266 Science Religion and Reality 



study of religion for so long was that this suggestion fell at the time 

 on barren ground, so that there are many who to this day continue 

 to treat religion as though it were purely an intellectual inference 

 from the visible world to an invisible, or supernatural information 

 made known by certain revelations in the past. But, if this be 

 wrong, no account of the causes which introduced it will spare us 

 the necessity of giving a better account of what religion is and what 

 part it has played in human experience. 



A consideration both of what religion is and what it has done 

 is necessary. We may not ignore its manifestations in history, 

 for they may correct and enlarge our conception of religion. Yet 

 without any idea of religion to determine what are manifestations 

 of religion, we shall not know what part of history is concerned 

 with them. Nowhere is this plainer than in what has sometimes 

 been offered to us as presenting, in purely objective form, the 

 simplest and most unquestionable elements of religion — the study 

 of primitive religion. Little discrimination being used, religion 

 is sometimes regarded as including every outlived idea, though 

 plainly many of them are science and many ethics, none the less 

 so because they are not our science or ethics. Justification might 

 be offered for identifying outgrown ideas with religion in the fact 

 that primitive science and custom took to themselves religious 

 sanction and with it entrenched themselves against progress. Then 

 religion is taken to be essentially conservatism and reaction, a view 

 which may not have been often formulated, but which has been 

 the fundamental assumption of many discussions of religion. 



It might be possible to show that such a view of religion springs 

 from lack of interest in the higher concerns of the human spirit, 

 but it is more profitable to consider why religion is thus conserva- 

 tive, and to take along with that the other question of why it is also 

 the most revolutionary of all forces. In history the latter aspect 

 has been at least as prominent as the former, because it is religion 

 which has produced the faith and courage and self-sacrifice which 

 have combated traditional ideas and customs, and dared, in face of 

 every kind of social ostracism, to stand alone in defence of what 

 seemed truer and higher. And this raises a larger question : Why 

 is religion, the chief, if not in the end the only, power in the might 

 of which man has denied self for goods the self may never realise ? 

 And this question also vv^e cannot answer without considering the 

 nature and sphere of religion. 



