CHAPTER VII.

THE ULTIMATE ELEMENTS.

We have now examined and classified the various phenomena manifested by the religious sentiment throughout the world. We have found these phenomena to have been in all ages of history, and to be now among all races of men, fundamentally alike. Diverse as the several creeds existing on the face of the earth appear to a superficial observer, yet the rites, the practices, the dogmas they contain, admit of being ranged under certain definite categories and deduced from certain invariable assumptions. The two leading ideas of consecration and of sanctity pervade them all, and while the mode of consecration, the objects consecrated, the things, places, men, or books regarded as sacred, differ in every quarter of the globe, the feelings of the religious man remain the same.

Let us take a rapid survey, before proceeding further, of the ground we have already traversed. Wherever any religion exists at all, we have found consecrated _actions_: that is, actions devoted to the service of God. Such actions, it is assumed, have some kind of validity or force, either in bringing from the deities addressed by the worshipers some species of temporal blessing, or in ensuring happiness in a future state, or in improving his moral character in this. Secondly, we no sooner rise above the very rudest forms of religion, than we find _places_ set apart for worship, and entirely abstracted from all profaner uses. Thirdly, we find that it is a universal practice to dedicate certain _objects_ to the special use of the divine beings received in the country; such objects being various in their nature, but very frequently consisting of gifts to the accredited ministers of the God for whom they are intended. Fourthly, we find in all the greater religions—the Confucians possibly excepted—a number of _persons_ who have devoted themselves to a mode of life supposed to be especially pleasing to God, and carrying with it in their minds the notion of superior sanctity. Lastly, we have in almost every form of faith a special _class_, generally of male persons only, who are set apart, by some distinctive rite, to the performance of the consecrated actions required by the community to be done on their behalf; these actions thus acquiring a double consecration, derived primarily from their own nature, and secondarily from the character of those by whom they are performed.

Passing to the second of our main divisions, we found the conception of sanctity applied generally where that of consecration had been applied, the distinction being that while the latter was imparted by man, the former was the gift of God. Thus, in the first place, just as human beings consecrate some of their actions to the service of God, so he, in his turn, sanctifies certain _events_ to the enlightenment of mankind. It is the same in the second case, that of _places_; for here the deity sometimes points out a holy spot by some special mark of his presence, sometimes (and more commonly) condescends to sanctify those which man has devoted to his worship. And, thirdly, as men set apart some of their property for him, so he imparts to some of the _objects_ in their possession a holy character, which endows them with peculiar powers, either over external nature, or over the mind and conscience of those who see, touch, or otherwise use them. Fourthly, he endows the _class_ who perform the ceremonies of religion with his peculiar grace; a grace commonly evinced in their power to consecrate places, things, and men, to forgive sins, to convey the apostolic succession, to administer sacraments, and so forth; but occasionally manifested in the shape of supernatural endowments. And fifthly, as there are many of both sexes who give themselves to him, so there have been a few _men_ to whom he may be said to have given himself, having invested them with authority to teach infallible truth, and found religions called after their names. Sixthly, he has revealed himself in a way to which there is nothing corresponding on the human side, by means of _books_ composed by authors whom he inspired with the words he desired them to write.

Viewed in the gross, as we have viewed them now, these several manifestations of religious feeling cancel one another. That feeling has indeed expressed itself in the same general manner, but with differences in detail which render all its expressions equally unimportant in the eyes of science. For, to take the simplest instance, nothing can be said by a Christian, on behalf of the inspiration of his Scriptures, which might not be said by the Buddhist, the Confucian, or the Mussulman on behalf of the inspiration of theirs. If his appear to him more beautiful, more perfect, more sublime, so do theirs to them; and even if we concede his claims, the difference is one of degree, and not of kind. So it is in reference to miracles. Christianity can point to no miracles tending to establish its truth, which may not be matched by others tending to establish the truth of rival creeds. And if we find believers of every kind in every clime, attaching the most profound importance to the exact performance of religious rites in certain exact ways, while, nevertheless, those ways differ from age to age and from place to place, we cannot but conclude that every form of worship is equally good and equally indifferent; and that the faith of the Christian who drinks the blood of Christ on the banks of the Thames, stands on the same intellectual level with that of the Brahman who quaffs the juice of the Soma on the banks of the Ganges.

