Human Traits and their Social Significance Part 25

[Footnote 1: Job, chap. XXI.]

In contrast, in the religious experience man feels himself to be a part of a world scheme in which justice and righteousness are a.s.sured by an incontestable and invulnerable power; "G.o.d's in his Heaven; all's right with the world." Despite the grounds he has for doubt, Job robustly avers: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." Calamities are but temporary; G.o.d will bring all things to a beautiful fruition.

Or a man may feel that the evils he or others experience here are not real evils, that, seen _sub specie oeternitatis_, they would cease to be regarded as such. He may feel that G.o.d moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform, that "somehow good may come of ill." He may feel, as does the Christian believer, that all the evils and pains unjustly experienced in this world will be adjusted in the next. Whatever be my privations from earthly good, "in my Father's house are many mansions." Immortality is, indeed, the religious man's faith in a second chance. The surety of a world to come, in which the blessed shall live in eternal bliss, is a compensation and a redress for the ills and frustrations of life in this world. Whatever be the seeming ills or injustices of life, there is eventual retribution, both to the just and the unjust.

Once more to quote Emerson:

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later a.s.sumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances, and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener, is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighbourhoods of men.[1]

[Footnote 1: Emerson: _Essay on Compensation_.]

On a larger scale, from the cosmic rather than from the personal point of view, an individual, gifted with a large and charitable interest in the future of mankind, is secured and sustained by the feeling that he is a part of that procession headed to the "one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves." The lugubrious picture of an utterly meaningless world, blind, purposeless, and heartless, which materialistic science reveals, is sufficient to wreck the equanimity of a sensitive and thoughtful mind.

That is the sting of it, that in the vast drifting of the cosmic weather, though many a jewelled sh.o.r.e appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved--even as our world now lingers for our joy--yet when these transient products are gone, nothing, absolutely _nothing_ remains. Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being.

Without an echo, without a memory; without an influence on aught that may come after, to make it care for similar ideals. This utter wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism, as at present understood.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Pragmatism_, p. 105.]

A belief that a divine power governs the universe, that all these miscellaneous and inexplicable happenings will be gathered up into a smooth and ultimate perfection, gives faith, comfort, and solace. We are on the side of the angels, or rather the angels are on our side. Human pa.s.sion, purpose, and endeavor are not wasted. They are small but not altogether negligible contributions to eventual cosmic good. And good is eventual. Perfection may be long delayed, but G.o.d's presence a.s.sures it. "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."

A world with a G.o.d in it to say the last word may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of Him as still mindful of the old ideals, and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that where He is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things.[2]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 106.]

Amid tragic errors and pitiful disillusions, men have yearned for "a benediction perfect and complete where they might cease to suffer and desire." This perfection religion has, as we have seen, accorded them in various ways. Some have found it in the immediate vision, the ecstatic union with the divine that, in intense degree, is peculiarly the mystic's. Some have found it in the a.s.sured belief that evil is itself an illusion, and, if rightly conceived, a beautiful dark shadow to set off by contrast the high lights of a divinely ordered cosmos, a minor note giving lyric and lovely poignancy to the celestial music. Some have rested their faith in a perfect world not here, but hereafter, "where the blessed would enter eternal bliss with G.o.d their master." Thus man has in religion found the fulfillment of his ideals, which always outrun the actualities amid which he lives. In the religious experience, in all of its forms throughout the ages, man has had the experience of perfection at first hand, in the immediate and rich intensity of the mystic ecstasy, in the serene faith of a lifelong intuition or of a reasoned belief in the ultimate divinely a.s.sured rightness of things.

Besides experiencing perfection, man has, in the sense of security and trust afforded by the religious experience, found release from the fret, the fever, the compulsion, and constriction under which so much of life must be lived. Whatever happens, the truly devout man has no fears or qualms. He has attained equanimity; the Lord is his shepherd; he shall not want. There is a serenity experienced by the genuinely faithful that the faithless may well envy. G.o.d is the believer's eternal watcher; a wise and merciful Providence, his infinite guarantee.

