In quite a little while the whole world may be alive with this renascent
faith.
For emancipation from the Trinitarian formularies and from a belief in
an infinite God means not merely a great revivification of minds trained
under the decadence of orthodox Christianity, minds which have hitherto
been hopelessly embarrassed by the choice between pseudo-Christian
religion or denial, but also it opens the way towards the completest
understanding and sympathy and participation with the kindred movements
for release and for an intensification of the religious life, that are
going on outside the sphere of the Christian tradition and influence
altogether. Allusion has already been made to the sympathetic devotional
poetry of Rabindranath Tagore; he stands for a movement in Brahminism
parallel with and assimilable to the worship of the true God of mankind.
It is too often supposed that the religious tendency of the East is
entirely towards other-worldness, to a treatment of this life as an evil
entanglement and of death as a release and a blessing. It is too easily
assumed that Eastern teaching is wholly concerned with renunciation, not
merely of self but of being, with the escape from all effort of any sort
into an exalted vacuity. This is indeed neither the spirit of China nor
of Islam nor of the every-day life of any people in the world. It is not
the spirit of the Sikh nor of these newer developments of Hindu thought.
It has never been the spirit of Japan. To-day less than ever does Asia
seem disposed to give up life and the effort of life. Just as readily as
Europeans, do the Asiatics reach out their arms to that fuller life we
can live, that greater intensity of existence, to which we can attain
by escaping from ourselves. All mankind is seeking God. There is not
a nation nor a city in the globe where men are not being urged at this
moment by the spirit of God in them towards the discovery of God. This
is not an age of despair but an age of hope in Asia as in all the world
besides.
Islam is undergoing a process of revision closely parallel to that
which ransacks Christianity. Tradition and mediaeval doctrines are being
thrust aside in a similar way. There is much probing into the spirit and
intention of the Founder. The time is almost ripe for a heart-searching
Dialogue of the Dead, “How we settled our religions for ever and ever,”
between, let us say, Eusebius of Caesarea and one of Nizam-al-Mulk’s
tame theologians. They would be drawn together by the same tribulations;
they would be in the closest sympathy against the temerity of the
moderns; they would have a common courtliness. The Quran is but little
read by Europeans; it is ignorantly supposed to contain many things that
it does not contain; there is much confusion in people’s minds between
its text and the ancient Semitic traditions and usages retained by its
followers; in places it may seem formless and barbaric; but what it has
chiefly to tell of is the leadership of one individualised militant God
who claims the rule of the whole world, who favours neither rank nor
race, who would lead men to righteousness. It is much more free from
sacramentalism, from vestiges of the ancient blood sacrifice, and its
associated sacerdotalism, than Christianity. The religion that
will presently sway mankind can be reached more easily from that
starting-point than from the confused mysteries of Trinitarian theology.
Islam was never saddled with a creed. With the very name “Islam”
(submission to God) there is no quarrel for those who hold the new
faith. . . .
All the world over there is this stirring in the dry bones of the old
beliefs. There is scarcely a religion that has not its Bahaism, its
Modernists, its Brahmo Somaj, its “religion without theology,” its
attempts to escape from old forms and hampering associations to that
living and world-wide spiritual reality upon which the human mind almost
instinctively insists. . . .
It is the same God we all seek; he becomes more and more plainly the
same God.
So that all this religious stir, which seems so multifold and incidental
and disconnected and confused and entirely ineffective to-day, may
be and most probably will be, in quite a few years a great flood
of religious unanimity pouring over and changing all human affairs,
sweeping away the old priesthoods and tabernacles and symbols and
shrines, the last crumb of the Orphic victim and the last rag of the
Serapeum, and turning all men about into one direction, as the ships and
houseboats swing round together in some great river with the uprush of
the tide. . . .