THE USE OF RELIGION.
But granted, people may say, that religion is what you say, a cult of
the emotions, of what use is it? Why should these emotions be cultivated
at all? You say that they are beautiful because they are true, and that
they are true because they are of use. Of what use are they? Some can be
explained perhaps, but not most--not the instinct of God, for instance,
nor of Law, nor the instinct of prayer. It seems to me that unless you
can prove that they are true, essentially true conceptions, they cannot
be beautiful. And this you say you cannot prove. "No one can prove God,"
you say, and prayer, surely that is against reason, and demonstrably a
weakness. Certainly not a good emotion to cultivate. "You say it is
beautiful. How can you prove that?"
* * * * *
Travelling on the Continent among those places where there are little
colonies of English people who for one reason or another have left their
own country, there crops up occasionally a man of peculiar kind, hardly
ever to be met elsewhere. He is a man who has left England, we will
suppose, for economy's sake, who has settled abroad, perhaps in one
place, perhaps roaming from place to place, who has no work, no interest
in life. He has drifted away from the current of our national life, he
has entered no other, but he exists, he would say, as a student of man
and a philosopher on motives.
One such, meeting me one day, turned his conversation upon wars and upon
patriotism. The former horrified him, the latter revolted him.
"Patriotism," he said, "can you defend such a feeling? Have you any
reasoning to support it? Patriotism is a narrowness, a blindness. It is
little better than a baseness founded on ignorance. How can it be
defended? You say it is beautiful. Prove to me that it is so. I deny
it."
To whom, and to men like this, it seems that there is only one answer to
be made.
"My friend, the love of your own people and your own country, if it ever
existed within you, is long dead or you would never ask such a question.
I cannot reason with you on the subject, because it would be like
reasoning with a blind man on the beauty of being able to see. He who
sees knows; but if a man be blind, how can it be explained to him?
Neither I nor my fellows can talk to you about patriotism, because it is
a feeling we have, but of which you are ignorant. It is not a question
of reason. But if you would know whether patriotism be beautiful or the
ignorant foolishness you suppose, I can show you the road to learn.
"Go back to that England you have forgotten, and in your forgetfulness
begun to despise. Go back there on the eve of a great victory, or a
great deliverance, such a day as that on which Ladysmith was relieved.
And go not into the streets if the loud rejoicings hurt your philosophic
ear, but go into the homes of the people. Go to the rich, to the middle
class, to the artisan, to the labourer, and mark their glowing faces,
their glad eyes, the look of glory, of thanksgiving that our people have
been rescued, that our flag has escaped a disaster. Look at the faces of
these men and women and children, whose hearts are full at the news. And
then ask them, 'Is patriotism a mean and debasing passion?' They know.
Or do better even than this, go yourself to Africa, to India, to the
thousand league frontiers where men die daily for their flag, for their
own honour, and that of their country. Take rifle yourself and beat
back those who would destroy our peace, take up your pen and give some
of your life to the people whom we rule. You will find it a better life,
perhaps, than at a foreign spa. Give yourself freely for your country
and those your country gives in charge to you. I think you will learn,
maybe, what patriotism means. But argument, reason? I think you
exaggerate the power of reason. It can argue only from facts. It is
necessary to know the facts first. And you are ignorant of your facts,
because you have never felt them. Only those who feel them know. Go and
give your life, and before it be gone you will have learnt what neither
I nor any man who ever lived can _tell_ you. You will have learnt the
_realities_ of life.
"For you and those like you mistake the power of reason, you have
forgotten its limitations. Reason is but the power of arranging facts,
it cannot provide them. Your eyes will give you the facts they can see,
your ears what they can hear, your sympathies will give you the
realities of men's lives. If you have no emotions, no sympathies, how
can you get on? You are like mariners afloat upon the sea vainly
waggling your rudders and boasting that you are at the mercy of no
erratic winds, while the ships pass you under full sail. Where will
reason alone take you? It cannot take you anywhere. A rudder is only
useful to a ship that has motive power. What motive power have you? So
you float and work your rudders and turn round and round, and are very
bitter. Why are all philosophers so bitter, so hard to bear with, so
useless? Because you are conscious unconsciously of your futility, that
the world passes you by and laughs.
