Modern Religious Cults and Movements Part 19

The Foundation of all religions is one.

Religion must be the cause of unity.

Religion must be in accord with science and reason.

Equality between men and women.

Prejudice of all kinds must be forgotten.

Universal Peace.

Universal Education.

Solution of the economic problem.

An international auxiliary language.

An international tribunal.

A program inclusive enough for any generous age. These principles are substantiated by quotations from the writings of Abdul-Baha and the teachings of Baha'u'llah. Many things combine to lend force to its appeal--the courage of its martyrs, its s.p.a.ciousness and yet at the same time the attractiveness of its appeal and its suggestion of spiritual brotherhood. Since the movement has borne a kind of messianic expectation it adjusts itself easily to inherited Christian hopes. There are real correspondences between its expected millennium and the Christian millennium.

How far its leaders, in their pa.s.sion for peace and their doctrine of non-resistance and their exaltation of the life of the spirit, are in debt to the suggestions of Christianity itself, or how far it is a new expression of a temper with which the Orient has always been more in sympathy than the West, it would be difficult to say, but in some ways Bahaism does express--or perhaps reproduces--the essential spirit of the Gospels more faithfully than a good deal of Western Christianity as now organized. Those members of Christian communions which are attracted to Bahaism find in it a real hospitality to the inherited faith they take over. It is possible, therefore, to belong to the cult and at the same time to continue one's established religious life without any very great violence and indeed with a possible intensification of that life.

It is difficult, therefore, to distinguish between Bahaism as it is held by devout groups in America, so far as ethics and ideals go, from much that is distinctive in the Christian spirit, though the influence of Bahaism as a whole would be to efface distinctions and especially to take the force out of the Christian creeds.

Chicago, or rather Wilmette, is now the center of the movement in America and an ambitious temple is in the way of being constructed there, the suggestion for whose architecture is taken from a temple in Eskabad, Russia. This is to be a temple of universal religion, symbolizing in its architecture the unities of faith and humanity. "The temple with its nine doors will be set in the center of a circular garden symbolizing the all-inclusive circle of G.o.d's unity; nine pathways will lead to the nine doors and each one coming down the pathway of his own sect or religion or trend of thought will leave at the door the dogmas that separate and, under the dome of G.o.d's oneness, all will become one.... At night it will be brilliantly lighted and the light will shine forth through the tracery of the dome, a beacon of peace and unity rising high above Lake Michigan."

This study has led us into many curious regions and shown to what unexpected conclusions the forces of faith or hope, once released, may come, but surely it has revealed nothing more curious than that the old, old controversy as to the true successor of Mohammed the prophet should at last have issued in a universal religion and set the faithful to building a temple of unity on the sh.o.r.es of Lake Michigan.

If this work were to be complete it should include some investigation of the rituals of the cults. They are gradually creating hymns of their own; their public orders of service include responsive readings with meditations on the immanence of G.o.d, the supremacy of the spiritual and related themes. In general they dispense with the sacraments; they have no ecclesiastical orders and hardly anything corresponding to the Catholic priesthood or the Protestant ministry, though the Christian Science reader has a recognized official place. They meet in conferences; they depend largely upon addresses by their leaders.

Spiritualistic movements organize themselves around seances. They use such halls as may be rented, hotels, their own homes; they have not generally buildings of their own save the Christian Science temples which are distinctive for dignity of architecture and beauty of appointment in almost every large city.

_General Conclusions; the Limitations of the Writer's Method_

It remains only to sum up in a most general way the conclusions to which this study may lead. There has been a process of criticism and appraisal throughout the whole book, but there should be room at the end for some general statements.

The writer recognizes the limitations of his method; he has studied faithfully the literature of the cults, but any religion is always a vast deal more than its literature. The history of the cults does not fully tell their story nor does any mere observation of their worship admit the observer to the inner religious life of the worshippers. Life always subdues its materials to its own ends, reproduces them in terms of its own realities; there are endless individual variations, but the outcome is ma.s.sively uniform. Religion does the same thing. Its materials are faiths and obediences and persuasions of truth and expectations of happier states, but its ultimate creations are character and experience, and the results in life of widely different religions are unexpectedly similar. Both theoretically and practically the truer understanding or the finer faith and, particularly, the higher ethical standards should produce the richer life and this is actually so. But real goodness is everywhere much the same; there are calendared saints for every faith.

