SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM 



admirable or morally offensive; it is surely neither. The good is a 

 category which does not emerge until the human level is reached.^ 



The difficulty about religion is that it cannot be considered apart 

 from organised religion as embodied in institutions.^ In practice, its 

 effects throughout the world are, in the present social context, largely 

 harmful. How far religion can be transformed without the disappear- 

 ance of the old vessels is a very disputable matter. The detailed beliefs 

 of the past — verbal inspiration, eternal damnation, magical efficacy of 

 prayer for "particular mercies" (in the old phrase), ex opere operato 

 rites, miraculous intervention, ascription of psychological states to 

 God, and so on, are of course irrevocably of the past, not of the 

 present or the future. None of them are relevant to true religion. 

 Religion is seen not as a divine revelation, but as a function of human 

 nature, in Julian Huxley's words, as a "peculiar and complicated 

 function, sometimes noble, sometimes hateful, sometimes intensely 

 valuable, sometimes a bar to individual or social progress, but no 

 more aiid no less a function of human nature than fighting or falling 

 in love, than law or literature."^ Theology, indeed, comes off badly 

 in our modern survey. In so far as it is a codification of the experiences 

 of religious mysticism it is an attempt to reduce to order what cannot 

 be so reduced. In so far as it is a description of such experiences, it 

 is engaged on the fruitless task of describing the indescribable. And 

 in so far as it is occupied with cosmology, anthropology, and history, 

 it is trespassing on legitimate fields of scientific activity. 



Many students of these problems at the present time see that the 

 essence of religion is the sense of the holy (Julian Huxley,* J. M. 

 Murry,^ Canon J. M. Wilson and others). Religion thus becomes no 

 more and no less than the reaction of the human spirit to the facts 

 of human destiny and the forces by which it is influenced; and natural 

 piety, or a divination of sacredness in heroic goodness, becomes the 

 primary religious activity. Consider also the following words of one 

 of our most judicious philosophers: — "The identification of this- 

 worldly with material values, other-worldly values alone being recog- 

 nised as spiritual, is what I am concerned to deny. I maintain that 



1 In this connection C. M. Williams' Review of the Systems of Ethics founded on the 

 Theory of Evolution (London, 1893), is still not witliout value. 



2 Cf. Lenin's remarks on religion in Works ^ Vol. 11, pp. 658 ff. and Lenin on Religion 

 (Lawrence, London, n.d.). 



3 J. S. Huxley What Dare I Think? (Chatto and Windus, London, 193 1), p. 187. 

 * loc. cit. 



^ J. M. Murry, many articles in tlie Adelphi, and especially 1932, 3, 267. 



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