"The functions of reason are very narrow. You forget them. You exalt
reason into the whole of life, committing the mistake for which you rail
on others. Unbridled emotion is, as you say, terrible. So is unbridled
reason. Where has reason alone ever led anyone save into the dreariest,
driest pessimism? Was a philosopher ever a happy man? Even your Utopias,
from Plato's to Bellamy's, who would desire them? Hell would be a
pleasant relaxation after any of them. The functions of the senses, of
which sympathy is the greatest, are to give you facts, the function of
reason is to arrange them. The emotions drive man forward, reason
directs and controls them. That is all.
"You say religions are founded on errors, on what are your reasonings
founded? They are founded on _nothings_."
Of what use is patriotism? Is it beautiful or no? Of what use is
religion? Is it beautiful or no? Prove to me that it is necessary or
beautiful. Show me why it should be so.
Is it not the same answer in each case? It is so easy to point out the
evils of exaggeration in each. Anyone can do it. But the mean. Prove to
me the use and beauty of the mean.
The answer is always the same. If you have religion in you, such a
question would never occur to you, for you would feel its use, you would
_know_ its beauty. And if you have not, who shall prove it to you? Who
shall provide you with the facts on which to reason, who shall open your
eyes? But if anyone doubts that religion is useful and is beautiful to
its believers, go and watch them.
It matters not where you go, East or West, it is always the same. In
England, or France, or Russia, among the Hindus, the Chinese, the
Japanese, the Parsees. It makes no matter if you will but look aright.
For you must know how to look and where. You must learn what to read. It
is never books I would ask you to read, never creeds, never theologies,
never reasons, nor arguments. You will not find what you search in
libraries nor yet in places of worship, in ceremonies, in temples,
great and beautiful as they may be. Not in even their inmost recesses is
the secret hid, the secret of all religions. I would have you listen to
no preachers, to no theologians. They are the last to know. But I would
have you go to the temple of the heart of man and read what is written
there, written not in words, but in the inarticulate emotions of the
heart. I would have you go and kneel beside the Mahommedan as he prays
at the sunset hour, and put your heart to his and wait for the echo that
will surely come. Yes, surely, if you be as a man who would learn, who
can learn. I would have you go to the hillman smearing the stone with
butter that his god may be pleased, to the woman crying to the forest
god for her sick child, to the boy before his monks learning to be good.
No matter where you go, no matter what the faith is called, if you have
the hearing ear, if your heart is in unison with the heart of the world,
you will hear always the same song. Far down below the noises of the
warring creeds, the clash of words and forms, the differences of
peoples, of climes, of civilisations, of ideals, far down below all this
lies that which you would hear. I know not what you would call it. Maybe
it is the Voice of God telling us for ever the secret of the world, but
in unknown tongue. For me it is like the unceasing surge of a shoreless
sea answering to the night, a melody beyond words.
The creeds and faiths are the words that men have set to that melody;
they are the interpretations of that wordless song. Each is true to him
whom it suits. Every nation has translated it into his own tongue. But
never forget that those are only your own interpretations. Whatever your
faith may be, you have no monopoly of religion. I confess that to me
there is nothing so repellent as the hate of faith for faith. To hear
their professors malign and abuse each other, as if each had the
monopoly of truth, is terrible. It is as a strife in families where
brother is killing brother, and the younger trying to disinherit the
elder. I doubt if in all this warfare they can listen for the voice that
is for ever telling the secret of the world. Whence came all the faiths
but from that inexplicable feeling of the heart, that surge and swell
arising we know not whence? If you would malign another's faith remember
your own. If you cannot understand his belief stop and consider. Can you
understand your own? Do you know whence came these emotions that have
risen and made your faith?
The faiths are all brothers, all born of the same mystery. There are
older and younger, stronger and weaker, some babble in strange tongues
maybe, different from your finer speech. But what of that? Are they the
less children of the Great Father for that? Surely if there be the
unforgivable offence, the sin against the Holy Ghost, it is this, to
deny the truth that lies in all the faiths.
* * * * *
Religion is the music of the infinite echoed from the hearts of men.
THE END.