There is an abundant testimony in the literature of the cults to rare goodnesses and abundant devotion, and observation confirms these testimonies. Something of this is doubtless due to their environment.

The Western cults themselves and the Eastern cults in the West are contained in and influenced by the whole outcome of historic Christianity and they naturally share its spirit. If the churches need to remember this as they appraise the cults, the cults need also to remember it as they appraise the churches. Mult.i.tudes of Catholics and Protestants secure from a religion which the cults think themselves either to have corrected or outgrown exactly what the cults secure--and more. Such as these trust G.o.d, keep well, go happily about their businesses and prove their faith in gracious lives. There is room for mutual respect and a working measure of give and take on both sides.

The writer is inclined to think the churches at present are more teachable than the more recent religious movements. For a long generation now the churches have been subject to searching criticism from almost every quarter. The scientist, the sociologist, the philosopher, the publicist, the discontented with things as they are and the protagonist of things as they ought to be, have all taken their turn and the Church generally, with some natural protest against being made the scapegoat for the sins of a society arrestingly reluctant to make the Church's gospel the law of its life, has taken account of its own shortcomings and sought to correct them. The cults are as yet less inclined to test themselves by that against which they have reacted. But this is beside the point. The movements we have been studying can only be fairly appraised as one follows through their outcome in life and that either in detail or entirety is impossible. But it is possible to gain from their literature a reasonable understanding of their principles and interrelations and this the writer has sought to do.

_The Cults Are Aspects of the Creative Religious Consciousness of the Age_

Certain conclusions are thus made evident. These movements are the creation of the religious consciousness of the time. They are aspects of the present tense of religion. Since religion is, among other things, the effective desire to enter into right relationships with the power which manifests itself in the universe there are two variants in its content; first, our changing understanding of the power itself and second, our changing uses of it. The first varies with our knowledge and insight, the second with our own changing sense of personal need. Though G.o.d be the same yesterday, to-day and forever, our understandings of Him cannot and ought not to be the same yesterday, to-day and forever. Our faith is modified by, for example, our scientific discoveries. When the firmament of Hebrew cosmogony has given way to interstellar s.p.a.ces and the telescope and the spectroscope plumb the depths of the universe, resolving nebulae into star drifts, faith is bound to reflect the change.

The power which manifests itself in the universe becomes thereby a vaster power, operating through a vaster sweep of law. Our changed understandings of ourselves must be reflected in our faith and our ethical insights as well. And because there is and ought to be no end to these changing understandings, religion itself, which is one outcome of them, must be plastic and changing.

What we ask of G.o.d is equally subject to change. True enough, the old questions--Whence? Whither? and Why? are constant. As we know ourselves to be living in a world which is less than a speck in an immensity wherein the birth and death of suns are ephemeral, we may rightly distrust our own value for the vaster order. We shall, therefore, the more insistently ask Whence? and Whither? and Why? But, none the less, there is always a shifting emphasis of religious need. Our own time is manifestly more concerned about well-being in the life that now is than a happy issue in the life which is to come. Temperament also qualifies experience. The mystic seeks conscious communion with G.o.d as an end in itself; the practical temper asks the demonstration of the love of G.o.d in happy material conditions. In general, action and reaction govern this whole region. The Puritan was supremely concerned about his own salvation and the struggle consequent thereto; his descendants were chiefly interested in the extension of knowledge and the conquest of the physical order and we react against this in a new return upon ourselves and the possibilities of personality.

