3 io LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1874- 



development of our race. An active and useful factor in 

 history cannot be a mere disease of humanity ; but it is 

 imagined that the truly beneficent forces of which religion 

 has hitherto been the vehicle have been clothed in a 

 false idealism, and unnecessarily engrafted on transcen 

 dental theories as to the relation of man to God. It is 

 held that a better social philosophy would enable us to 

 find on earth all those ethical motives and all those 

 springs of bliss which the imagination of early ages 

 placed in heaven. And this new religion of humanity 

 has no need for a theology, because it finds no place for 

 a God. The religion of humanity is as yet in a some 

 what undeveloped state, and its adherents are, for the 

 most part, either unable or unwilling to lay down with 

 logical precision the features that distinguish it from 

 Christianity. But when we hear it asserted that religion 

 is a necessary and an excellent thing, while theology, on 

 the contrary, is useless or noxious, we may in general 

 assume that we have to deal with a man who, more or 

 less consciously, derives his views from the school in 

 question. A religion without theology means, for the 

 most part, a religion without God. It can mean nothing 

 else in the mouth of any man who does not possess that 

 mystical habit of mind which conceives of communion 

 with God as a state of the soul too purely passive to 

 become an object of intellectual cognition, too purely 

 individual to be the basis of a general doctrine. And 

 this extreme form of mysticism is at present so rare and 

 so uninfluential that it cannot be credited with any 

 share in establishing the currency of the formula which 

 contrasts religion with theology. That formula has a 

 clear meaning only for the man who has satisfied himself 

 that the really valuable elements of religion are quite 

 separable from all belief in God, or in any other tran 

 scendental fact. It is a formula, therefore, which is so 

 far from being the self-evident foundation of a new 

 religious liberalism, that it possesses no value for any man 



