Religion is not a plant that has grown from one seed; it is like a lake
that has been fed by countless springs. It is a great pool of living
water, mingled from many sources and tainted with much impurity. It is
synthetic in its nature; it becomes simpler from original complexities;
the sediment subsides.
A life perfectly adjusted to its surroundings is a life without
mentality; no judgment is called for, no inhibition, no disturbance
of the instinctive flow of perfect reactions. Such a life is bliss, or
nirvana. It is unconsciousness below dreaming. Consciousness is discord
evoking the will to adjust; it is inseparable from need. At every need
consciousness breaks into being. Imperfect adjustments, needs, are the
rents and tatters in the smooth dark veil of being through which the
light of consciousness shines--the light of consciousness and will of
which God is the sun.
So that every need of human life, every disappointment and
dissatisfaction and call for help and effort, is a means whereby men may
and do come to the realisation of God.
There is no cardinal need, there is no sort of experience in human life
from which there does not come or has not come a contribution to men’s
religious ideas. At every challenge men have to put forth effort, feel
doubt of adequacy, be thwarted, perceive the chill shadow of their
mortality. At every challenge comes the possibility of help from
without, the idea of eluding frustration, the aspiration towards
immortality. It is possible to classify the appeals men make for God
under the headings of their chief system of effort, their efforts to
understand, their fear and their struggles for safety and happiness, the
craving of their restlessness for peace, their angers against
disorder and their desire for the avenger; their sexual passions and
perplexities. . . .
Each of these great systems of needs and efforts brings its own sort
of sediment into religion. Each, that is to say, has its own kind
of heresy, its distinctive misapprehension of God. It is only in the
synthesis and mutual correction of many divergent ideas that the idea of
God grows clear. The effort to understand completely, for example,
leads to the endless Heresies of Theory. Men trip over the inherent
infirmities of the human mind. But in these days one does not argue
greatly about dogma. Almost every conceivable error about unity, about
personality, about time and quantity and genus and species, about
begetting and beginning and limitation and similarity and every kink
in the difficult mind of man, has been thrust forward in some form of
dogma. Beside the errors of thought are the errors of emotion. Fear and
feebleness go straight to the Heresies that God is Magic or that God
is Providence; restless egotism at leisure and unchallenged by urgent
elementary realities breeds the Heresies of Mysticism, anger and hate
call for God’s Judgments, and the stormy emotions of sex gave mankind
the Phallic God. Those who find themselves possessed by the new spirit
in religion, realise very speedily the necessity of clearing the mind
of all these exaggerations, transferences, and overflows of feeling. The
search for divine truth is like gold washing; nothing is of any value
until most has been swept away.