Now these changing understandings of the power which manifests itself in the universe on the one side and our own changing senses of need on the other, give to religion a constantly fluctuating character and what is most distinctively religious in any period must be the outcome of the combination of these two variants. What an age asks of the G.o.d whom it knows colours the whole of its religious life. These cults and movements do not wholly represent the creative religious consciousness of our time, of course; a great deal of that same creative religious consciousness has given new quality to the organizations and orthodoxies of the churches. But within the frontiers of historic Christianity it has been rather the working over of the deposit of faith than an actual adventure in the making of religion. The cults and movements have not been thus limited. They have challenged old understandings, broken away from the older organizations and taken their own line, using such material as seems proper for their purpose.

They are not wholly independent of the past; some of them have taken the immemorial speculations of the East for their point of departure though introducing therein a good many of the permissions or conclusions of modern science and something of the spirit of Christianity itself. Those taking their departure from Christianity have claimed rather to reinterpret and modernize it than to supplant it by their own creations.

Yet when all this is recognized these cults and movements are particularly the creation of our own time. So accepted, they reveal strongly the persistence of religion. All these conjectures and confidences and reachings through the shadows are just a testimony that few are content to go on without some form of religion or other.

All religion has, in one phase or another, gone through much the same process. There has been for every religion a time when it took new form out of older elements, a time when the accepted religions had little enough sympathy for and understanding of what was taking place about them while those committed to new quests were exultant in the consciousness of spiritual adventure and discovery and heard the morning stars sing together for joy. What is thus begun must submit always to the testimony of time. In the end a religion is permanent as it meets the great human needs and adjusts itself to their changing phases. It is imperial and universal as it meets these needs supremely. If in addition it be capable of organization, if there be within it room for expansion, and if, on the whole, it justifies itself by the outcome of it in life and society it will persist, and if it persists through a long period of time and creates for itself literatures, dogmas and authorities, it becomes as nearly fundamental as anything can be in this world. It creates cultures, shapes civilizations, colours art, establishes ideals and fills the whole horizon of its devotees.

If a religion is to endure it must meet a wide range of need; it must be plastic and yet invest itself with the sanctions of History. For the conservative it must possess the note of authority and at the same time promise freedom to the liberal. It must persuade the forward-looking that it holds within itself the power to meet changing conditions. It must offer a satisfying experience to the mystic and the practically minded and deliverance to the despairing. It must be able to build into its structure new sciences and philosophies and yet it must touch the whole of life with some sense of the timeless, and above all, it must include the whole of life, nor depend upon particularized appeals or pa.s.sing phases of thought. Historic Christianity has more nearly met all these tests than any other religion, for though under the stress of meeting so great a variety of needs and conditions it has organized itself into forms as different as Latin Catholicism and the Society of the Friends, so losing catholicity of organization, it has secured instead a catholicity of spirit and a vast elasticity of appeal which are the secret of its power and the a.s.surance of its continuing and enduring supremacy.

_Their Parallels in the Past_

Now by such tests as these what future may one antic.i.p.ate for such cults as we have been studying? Are they likely to displace the historic forms of Christianity, will they substantially modify it, or will they wear away and be reabsorbed? Evidently one of these three things must happen.

This is not the first time in the Western world that historic and authoritative Christianity has been challenged. We should have, perhaps, to go back to the fourth century to find an exact parallel and then we should find in the vast and confused movement of Gnosticism an unexpected parallel to a great deal of what is happening about us.

Gnosticism was the effort of a reason excessively given to speculation, undisciplined and greatly unrestrained by any sense of reality to possess and transform the Church. Various forces combined to build its fabric of air-born speculation and though for the time it gave the patristic Church the hardest fight of its existence, the discipline of the Church was too strong for it. Its own weaknesses proved eventually its undoing and Gnosticism remains only as a fascinating field of study for the specialist, only a name if even so much as that for the generality of us and valuable chiefly in showing what speculation may do when permitted at will to range earth and sky, with a spurious rationalism for pilot and imagination for wings.

There have been, beside, in the history of the Church many other movements possessing a great staying power and running in some cases for generations alongside the main current of religious development, until they finally disappeared with the changing centuries. Arguing from such historical precedents as these one might easily a.s.sume a like fate for the Gnosticism of our own time, and yet a note of caution is needed here for there are divisive religious movements which have as yet neither failed nor been absorbed in that from which they took their departure.