But this line of argument seems to tend to nothing short of the absolute annihilation of religion. Under the touch of a comparative anatomy of creeds, all that was imposing and magnificent in the edifice of theology crumbles into dust. Systems of thought piled up with elaborate care, philosophies evolved by centuries of toilsome preparation, fall into shapeless ruins at our feet. And all this by the simple process of putting them side by side.

Can we, however, rest content in the assumption that so vast a superstructure as that of religion has no solid foundation in the mind of man? And is it destined, like the theologies it has evolved in the course of its existence to disappear entirely from a world enlightened by scientific knowledge?

Two questions must be carefully distinguished from one another in replying to the doubt thus suggested. The first is whether religion, although it may contain no objective truth, or no objective truth ascertainable by us, nevertheless possesses, from some circumstance in its own nature, or in the nature of the world we live in, a hold upon the human race, of which it cannot by any advance of knowledge be deprived. Is there, in short, if not an everlasting truth, yet an everlasting dream from which there is to be no awakening, and in which spectral shapes do duty for external realities? An affirmative reply would admit the existence of religious sentiment to be a necessary result of the constitution of the human mind, but would not concede the inference that conclusions reached by means of that sentiment had any objective validity, or any intellectual worth beyond that which they derive from the imagination of those who believe them. The second question is whether there are in the fundamental composition of religious sentiment any elements not only necessary, but true; and if so, what those elements are, and what is the proof of their credibility, if proof there be.

As a preliminary to answering either of these questions, it is needful to ascertain whether in the midst of the variety we have passed in review, there is any fundamental unity; in other words, whether the varied _forms_ of religion are all we can ever know of it, or whether underlying those forms there is a permanent _structure_ upon which they are superposed. For only when we know whether there is in all the creeds of the world a common element, can we proceed to inquire whether there is an element which is a necessary result of the constitution of our minds. If the phenomena evinced by the several religions to which we have referred in the previous book have no common source in human nature; if, while they differ in every article of their theology, there is nothing beyond theology in which they agree; then religion is a mere superficial product of circumstances, having no more solid guarantee than the authority of the particular teachers of each special variety. There is in fact no religion; there are only religions. There is no universal Faith; there is only particular Belief.

These, then, are the queries to which our attention must be addressed:—

1. Are there in the several religions of mankind any common elements?

2. If so, are those common elements a necessary, and therefore permanent, portion of our mental furniture?

3. If so, are those elements the correlatives of any actual truths, or not?

It may have been observed that all the phenomena we have examined in the previous Book imply one assumption, and cannot be understood without that assumption. All of them imply some kind of power or powers either behind, beyond, or external to the material world and the human beings who inhabit it, or at least involved in and manifested through that world and its inhabitants; some power whose nature is not clear to us, but whose effects are perceptible to our senses; some power to which we ourselves and the material world are equally subject. Sometimes indeed the power which religion thus assumes is broken up into several minor forces, and instead of a single deity we have several deities controlling the operations of nature. But, without dwelling now upon the fact that polytheistic creeds often look above the lesser beings whom they commonly put forward to a more mysterious and greater God, it may be observed that these minor forces are no more than forms of the one great force from which they are parted off by an imaginative subdivision. To place the ocean under one divinity, the winds under another, and the sun under a third, is practically a mental process of the same kind as to place them all under a single divinity; and the existence of some such cause of material phenomena being granted, it is a mere question of less or greater representative capacity whether we range them under numerous chiefs or comprehend them all under one. In either case we assume extra-mundane and superhuman power, and this is the essential assumption of all religion. The least assumption a religion can make is that of a single such power, and this (or more than this) it always must assume. For without this we should remain within the boundaries of science; we should examine and classify phenomena, but we could never pass beyond the phenomena themselves to their mysterious origin or their hidden cause.

But this is not the only assumption involved in every possible religion. Every religion assumes also that there is in human nature something equally hyperphysical with the power which it worships, whether we call this something soul, or mind, or spirit. And between this human essence and the divine power there is held to be a singular correspondence, their relationship finding its concrete expression in religious worship on the one side and theological dogma on the other. All the practices and all the doctrines of every positive religion are but the modes in which men have sought to give body to their idea of this relationship.

We have then, strictly speaking, three fundamental postulates involved in the religious idea:—

First, that of a hyperphysical power in the universe.

Secondly, that of a hyperphysical entity in man.

Thirdly, that of a relation between the two.

The power assumed in the first postulate we may term the objective element in religion; the entity assumed in the second postulate we may term the subjective element. In the following chapter we shall deal with the objective element in the religious idea.