Whoever not only says but feels, "G.o.d's will be done" is mailed against every weakness; and the whole historic array of martyrs, missionaries and religious reformers is there to prove the tranquil-mindedness, under naturally agitating or distressing circ.u.mstances, which self-surrender brings.[1]

[Footnote 1: James; _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 285.]

But peace is attained not only through faith in the fulfillment of desire, but in a marked lessening in the tension of desire itself, in a large and s.p.a.cious freedom attained through release from the confinement of self. We saw in the chapter on the Consciousness of Self how much exertion and energy may be devoted to the enhancement of Self through fame, achievement, social distinction, power, or possession. We saw how, in the frustration of self, the germ of great tragedy lay. From the tragedy and bitterness of such frustration men have often been rea.s.sured by a genuine conversion to the religious life. Through the negation of self rather than through its fulfillment men have found solace and rest. And this negation, when it takes religious form, has consisted in a rapturous submission to the will of G.o.d.

"Outside, the world is wild and pa.s.sionate.

Man's weary laughter and his sick despair Entreat at their impenetrable gate, They heed no voices in their dream of prayer.

"Calm, sad, secure, with faces worn and mild, Surely their choice of vigil is the best.

Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild; But there beside the altar there is rest."[1]

[Footnote 1: Ernest Dawson: _Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration._]

EXPERIENCES WHICH FREQUENTLY FIND RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION.

The religious experience, as pointed out in the beginning of this discussion, has its roots in the same impulses which cause men to love and to hate, to be jubilant and sorrowful, exalted and depressed. All these human experiences sometimes take a religious form, that is, their expressions have some reference to the supernatural and the divine. We find, in surveying the history of religion, that certain experiences more than others tend to find religious expression. We shall examine a few of the chief of these.

NEED AND IMPOTENCE. An awed, almost frightened sense of dependence overcomes even the most robust and healthy-minded man when he sees the forces of Nature suddenly unloosed on a magnificent scale. A terrific peal of thunder, an earthquake or a cyclone will send thrills of terror through the normally calm and self-sufficient. Even apart from such vivid and terrifying examples of the range and scale of non-human power, there comes to the reflective a sense of the frailty of human life, of the utter dependability of all human purposes and plans on conditions beyond human control. In our most fundamental industry, agriculture, an untimely frost can undo the work of the most ingenious industry and thrift.

A tornado or a snowstorm can disorganize the cunning and subtle, swift mechanisms of communication which men have invented. In the field of humanly built-up relations, again, a fortune or a friendship may depend on some chance meeting; a man's profession and ideals are fixed by a single fortuitous conversation, by a chance encouragement, opportunity or frustration.

There is thus a psychological though perhaps not literal truth in the figure of Fate, or in the metaphor that speaks of human destiny as lying on the knees of the G.o.ds. Action so often wanders from intent, so much in the best-laid plans is at the mercy of external circ.u.mstance! A creature whose being can be snuffed out in a moment, whose life is less than an instant in the magnificent perspective of eternity, comes not unnaturally to be aware of his own insignificance as compared with those vast forces, some auspicious and some terrible, which are patently afoot in the world.

But as patent a fact as man's impotence is his desire. The individual realizes how powerless is a human being to fulfill, independently of external forces, those impulses with which these same inexplicable forces have launched him into the world. Thus do we feel even to-day when we have learned that the forces of Nature, obdurate to the ignorant, yet become flexible and fruitful under the knowing manipulation of science. We realize that despite our cunning and contrivance, our successes are, as it were, largely matters of grace; the changes we can make in Nature are as nothing to the slow, gradual processes by which Nature makes mountains into molehills, builds and destroys continents, develops man out of the lower animals, and, by varying climates and topographies, affects the destinies of nations.