The expectation of the Catholic Church that Protestantism will spend its force and be lost again in the majestic fabric of Latin Catholic Christianity as it is continued amongst us, is as far from realization to-day, or farther, than at any time in the last 300 years. We need to remember also that conditions change. The right of individual initiative and judgment once secured in the region of religion is not likely ever to be lost. A good many divergent movements have literally been whipped back into line or else put out in fire and blood. Nothing of that sort is likely to happen now.

No student of history should be blind to the sequence of action and reaction. A period of excessive dependence upon authority may follow a period of undue self-a.s.sertion, but it is not likely that we shall ever find recreated exactly the conditions of the past or that religion can hereafter be held, as it has heretofore, in relatively well marked channels under the stress of accepted authorities. Prophecy is hazardous business but it is safe to a.s.sume that these modern religious cults and movements represent the beginnings of a freer, more diffused, less formal religious faith. The peculiar cults themselves may reach their term but the temper which produced them is likely to continue and with other groupings of forces produce something in the future which will at least be their parallel.

_The Healing Cults Likely to be Adversely Influenced by the Scientific Organisation of Psycho-therapy_

As far as the fortunes of the distinctive cults themselves go, one's conclusions may be less tentative. For the most part the foundations upon which they are built are not big enough to carry an ample and secure structure. They have been made possible not only by marked limitations in historic religion itself, but also by contemporaneous tempers which, one may sincerely hope, are self-limiting, and this is said not through undue prejudice against the cults themselves, but simply because one is loath to believe that the want of critical faculty which has made some of these cults possible will not in the end yield to experience and a really sounder education. Since, moreover, some of them--and Christian Science, preeminently--depend upon faith and mental healing, whatever helps us to a clearer understanding of the nature and limits of psycho-therapy will greatly affect their future.

All faith healing cults have heretofore depended very greatly upon the atmosphere of mystery with which they have been able to surround themselves. The fact that they have been able to secure results with no very clear understanding of the way in which the results have been secured has invested them with awe and wonder, so essential to every religion.

But as psycho-therapy itself becomes organized, works out its laws, develops its own science and particularly as the knowledge of all this is extended and popularized, they will lose their base of support. For this reason the writer believes that the final explanation of all faith and mental healing in terms of some form of suggestion which is just now strongly in evidence will prove a distinct service to us all.

The intimate a.s.sociation of religion and healing has, on the whole, been good neither for religion nor health. Of course, this statement will probably be sharply challenged but it is maintained in the face of possible challenge. As far as religion goes it has withdrawn the interest of the religious, thus influenced, from the normal expressions of the religious life to border-land regions; it has stressed the exceptional rather than the sweep of law, and the occult rather than the luminously reasonable. Where it has failed in individual cases, as it is bound to fail, it has left those thus disillusioned without any sound basis for their faith and generally has driven them away from religion altogether. It has tempted religious teachers to win a hearing by signs and wonders. Even the Founder of the Christian religion grew weary of this, as the records show plainly enough, in that He saw His true work to be thereby not helped but hindered, and if this be true of the Founder it is by so much the more true of His followers.

On the scientific side this temper has hindered honest thinking, laborious investigation and that specialization which is absolutely necessary to the furtherance of any great division of human effort.

Medicine made little progress until it got itself free of the Church.

Specifically the average minister is neither by training nor temperament fitted for healing work and those laymen who have a.s.sumed that office have generally been wanting in balance and self-restraint. This is not to deny the reality of a power not ourselves making for health and well-being generally, or the power of faith, or the efficacy of prayer.

Least of all is G.o.d, upon this understanding, to be shut out of life.

But the power not ourselves which makes for faith and healing is best known through laborious investigation, the discovery of methods and obediences to ascertained law. When we have clearly come to see the nature of psycho-therapy, the occult authority of healing cults will in the end yield to this understanding and the cults themselves be greatly weakened or displaced.

