254 RELIGION 



Or if, in harmony with the social consciousness of our time, we 

 think of life as love, we have only struck the note of Christianity's 

 most fundamental conviction. Or if, with Kaftan, we find the great 

 problem and joy of life in the appreciative understanding of the great 

 personalities of history, then in Christianity we are confronted again 

 with the one great, central, supreme personality of Jesus Christ. Or, 

 if we try to think of the highest conceivable goal of life, w r e can 

 hardly set before ourselves anything greater than the possible sharing 

 of the life of the infinite God. Compared with the infinity of the 

 religious outlook, all other aims and goals are poor indeed. 



Or if, once more, we ask from psychology a statement of those 

 ideal conditions of the richest life, and get its answer, - - Reverent 

 association, and work in which one can forget himself, we can then 

 hardly fail to see that exactly these greatest means and greatest con- 

 ditions are given in religion. For here alone are the most intimate 

 and unobtrusive association with the Spirit of the Highest, and work 

 for the Kingdom of God God given and large enough for a man to 

 lose himself in it with joy. 



We are thus unavoidably brought to our conclusion, and to Christ's 

 great insistence: Religion is life. " This is life eternal, that they 

 should know thee, the only true God, and him whom thou didst 

 send, even Jesus Christ." 



No doubt, the depth of a man's religion must depend on the depth 

 of his conviction as to the significance of life, and his felt need of 

 religion on the claim he makes on life. The man who requires little 

 from life will have little conscious need of religion. But in just the 

 proportion in which he awakes to the real meaning of the life into 

 which he is called and of the true greatness of his own nature, in just 

 that degree must he awake to the need of more than the finite can 

 gi ve - - to the need of religion and to its indispensable contribution 

 to life. What religion requires, above all, is not credulity, but 

 simply that a man should be really awake. " Man's unhappiness," 

 Carlyle says, " as I construe, comes from his greatness; it is because 

 there is an Infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot 

 quite bury under the Finite." He cannot satisfy the infinite though 

 unconscious thirst of his nature with finite things. 



It is no new heresy, then, though it has been so called, to assert 

 that in this sense religion grows out of the claim on life. For it is, 

 after all, only a modern echo of that great sentence of Augustine that 

 has voiced the heart of the Church through the centuries: " Thou 

 hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find 

 rest in Thee." In our deepest nature, then, we are religious, and we 

 cannot escape it. We were never meant to come to our best in inde- 

 pendence either of our neighbor or of God. Man is alone the religious 

 animal, and he cannot escape the demand of religion until he escapes 