To primitive man the sense of impotence and need were not derived from any general reflections upon the insecurity of man's place in the cosmos, but rather from the sharp pressure of practical necessity.

The helplessness of primitive man set down in the midst of a universe of which he knew not the laws, may perhaps be brought home to the mind of modern man, if we compare the universe to a vast workshop full of the most various and highly-complicated machinery working at full speed. The machinery, if properly handled, is capable of producing everything that the heart of primitive man can wish for, but also, if he sets hand to the wrong part of the machinery, is capable of whirling him off between its wheels, and crushing and killing him in its inexorable and ruthless movement. Further, primitive man cannot decline to submit himself to the perilous test: he must make his experiments or perish, and even so his survival is conditional on his selecting the right part of the machine to handle.

Nor can he take his own time and study the dangerous mechanism long and carefully before setting his hand to it: his needs are pressing and his action must be immediate.[1]

[Footnote 1: Jevons: _An Introduction to the History of Religion_, p. 17.]

The very food of primitive man was to him as precarious as it was essential. His life was practically at the mercy of wind and rain and sun. His food and shelter were desperately lucky chances. Not having attained as yet to a conception of the impersonality of Nature, he regarded these forces which helped and hindered him as friendly and alien powers which it was in the imperative interests of his own welfare to placate and propitiate. It was in this urgent sense of helplessness and need that there were developed the two outstanding modes of communication with the supernatural, _sacrifice_ and _prayer_.

Primitive man conceived his universe to be governed by essentially human powers; powers, of course, on a grand scale, but human none the less, with the same weaknesses, moods, and humors as human beings themselves. They could be flattered and cajoled; they could be bribed and paid; they could be moved to tenderness, generosity, and pity. "Holiness,"

says Socrates in one of Plato's dialogues, "is an art in which G.o.ds and men do business with each other, ... Sacrifice is giving to the G.o.ds, prayer is asking of them."[2] In Frazer's _Golden Bough_ one finds the remarkably diverse sacrificial rites by which men have sought to win the favor of the divine. Primitive man believed literally that the universe was governed by superhuman personal powers; he believed literally that these are human in their motives. He believed in consequence that sacrifices to the G.o.ds would help him to control the controlling powers of Nature for his own good, just as modern man believes that an application of the laws of electricity and mechanics will help him to control the natural world for his own purposes. The sacrifices of primitive man were immensely practical in character; they were made at the crucial moments and pivotal crises of life, at sowing and at harvest time, at the initiation of the young into the responsibilities of maturity, at times of pestilence, famine, or danger.

The G.o.ds were given the choice part of a meal; the prize calf; in some cases, human sacrifices; the sacrifice, moreover, of the beautiful and best. The chief sacrificial rites of almost all primitive peoples are connected with food, the sustainer, and procreation or birth, the perpetuator, of life.

[Footnote 2: See Plato's _Euthyphro_.]

As Jane Harrison puts it:

If man the individual is to live, he must have food; if his race is to persist, he must have children. To live and to cause to live, to eat food and beget children, these were the primary wants of man in the past, and they will be the primary wants of man in the future, so long as the world lasts. Other things may be added to enrich and beautify life, but unless these wants are first satisfied, humanity itself must cease to exist. These two things, therefore, were what men chiefly sought to procure by the performance of magical rites for the regulation of the seasons.... What he realizes first and foremost is that at certain times the animals, and still more the plants, which form his food, appear, at certain others they disappear. It is these times that become the central points, the focusses of his interest, and the dates of his religious festivals.[1]

[Footnote 1: Jane Harrison: _Ancient Art and Ritual_, p. 31.]

Sacrifice is only one way primitive man contrives of winning the favor of the G.o.ds toward the satisfaction of his desires.

Another common method is prayer. In its crudest form prayer is a direct pet.i.tion from the individual to divinity for the grant of a specific favor. The individual seeks a kindness from a supernatural power whose motives are human, and who may, therefore, be moved by human appeals; whose power is superhuman and can therefore fulfill requests.