One must recognize, on the other hand, the staying power of any well-established religious system. Through nurture and those profound conservatisms which hold more tenaciously in the region of religion than anywhere else, it is possible to continue from generation to generation the unreasonable or the positively untrue, and this holds in the Church as well as outside it. None the less, the most coherent systems must reckon with their own weaknesses. Christian Science may have before it a long period of solid going or even marked growth, but its philosophy will at last yield to the vaster sweep of a truer philosophic thought.

Its interpretations of historic Christianity will come up again and again for examination until their fallacies become apparent and its force as a system of psycho-therapy will be modified by simpler and more reasonable applications of the same power.

_New Thought Will Become Old Thought_

New Thought is likely to take a different course but it also will have to reckon with changing sciences and philosophies. What is New Thought to-day will be old thought to-morrow; it will be challenged by new expressions of the spirit which begot it. It will endure, therefore, only as it is open, flexible and possesses a great power of accommodation. But as long as understandings and ideals are fluid, as long as religion is under bonds to take account of all the elements which must be incorporated in it in order to enlarge and continue it, as long, in short, as the human spirit outgrows fixed forms in any region there is likely to be in religion itself something corresponding to the New Thought of to-day, but this will be true only as New Thought is not a cult at all but something larger--a free and creative movement of the human spirit.

Of all these cults it has made the soundest contribution to religion as a whole. It is also more easily a.s.similated, more easily absorbed. Its own distinct field will be limited by the increasing hospitality of Christian thought to contemporaneous truth. A wholly open-minded church will go a long way toward taking from New Thought its raison d'etre. Its future depends, therefore, very largely upon the open-mindedness of the older and more strongly established forms of religion.

The future of Spiritualism is greatly open to conjecture. We have already seen the alternatives which Spiritualism is called upon to face and the uncertainties which attend its conclusions. A fuller understanding of the possibilities of abnormal personality and the reach of automatism are likely to work against Spiritualism. If we find ascertainable causes for its phenomena resident within personality itself there will be no need of calling in the other world in order to explain what is happening in this. On the other hand, if there should evidence an increasing and tested body of facts which can be explained only in terms of spiritistic communications, Spiritualism will naturally make headway. But we are certainly standing only upon the threshold of a scientific interpretation of spiritistic phenomena and until the whole region has been very much more carefully worked through and far more dependable facts are in hand, one can only say that Spiritism is a hypothesis which may or may not be verified, and attend the outcome.

It is hard to believe that Theosophy and kindred speculation will ever get a strong hold upon the practical Western mind. It owes what force it has either to an excessive love of the speculative on the part of a few, or else to that particular temper which always wants something else and something new, or else to wearinesses and misunderstandings of the more shadowed side of life. Theosophy is greatly at the mercy of the positive, practical temper; it will always find a prevailing compet.i.tor in the Christian doctrine of immortality. Whatever, moreover, explains the apparent inequalities of life in more simple and reasonable terms will cut the roots of it. The movement toward religious syncretism of which Bahaism is just now the expression will not be so easy to dispose of. There will always be a temper impatient of the past, eager for unity, anxious for something big and interpenetrating. Historically this temper has from time to time emerged, particularly in the latter phases of Roman paganism, and there is likely to be a larger interchange of religious faith and understanding in the future than there has been in the past.

In general, this desire for a universal religion, simple and wanting in distinctive characters, follows a weakening of conviction, a loss of pa.s.sion for accepted forms. If anything should deepen again amongst us in religion what corresponds just now to the pa.s.sion for nationality these more general religious quests would suffer. A strong feeling for a church or a creed or one's own movement would displace them. They have, on the other hand, in their favour the general tendency of all religion toward simplicity, the reduction of faith, that is, to a few broad and generally shared elements. But there is no reason to antic.i.p.ate a speedy breakdown of what one may call particularist religion and the subst.i.tution therefor of a faith built up out of many diverse elements and held in common by widely separated tempers.

_There is Likely to be Some Absorption of the Cults by a Widening Historic Christianity_