RELIGION 



RELIGION 



the sense of awe and is turned into 

 reverence for truth and beauty and 

 goodness, how redemption moves 

 from deliverance from the physical 

 ills which work bodily harm to 

 victory over all the evil that is in 

 the world by reconciliation to a 

 purpose which is over them and 

 beyond them, and how in that pro- 

 gress the spiritual faculties of the 

 human race are liberated and 

 exalted. 



Methods of Classification 



More recently the various re- 

 ligions have claimed attention, 

 because all historical study of the 

 subject confirms Schleiermacher's 

 view that each religion is an organic 

 whole, to be estimated not merely 

 by weighing the proportion of its 

 higher and lower elements. Yet, 

 if we are to regard the religions as 

 stages of progress, we must classify 

 them, not merely geographically, 

 but on a principle which will 

 arrange them in some order of 

 lower and higher. 



The primary division put forward 

 by Schleiermacher was between 

 " religions without founders " and 

 " religions with founders." This 

 agreed with his view of religion as 

 intuition of the universe, and of the 

 religions as distinct intuitions ; 

 for a higher religion was impossible 

 without some original religious 

 genius to produce the intuition by 

 which it was organized. This dis- 

 tinction between what we may call 

 unprophetic and prophetic reli- 

 gions is of the utmost importance, 

 as appears in the progress from the 

 8th to the 6th century B.C., due to 

 such great prophetic persons as 

 Zarathustra, the Hebrew prophets, 

 Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, and 

 Lao-tse. Nor may we ignore the 

 influence of Moses on the national 

 Hebrew religion ; and there may 

 be no religion which is not in some 

 sense prophetic. 



The division of religions into 

 national and universal, or natural 

 and ethical, are practically parallel, 

 but national and universal elements 

 are not always distinct ; and, un- 

 less we restrict ethics to our own 

 moral standards, there is no religion 

 but is in some sense ethical. To 

 the division into religions of nature 

 and religions of redemption there 

 is the objection that every religion 

 is concerned with redemption, if 

 only from the ills that threaten the 

 bodily life. But that fact affords 

 us the true principle of division, 

 which is the kind of redemption 

 each religion offers, to which must 

 be related the values in man worthy 

 of being redeemed, and the purpose 

 above the world by which they are 

 to be realized, and, therefore, the 

 idea of God on which the purpose 

 depends. 



On this principle the following 

 classification is suggested : (1) Re- 

 ligions of the natural life and of an 

 animistic force, vaguely many and 

 indefinitely one, whereby man seeks 

 outward security through a power 

 as personal as his own dim sense 

 of his own personality in the com- 

 munistic stage at which he lives 

 permits. (2) Religions of anthropo- 

 morphism and external morality, 

 whereby, having become an in- 

 dividual possessing property, man 

 seeks to secure his state by beings 

 like himself, who lay down ex- 

 ternal rules for what is yet mainly 

 an outward life. (3) Religions of 

 ecstasy and asceticism and acosmic 

 morality, which either do not 

 depend on gods, or whose gods are 

 pantheistic and identified with the 

 order of things, because, seeking 

 to solve the problem of the world 

 by escaping from it, they do not 

 depend for help on any power that 

 rules the world. Of this Buddhism 

 is one type and Neo-platonism 

 another. (4) Religions of mono- 

 theistic tendency and ethical 

 dualism, which, having realized the 

 organization of good and evil in the 

 world, seek to secure a higher life 

 by faith that the power of light 

 must ultimately prevail over the 

 powers of darkness. The typical 

 example is Zoroastrianism, but the 

 later Greek religion also belonged 

 to it. (5) Religions of true mono- 

 theism and reconciliation, which 

 secure the spiritual life by making it 

 the one eternal purpose, and by 

 faith in the one God who works 

 through all things for it. To it 

 belong especially prophetic Judaism 

 and Christianity. 



Psychology of Religion 



The second study, the psychology 

 of religion, deals with the origin 

 and working of religion in the mind. 

 From the time of the ancientGreeks, 

 religion has been explained away 

 as fear, or vanity, or the fashioning 

 of the world according to our 

 desires. Modern psychology has to 

 acknowledge it an original and 

 fundamental element of human 

 nature, but many studies, especially 

 from France and America, deal 

 with matters like a pre-logical 

 stage of mind, conversion, mystic- 

 ism, social and mass religious ideas, 

 still with the purpose of explain- 

 ing religion on purely mental 

 grounds without any external 

 reality to which it corresponds. 



Thus Durckheim ascribes to it 

 all social progress and even the 

 development of reason, but, though 

 the sacred is thus eminently useful, 

 it is apparently a mere social device 

 without sanction from the nature 

 of things ; and Leuba regards it 

 as an aspect of the will to live, 

 encouraging us in our task of 



managing the world by the imagi- 

 nation of beings like ourselves 

 ruling behind its blind forces. With- 

 out the sense of sacred obligation 

 above convenience, reason and 

 social order and a victorious free- 

 dom in life could hardly have been 

 achieved. But, if illusion works 

 better than reality, we have not 

 even a pragmatic basis for truth. 

 A more serious psychology has 

 sought to find the essence of religion 

 in some aspect of mind Kant in 

 will, as the assurance of the moral 

 order; Hegel in intellect, as popular 

 philosophy ; Schleiermacher in 

 feeling, as artistic intuition of the 

 whole in all things. 



Later Interpretations 



Kant is nearest the reality, but, 

 as the values of religion also 

 concern truth and beauty, later 

 writers, like Dr. Inge, seek it in a 

 harmony of all our powers. But 

 no religious person is concerned to 

 maintain this balance of self- 

 culture. His interest in what is 

 sacred is purely as he believes 

 it to be concerned with an abso- 

 lute and eternal worth in man, 

 which corresponds with the ulti- 

 mate meaning of the world. The 

 psychology of religion is only an 

 extension of the ordinary psycho- 

 logy of mind. It is an empirical 

 science, dealing with observed 

 facts of mind, without going on to 

 speculate about the nature of 

 reality. But it does not deal with 

 mind as if mind were all. 



The metaphysic of religion has 

 to do with the higher world of spirit 

 and our way of knowing it, being 

 also simply an extension of the 

 ordinary metaphysic of experi- 

 ence. This does not mean that all 

 theology is philosophical abstrac- 

 tion, or that faith must be deter- 

 mined by philosophical demonstra- 

 tion, or that the spiritual values 

 which have required great pro- 

 phetic souls and the long process 

 of history can be produced by 

 philosophical argument from the 

 individual mind. On the con- 

 trary, it is the business of this study 

 to justify for religion its own way 

 of knowing its realities. Especially 

 it must show how the question of 

 God means the reality of the abso- 

 lute claim of all that is of final 

 worth in man and all that he holds 

 sacred in life. J. w. Oman 



G RE AT RELIG IONS OF THE WORLD. 

 The word heathen, as used on 

 the map, comprises those primitive 

 peoples whose attitude to the 

 supernatural may be comprehended 

 under the general term magico- 

 religious. It is to be preferred 

 to animist because animism does 

 not cover all forms of primitive 

 belief. Some of them were pre- 

 animistic, some tend to pass into 



