the manner described is often seen in terrible reactions. If the joys of the ecstatic state are (as is said by some who have experienced them) too great to be described, so also are the miseries of 'dereliction,' and the hallucinations of religious melancholy. Every fanatical 'revival' produces a crop of insanity. The normal development of religion is calm and self-collected, though deep and strong. Religious feeling, if not abused, pricks us with a sense of our imperfection, and forces us to seek, through thought and will, for the cause of our disquiet and for a means of satisfying our need.

The normal history of religious feeling is summed up in the words, Fear, Dependence, Love. Assuredly none of the three is pure feeling'; but I am protesting all through these lectures against separating our faculties in this way. Love is the crown of the soul's victory, and love, though it contains intellectual and moral elements, is primarily an emotion. Christianity has seemed to many to give the last word to the affections or emotions, by its exaltation of love as the only gift that never faileth'; and certainly love is the only virtue which we can imagine as persisting without much change in the eternal world, when faith shall have become sight, hope been turned into satisfaction, and knowledge into contemplation.

Love is implicit in Faith from the first. As aesthetics is a power of recognising beauty practically inseparable from the love of beauty; as ethics is a power of recognising the morally right practically inseparable from the love of right, so the aim of theology is an intellectual recognition of God practically inseparable from the love of God. And so Augustine is right when he says that a man's spiritual state may be best gauged not by what he knows, but by what he loves.1

1 Pascal's 'Human things need only be known in order to be loved, but divine things must first be loved in order to be known,' is valuable, but needs safeguarding, as making the acquisition of divine knowledge too independent of rational thought.

But if Faith thus loses itself at last in Love, Love must not, like mere feeling, be immediate at a level below distinction and relation. The religion of feeling cannot become true till it has passed through the crucible of the will and the intellect. Our problem is to find the intellectual and volitional equivalents of this vague religion of feeling, certainly not to regard it as a third stage, destined to override the intellect.1

In the following lectures I shall try to consider in what manner, and under what limitations, the activities of the will and intellect, brought to bear upon the spontaneous Faith-state, which Professor Baldwin calls 'reality-feeling' as opposed to self-conscious belief, may conduct us towards a unified spiritual experience, in which the contradictions and divisions which analysis brings to light may be partially reconciled. But there is one other principle, besides the intellectual and practical, which is of immense importance. This is the principle of Authority, the effect of which as a secondary ground of Faith, determining its form and content, can hardly be overestimated. Religion is a racial affair, and authority is the principle of continuity, the memory of the race. I think, therefore, that a discussion of authority in relation to Faith should take precedence even of the practical and intellectual grounds of belief.

1 As (e.g.) Pratt does in his Psychology of Religious Belief.

CHAPTER V

AUTHORITY AS A GROUND OF FAITH

To class Authority as a secondary ground of Faith is a proceeding which needs some defence. For it is certain that in individual experience Authority is the earliest ground of belief. We are none of us born with a belief in God; but we are all born with a tendency to believe what we are told. A child can be made to believe almost anything. He does not believe because he wishes to believe, or because the things presented to him for acceptance appear to him to be useful or beautiful or desirable in any way. He is quite as ready to believe in ghosts and hobgoblins as in angels and good fairies. As he began to speak by parrottalk, so he begins to think by accepting facts without criticising them, and assumes that whatever he hears and understands has a place in the world of reality. It is only after sad experience of the deceitfulness of appearances that he unlearns his first confidence, and begins to doubt and question and disbelieve.

This natural tendency to believe what we are told remains with us, though more or less impaired by experience, through life. Some may protest that no one except a young child believes anything merely because he is told, without any thought of the trustworthiness of the authority; but I am convinced that this is a mistake. A great many grown persons will accept almost any statements put before them (not on all subjects, of course, but on some subjects) from pure inertia, because it is easier for them to believe than to disbelieve. Some popular superstitions,

which show such astonishing vitality, must be transmitted and accepted in this lazy fashion. Such notions as that it is unlucky to walk under a ladder, or to be married in May, could not survive a moment's thought about the value of the evidence in their favour. They are simply taken at their face value, with no questions asked.

If pure credulity is an actual cause of belief, even in cases where disproof is possible and easy, we cannot be surprised that it is largely instrumental in forming beliefs about the unseen world, where no contradiction from experience is possible. Among savages, myths about gods and spirits are handed down from father to son, and believed implicitly. They become part of the mental capital of the tribe or nation, and any attempt to damage their credit is visited with great indignation. This is quite natural. When an old master' has been in a family for generations, the owner is not likely to be grateful for being told that it is a sham. Or if he has acquired it himself without asking questions, and has frequently spoken of it as undoubtedly genuine, he will be at least equally unwilling to admit that he has been deceived. As a general rule, we say a thing for the first time because we have heard some one else say it, and stick to it because we have said it ourselves.

It follows that the diffusion and persistence of a belief is not always a presumption in favour of its truth. Many beliefs, which are purely silly and destitute of any foundation, have been kept alive by mere credulity, even in Europe, for thousands of years. When a superstition once establishes itself, it does not become any more respectable by growing old. Its antiquity gives it a sort of prestige which helps to keep it alive, but adds nothing to its weight. For instance, all housemaids everywhere believe that you can make a fire burn by tilting a poker against the bars. I dare say this curious manoeuvre was originally an attempt

to make the sign of the cross, and so conjure the fire to burn; but for centuries it has been a purely irrational superstition. Or take the cock-and-lion story, solemnly told by Aristotle-that the lion is afraid of the cock. This superstition lasted till Cuvier at last thought of putting a cock into a lion's cage, with results fatal to the cock. Intellectual indolence has perpetuated a great many bits of antiquated science. The history of popular quack remedies supplies a mass of instances of a highly instructive kind; for the same mental attitude which leads uneducated people to resort to quacks when they are ill makes them victims of religious imposture when they are in trouble about their souls.

Excessive reverence for tradition, deference to the opinions of our forefathers, who had more wit and wisdom than we,' must be distinguished from mere credulity. This reverence for the supposed wisdom of the past, which we find everywhere in primitive societies, must have been very useful in the early stages of civilisation, when the difficulty of preserving the hardly-won gains of humanity was far greater than at present. The tendency to put the golden age in the past may have been caused partly by a consciousness of the real sacrifices which civilisation entails. The fruit of the tree of knowledge, as I have said elsewhere,1 always expels us from some paradise or other, even if it be only the paradise of fools. And when the art of writing was discovered, a superstitious veneration for the written word was universal, and so persistent that I do not think it is extinct yet. If the words of wisdom were enshrined in verse, that made the glamour even more potent. The old Greek sentiment about the inspiration of poets survived to the end of the classical period. To the poets sometimes,' says Dion Chrysostom,-'I mean the very ancient poets-there came a brief utterance from the Muses, a kind of inspiration of the divine nature and truth, 1 Truth and Falsehood in Religion, p. 153.