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CHAPTER I

A Hot Impossible Religion

LL thoughtful men amongst those who are neither on the one hand bound to existing ecclesiastical systems, nor, on the other, estranged from spiritual emotions, admit that a reconstruction of religious beliefs and ideas is a vital necessity of our time. Many of the orthodox Christian dogmas are dead beyond resuscitation; they have had their day. The age has learned much that preceding ages knew not, and with the fuller knowledge has come a natural and inevitable decay of the imperfect learning of the past. Even those who hold to the older forms of belief and subscribe to the ancient creeds do so either avowing a new definition of the old terms or else interpreting them unconsciously or implicitly in ways that change their whole intent. The orthodoxy of to-day differs thus widely from the orthodoxy of the eighteenth century, or of the thirteenth or of the sixth. inexorable laws of change and growth forbid stagnation of men's thoughts concerning the things that are eternal and invisible. It is not that men believe less they believe more. But their beliefs are centering less around tradition and more around ascertained knowledge; the quality of belief has

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changed rather than its quantity. The traditional drops away, scaring the timid-souled or the emptysouled, causing them to think that this natural and inevitable growth is a decay of faith. It is rather its uprising in the commencement of a new order. To the stagnant all development seems like destruction. But in all this movement forward it is inevitable that there should be some unlovely features. Impatient minds are keen to drop the old before they have learned the new; and slowly-moving spirits are apt to see in the new nothing but spiritual loss. There are also ever at work, both amongst the old and the new, tendencies to degenerate; degenerate; so that neither the old nor the new is altogether healthy. In no department of human life is progress more difficult or more open to misunderstanding than in religion. Of religious ideas, on whatever founded, the mind of man is particularly tenacious, associated as they almost always are with the things that touch the deepest parts of his nature, the joys, the sorrows, the struggles, that have been his from the cradle onward. Many continue by force of sacred associations to hold, as they themselves would freely admit, the religious ideas which they received in their childhood long after the time when any real basis for them has passed out of their lives, or when it has been perceived to be no basis at all. They cling all the more tenaciously to a dogma because they are dimly conscious that it is merely a dogma, not an eternal truth of demonstrable power. For they see as yet nothing that for them can take the place of that which is threatened. Fearing to lose all, they will part with none of their early beliefs. So they grow encrusted in an environment of dead tradition, and

mistrust all freedom of soul. By reaction against the stubbornness of this conservatism there arise others for whom the old has no such sacredness, and who, feeling the dead weight thus opposing them, strike out, regardless whom their activity may wound. Estrangement between souls equally sincere in their way becomes thus inevitable; and the bitterness of language, as well as of act, which follows on estrangement only widens the breach.

Three sections may be to-day distinguished amongst the multitudes. One is made up of those who adhere to old forms of faith, and who though divided up into many sects with conflicting doctrines, still find their religion serve as a more or less efficient rule of life and conduct, and think, speak and act as though their particular creed were indeed the sole true rule.

A second section has thrown off all semblance of religious belief, and so far as it holds any views at all on human conduct bases them purely upon ethical and sociological considerations, which it appears to regard as the only rational bases for motive. The large majority of educated and scientific men on the Continent belong to this section.

A third section comprises all the careless and worldly minded who, whether they profess any belief or none, act as though no religion were obligatory on themselves or any one else, and for whom the getting on in this world looms larger than spiritual or ethical considerations of any kind. For brevity we may call these three sections the religionists, the non-religionists, and the indifferent.

Besides these three groups, belonging to none, but inclining more or less to one or other, there

remains however a fourth group, composed of those who, without any reflection upon the others, and purely by way of a convenient denomination, may be called the merely earnest-minded. These are the seekers after truth, who by force of character and conviction cannot be indifferent; who realise that the religious instinct in mankind is not to be ignored or set aside; who perceive that somehow the ethical and sociological propositions of the nonreligionist do not furnish adequate motives for right conduct; who recognise that chemistry, mechanics, history, and logic do not constitute everything in the world, that spiritual forces are phenomena to be reckoned with; who, in fact, are, without perhaps knowing or admitting it, of a deeply religious cast of mind. Yet they revolt instinctively from the claims made by professed religionists; they refuse to stake their spiritual, moral and intellectual welfare upon the acceptance of that which appears to them a mass of folk-lore and tradition, however sublime and elevated the ethical and spiritual influences bound up with it. While they admit that Christianity has done much for the world, and freely acknowledge the intense spiritual elevation and nobility of soul of the great Christian leaders of all ages, they are repelled by the narrowness of its creeds, the artificiality of its observances, the puerility of its rituals, the materialism of its views on spiritual truth, the insincerities of its professors and-shall we say it— the hypocrisies of its professional exponents. They see wealthy princes of the Church professing to represent on earth the lonely and self-denying Son of man. They see lip-service instead of right living accepted as test of membership. They see fantastic