RELIGION AND PERSONALITY 425 



" Progress man's distinctive mark alone, 

 Not God's, not beasts'. He is; they are; 

 Man partly is and wholly hopes to be." 



Religion is optimistic. In so far as it is pessimistic it is irreligion. 

 Even Buddhism looks, forward in hope, though that hope be in the 

 loss of personality. Religion looks forward to a Golden Age before 

 as well as a Golden Age behind, a restored humanity, a redeemed 

 society. Surely " we are saved by hope." 



This reaching after perfection has its correlative feeling in the 

 sense of divine sonship on the one hand and the widespread belief 

 in a divine incarnation on the other. In all religions a certain sense 

 of sonship is present -- crude and narrow in primitive clan life; 

 present in the patriarchal system of the Chinese; present in Plato's 

 divine man who should bring order out of human conflicts; and 

 best of all in the revelation of Jesus, whose preeminent emotion 

 was the feeling of filial relation with God. 



Without the aspirations for immortality and perfection which 

 religion enkindles, personal life must ever move upon a low plane 

 of hopelessness, helplessness, and blight. 



The contribution of religion to the esthetic nature need only to 

 be mentioned to be recognized. Imagination, twin sister to faith, 

 imagination enkindled by religious motives, has given us all that is 

 best in art. From the rude but rhythmic motion of the religious 

 dance, all through the higher development of the drama ; from the 

 beginnings of architecture, painting, sculpture, up to the highest 

 forms of poetry and eloquence, and music in all the stages of 

 development, art owes its origin, its patronage, and its power to the 

 religious motive. This is because religion has always touched the 

 deepest and truest emotions of the heart. 



As has already been intimated, religion has been foremost in 

 stimulating the intellectual pursuits of men, fostering inquiry, be- 

 ing a patron of learning. Religion is, in fact, the progenitor of the 

 sciences. The rich religious nature of many of the world's great- 

 est scientists, statesmen, philosophers, educators, thinkers in all 

 branches of intellectual pursuits, is a testimony to religion's contri- 

 bution to the enrichment of personal life. Scientists from Coperni- 

 cus and Tycho Brahe to Silliman, Agassiz, and Le Conte; Newton, 

 Faraday, Dalton, Davy, the Herschels, Maury, Clerk-Maxwell, Pas- 

 cal, Priestley, Joseph Henry, and a great host of others bear this 

 testimony. 



It is truly an encouraging sign of the coming unification of all 

 knowledge, that the scientists, like James Starbuck and Stanley Hall, 

 as well as the theologians, are carefully studying the facts of religious 

 experience and giving them their rightful and indisputable place. 

 A harmonizing of the facts of nature outside of man and nature within 



