424 RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE: PERSONAL 



longing for divine fellowship, the desire for communion with a power 

 not ourselves. In the presence of this power man " takes off his 

 shoes." Aristotle held that all education may be summed up in 

 teaching men how to fear rightly. Take away from human life the 

 feeling of reverence for the sacred, awe for the sublime and the all- 

 powerful, the sense of human dependence, the feeling of need for 

 divine fellowship, and you have cut the nerve of all that has proved 

 best and richest in human character and achievement. There has 

 been a tendency to undervalue the emotional life and to crown 

 Reason as king of the human powers. A rebellion has broken out, 

 both among the psychologists and the theologians, that the emotions 

 may enter into their rightful heritage. While religion is more than 

 fear, or wonder, or dependence, - - more than any one desire or 

 emotion, yet all these, so common to religion, have made greatly 

 for the enrichment of life. Without the emotional nature, religion 

 could not exist, and without religion there can be no emotional life 

 worth the having. 



Take the single fact of wonder, or what the author of Revealed 

 Religion calls " habitual and permanent admiration ' - which he 

 gives as a definition of religion, at least in its elementary state. By 

 keeping alive the sense of wonder, religion has greatly contributed 

 to human life. The savage stands puzzled before the moving leaf; 

 the little child gazes at the twinkling stars and wonders what they 

 are so high above him; and the man of science cannot banish this 

 awe-inspiring admiration; for with every advance of knowledge 

 wonder gives place to a widening circle of mystery. This has ever 

 led the untutored to better things and allured the man of science to 

 newer conquests. 



There are certain ideals which religion has always fostered, without 

 which human life would be flat and arid. Religion is normative. 

 The soul of man has, from the earliest times, been haunted by inti- 

 mations or inspired by belief in an ideal life. 



There are no more universal facts in the history of religion than 

 faith in human perfectibility and the belief in personal immortality. 

 To say that these two ideals have inspired human life, elevated and 

 energized their undertakings, is to pronounce a truism. These two, 

 coupled with the doctrine of the perfection of human society, may 

 be termed cardinal beliefs, so general and radical are they. Leave 

 the idea of immortality out of life, whether it move on the low plane 

 of the Amerind, who would take his earthly trappings to the spirit 

 world, or on the higher plane of Him who " brought life and immor- 

 tality to life in the gospel ;" leave the desire for and striving after 

 the perfect out of human emotions, and human undertakings lan- 

 guish. It is this ideal that has ever beckoned man onward and 

 upward; it is because of this we find: 



