THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE OF RELIGION 249 



without thereby rendering the tribute of our deepest reverence to 

 this essential nature of things in its highest revelation in ourselves. 

 Here, too, then, a conviction essentially religious underlies the 

 ethical. 



Wundt's thoroughgoing study of The Facts of the Moral Life may 

 be taken as confirming this result, in his insistence that " the whole 

 development of human morality rests on the expression of these two 

 fundamental impulses of human nature ' - " the feelings of 

 reverence and affection." Of these, one, at least, is distinctly religious. 

 And how important the religious element is, Wundt bears witness 

 when, in speaking earlier even of the development of the forms of 

 human society, he says: " Here, again, it is the religious factors 

 that constitute the most important of all aids to moral evolution, 

 whether found within or without the sphere of morality itself. " * 



(4) For us Americans, too, there is an historical reason why we 

 can hardly separate the ethical and the religious without a denial 

 of ourselves. For our national character has had a religious basis, 

 and has been plainly glorified thereby. When William Stoughton, 

 in 1688, in words that John Fiske asserts must be taken as literally 

 true, said of our Puritan ancestors, " God sifted a whole nation that 

 he might send choice grain into the wilderness," he reminds us how 

 great these founders of our national life were, and how transcen- 

 dent was their service. And their greatness lay in their convictions 

 and their conscience. And any "new Puritanism' in life needs 

 beneath it the old Puritan religious convictions in their seership, in 

 their prophet's sense of God and the spiritual world as the realest 

 of all realities, in their consequent sense of commission, vocation, 

 divine calling -- the apostle's sense of being called to an " imperish- 

 able work in the world ' : - and in their resulting conviction of 

 responsibility and accountability. This tremendous sense of the 

 significance and value of life in the doing of the will of God as 

 co-partners with him, - - this sense had power, and must ever 

 have power, to lift men above the petty and the prejudiced and the 

 partisan. Macaulay was certainly no eulogist of the Puritans, but 

 Macaulay saw that their " coolness of judgment and immutability 

 of purpose " were " the necessary effects of their religious zeal." 

 And, if we are to be worthy successors of worthy sires, we must bind 

 our ethical life up indissolubly with their great religious con- 

 victions. 



In truth, from whatever point of view we choose to consider them, 

 if we look deeply into both, we can hardly fail to find that, in Wundt's 

 words, " religion and morality tend more and more to blend in an 

 inseparable unity." Religion is the sharing of the life of God, and 

 no man may share the life of the God of character without, character. 



1 Pp. 226, 328. 



