less, so does the
devotion to religion increase. Until at last among these rural people,
who with strong feelings have but little to gratify them, whose lives
are the dreary monotony of a daily routine into which excitement or
novelty never enters, we find often the greatest, the strongest, and
narrowest faith. So too among those many women of our middle classes
whose lives, from the want of mankind or of children, fall into narrow
ways, whose lives are dull, whose natural affections and desires are too
often thwarted, there lives the purest and strongest, if often, too, the
narrowest religion. It comes to them as a help where there is none
other, it brings to them emotions when the world holds for them none, it
contains in itself beauty and love and interest when the world has
refused them. How much, how very much of the deeper religious feeling is
due to the want of other pleasure in life, to the forced introspection
of solitude, to the desire to feel emotion when there is nothing without
to raise it.
The old and disappointed turn almost always to religion. Thus it seems
as if the quality of religion in mankind were due to two causes; to
temperament, according to the emotional necessity, the desire for
stimulation and the absence of mental restriction; and to environment,
according as the life led furnishes excitement and interest or is dull,
leading to a search within for that which does not come from without. Of
such are the ultra religious.
* * * * *
And the irreligious, those who say openly that they have no religion,
amongst whom are they to be found? They can, I think, be divided into
three classes.
There are first of all those who are very low down in the scale of
humanity, who are wanting in all the finer instincts of mankind. You
will find them usually in cities, amongst the dregs of the people; for
in the country it is difficult to find any who are quite without the
finer emotions. The air and land and sky, the sunset and the sunrise,
the myriad beauties of the world, do not leave them quite unmoved. And
then solitude, which gives men time to think, not to reason but to
think; which gives their hearts peace to hear the echoes of nature, is a
great refiner. Countrymen are often stupid, they are rarely brutalised.
Then there are the sensualists of all classes in life. It is a strange
thing to notice that of all the commands of religions, of all laws of
conduct they have given forth, but one only is almost invariably kept.
There is but one crime that the religious rarely commit, and that is
sensuality. It is true the rule is not absolute. There are the
Swedenborgians, if theirs can be called a religion. I doubt myself if it
be so, if this one fact did not oust it from the family of faiths. But
however that may be, sensuality in all history has been almost always
allied to irreligion. Not as a consequence, but because I think both
proceed from the same cause, a nerve weakness and irritability arising
from deficient vitality, a want of the finer emotions, which are
religion.
Finally, there are the philosophers. In all history, in all countries,
in all faiths there have been the thinkers, the reasoners, the "lovers
of wisdom," and they have rejected the religion of their people.
Of what sort are these philosophers? Are they, as they claim to be, the
cream of mankind, those who have the pure reason? Are they such as the
world admires? I think not. For pure reason does not appeal to mankind.
It is too cold, too hard, too arid. It is barren and produces nothing.
What has philosophy given the world but unending words? It is the denial
of emotion, and emotion is life. It is the reduction of living to the
formula of mathematics--a grey world. Those who, rejecting religion,
rely on pure reason, are those who have lost the stronger emotions, who
have heads but no hearts, while the enthusiasts have hearts but no
heads. And in between these lie the great mass of men who are religious
but not fanatics, who reason but who do not look to reason to prove
their religion, the men and women who live large lives, and are lost
neither in the tumult of unrestrained emotion, nor bound in the iron
limits of a mental syllogism.
"Do you infer," it will be asked, "that religion is in inverse ratio to
reason? But it is not so. Many men, most men of the highest intellectual
attainments, have been deeply religious, great soldiers, sailors,
statesmen, discoverers; the great men are on our side, the thinkers have
been with us." I am not sure of that. The great _doers_ have always been
religious, the great thinkers rarely so. No man has ever, I think, sat
down calmly unbiassed to reason out his religion and not ended by
rejecting it. The great men who have also been religious do not
invalidate what I say. Newton was a great thinker, perhaps one of the
greatest thinkers of all time. He could follow natural laws and
occurrences with the keenest eye for flaws, for mistakes, for rash
assumption. He could never accept until he had proved. But did he ever
apply this acumen to religion? Not so; he accepted at once the
chronology of the Old Testament unhesitatingly, blindly, and worked out
a chronology of the Fall much as did Archbishop Usher.
Indeed, I think it is always so. There is no assumption more fallacious
than that because a man is a keen reasoner on one subject he is also on
another, that because one thing is fair ground for controversy other
things are so also. Men who are really religious, who believe in their
faith whatever that faith may be, consider it above proof, beyond
argument. It is strange at first, it is to later thoughts one of the
most illuminating things, to hear a keen reasoner who is also a
religious man talk, to note the change of mental attitude as the subject
changes. In ordinary matters everything is subject to challenge, to
discussion, to rules of logic. But when it is religion that comes up,
note the dropped voice, the softened face, the gentle light in the eye.
It is emotion now, not reason; feeling, not induction. It is a subject
few religious men care to discuss at all, because they know it is not a
matter of pure reason. True religion, therefore, that beautiful
restrained emotion which all who have it treasure, which those who have
not envy and hate, lives among the men who are between these extremes.
Those who with strong emotions have but narrow outlets for it become
unduly religious, narrow sectarians.
Those with uncontrolled religious emotions become fanatics, those with
none but brute emotions remain brutes. Those whom the cult of sensual
desires has overcome follow Horace and Omar Khayyam. Those in whom
reason has overpowered and killed the emotions become those most arid of
people, philosophers. True and beautiful faith is to be found only
amongst those who lie between all these extremes. They have many and
keen emotions, but they find many outlets for them all, so that the
stream of feeling is not directed into one narrow channel. And they
employ reason not as a murdering dissecting power, but as an equaliser
and balancer of the living. Reason is not concerned with what religion
is, but only with the relative position religious emotions shall occupy
in life. Too little lets it run wild, too much kills it.
But religion is never reason. It is a cult of certain of the emotions.
What these emotions are I hope to explain further on.