Prayer may become profoundly spiritualized, but in its primitive form it is, like sacrifice, a certain way of getting things done. They are both to primitive man largely what our science is to us.

Both prayer and sacrifice arise in primitive man's need and helplessness and terror before mysterious supernatural powers, but they may rise, in the higher form of religion, to genuine n.o.bility, from this cra.s.s commerce with divinity, this religion of bargaining and _quid pro quo_. Sacrifice may change from a desperate reluctant offering made to please a jealous G.o.d, to a thanksgiving and a jubilation, an overflowing of happiness, grat.i.tude, and good-will.

Greek writers of the fifth century B.C. have a way of speaking of an att.i.tude toward religion, as though it were wholly a thing of joy and confidence, a friendly fellowship with the G.o.ds, whose service is but a high festival for man. In Homer, sacrifice is but, as it were, the signal for a banquet of abundant roast flesh and sweet wine; we hear nothing of fasting, cleansing, and atonement. This we might explain as part of the general splendid unreality of the Greek saga, but sober historians of the fifth century B.C. express the same spirit.

Thucydides is by nature no reveller, yet religion is to him, in the main, a rest from toil. He makes Pericles say of the Athenians: Moreover we have provided for our spirit very many opportunities of recreation, by the celebration of games and sacrifices throughout the year.[1]

[Footnote 1: Jane Harrison: _Prolegomena to Greek Religion_, p. 1.]

Sacrifice may become spiritualized, as it is in Christianity, "instead of he-goats and she-goats, there are subst.i.tuted offerings of the heart for all these vain oblations." The sacrificial heart has at all times been accounted germane to n.o.bility.

There is something akin to religion in the laying down of a life for a cause or a country or a friend, in surrendering one's self for others. It is this power and beauty of renunciation that is the spiritual value behind all the rituals of sacrifice that still persist, as in the sacraments of Christianity. It is the tragic necessity of self-negation that haloes, even in secular life, the sacrificial att.i.tude:

But there is in resignation a further good element. Even real goods when they are attainable ought not to be fretfully desired.

To every man comes sooner or later the great renunciation. For the young there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a pa.s.sionate will, and yet unattainable, is to them not credible. Yet by death, by illness, by poverty, or, by the voice of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave, Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission to power is not only just and right; it is the very gate of wisdom.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Philosophical Essays_, p. 65.]

The spiritual meaning and value of sacrifice is thus seen to lie in self-surrender. The human being, born into a world where choices must be made, must make continual abnegation.

And when the temporary good is surrendered in the maintenance of an ideal, sacrifice becomes genuinely spiritual in character.

Prayer, also, becomes genuinely spiritual in its values when one ceases to believe in its practical efficacy and comes to think it shameful to traffic with the divine. Prayer beautifully ill.u.s.trates a point previously noted, how speech oscillates between the expression of feeling and the conveyance of ideas.

Beginning in primitive religion as a crude and cheap pet.i.tion for favors, it becomes in more spiritual religious experience, a lyric cry of emotion, a tranquil and serene expression of the soul's desire. Prayer is, moreover, "religion in act." That deep sense of an awed relationship to divine power which was, in the beginning of this discussion, noted as const.i.tuting certainly one of the outstanding characteristics of the religious experience, finds its most adequate emotional expression in prayer.

Religion is nothing [writes Auguste Sabatier] if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws life. This act is prayer, by which I understand no vain exercise of words, no mere repet.i.tion of certain sacred formulas, but the very movement itself of the soul, putting itself in a personal relation of contact with the mysterious power of which it feels the presence--it may be even before it has a name by which to call it. Wherever this interior prayer is lacking, there is no religion; wherever, on the other hand, this prayer rises and stirs the soul, even in the absence of forms or doctrines, we have religion.[1]