250 RELIGION 



III. Religion and Life 



If there is any one emphasis of our time more powerful than the 

 emphases upon education and the ethical, it is the emphasis on life. 

 The demand for life, real, full, and satisfying, is the deepest instinct 

 of our time. 



'T is life whereof our nerves are scant ; 



More life and fuller, that I want. 



So far is this true, that Professor Leuba feels justified in saying, as 

 the result of his study of the religious consciousness of the Protestant 

 Anglo-Saxon: " The preservation and increase of life is the moving 

 impulse as well of religion as of secular activity." In our search, 

 then, for the fundamental nature of religion, let us turn from this 

 comparison of religion and education, and of religion and ethics, to 

 the comparison of religion and life, and let us see how surely a faith 

 that is essentially religious logically underlies all our reasoning, all 

 work worth doing, all strenuous moral endeavor, all earnest social 

 service; how permeated with the religious, therefore, all life at its 

 highest must be. 



(1) For, in the first place, a faith essentially religious logically un- 

 derlies all our reasoning. For every argument that we can possibly 

 make, especially concerning any of the greater interests of life, must 

 go forward upon the double assumption of the consistency and the 

 worth of the world. We can reason at all, only so far as we have 

 already virtually asserted that the world is a world in which we can 

 rationally think; and our most significant arguments require, as well, 

 that we should add the faith that the world is a world in which we 

 can rationally live. That, in other words, there is the unity and con- 

 sistency of one truth and of a unified reason in the world, and an 

 essential love at its heart that makes life abundantly worth living. 

 And these two fundamental assumptions of all our reasoning are 

 essentially religious convictions. 



That men often do not recognize these logical implications of their 

 reasoning and may use with great complacency impersonal and 

 irreligious language concerning their experience that will not bear 

 thinking through - - this is all too true ; but this does not alter the 

 fact of the ultimate logical implications of their deepest thinking 

 and living. The mere report, therefore, of the psychological facts of 

 a man's religious experience, as he conceives it, is by no means the 

 final step in any fundamental religious inquiry. 



(2) In the same way, a faith essentially religious underlies all 

 work worth doing. For, as Paulsen says, speaking simply as a philo- 

 sopher, " Whoever devotes his life to a cause believes in that cause; 

 and this belief, be his creed what it may, has always something of 



