IN THE FORM OF EDUCATION AND RELIGION 3 



" Outside of the state," said he, " is found only the dominion of 

 the passions, war, fear, poverty, filth, isolation, barbarism, ignor- 

 ance, and savagery; while in the state is found the dominion of 

 reason, peace, security, riches, ornament, sociability, elegance, 

 science, and good will." 



With this point of view we see at a glance the potency of the arts 

 of social culture, fitting as they do the individual for a cooperative 

 life with his fellow men in the institutions of civilization. 



Ill 



My thesis proceeds from this insight to lay down the doctrine that 

 the first social culture is religion and that religion is the foundation 

 of social life in so far as that social life belongs to the history of civil- 

 ization. Religion in the first place is not merely the process of an 

 individual mind, but it is a great social process of intellect and will 

 and heart. Its ideas are not the unaided thoughts of individual 

 scholars, but the aggregate results of a social activity of intellect, 

 so to speak, each thought of the individual being modified by the 

 thought of his community, so that it comes back to the individual 

 with the substantial impress of authority. 



There is a religious social process, the most serious of all social 

 activity. In it the religious view of the world is shaped and delivered 

 to the individual by authority such as cannot be resisted by him 

 except with martyrdom. Each modification in the body of religious 

 doctrine has come through individual innovation, but at the expense 

 of disaster to his life. He had to sacrifice his life so far as his ordinary 

 prosperity was concerned, and his doctrine had to be taken up by 

 his fellow men acting as a social whole, and translated into their 

 mode of viewing divine revelation before it effected a modification 

 in the popular faith. It was a process of social assimilation of the 

 product of the individual comparable to the physiologic process by 

 which the organs of the body take up a portion of food and 

 convert it into a blood-corpuscle before adding it to the bodily 

 structure. 



So in the living church of a people goes on forever the great process 

 of receiving new views from its members, and its members include 

 not only the Saint Bernards, but also the Voltaires. The church 

 receives the new views, but does not by any means adopt them until 

 it has submitted them to the negative process of criticism and 

 elimination, and finally to the transforming process that selects the 

 available portions for assimilation and nutriment. This is certainly 

 the slowest and most conservative spiritual process that goes on 

 in civilization. But it is by all means the most salutary. The 

 individuals that suggest the most radical modifications are swiftly 



