The Sphere of Religion 287 



the holy is a sense that man stands in presence of a reah'ty before 

 which he may not seek his own pleasure or walk after the imagina- 

 tions of his own heart, has he not in that the well-spring of all 

 ethical progress ? For this reason, holy awe, even when most 

 akin to abject fear, is never utterly abject, but, if it crush man with 

 the sense of being the creature of a day, it also speaks to him of the 

 eternity " God has set in his heart," so that the most primitive man 

 who responds to it could say with the poet, " I felt myself so small, 

 so great." And, just as there is in the poorest awe a certain 

 quality of moral reverence which distinguishes it from fear, so, 

 at the other end, there is in the highest moral reverence an element 

 of awe which distinguishes it from a purely intellectual judgement. 

 At the lowest stage the object of this awe may be so confusedly 

 conceived that we may discern little but crude dominating feeling ; 

 at the highest, its object may be so clearly conceived through the 

 true, the beautiful, and the good, that Kant could regard it as 

 delivering us from the domination of all feeling whatsoever. 

 Nevertheless, the feeling throughout has its own essential quality, 

 and affects us quite differently from any other series of feeling ; 

 and there is no break anywhere in the evolution. Being original, it 

 is not to be described by something else, but, being the same feeling 

 throughout, all the stages of its progress shed light on each other. 



Professor Otto, on the other hand, divorces the sense of the 

 holy from any sense of an environment which is becoming for man 

 an ethical reality, and relates it to what he calls the " numinous." 

 The mark of the holy, he says, is throughout the sense of a mystery 

 at once tremendous and fascinating, the " numinous " being this 

 kind of half-lit shadow, at once forbidding and attractive. 



Three points may at once be conceded. First, the earliest 

 religion was, probably enough, largely the sense of mysterious 

 moving things in the world about one. Second, this feeling is 

 common and exercises a powerful influence in all primitive forms 

 of religion. Third, there is a sense in which a living nature must 

 remain the basis even of the highest religion. 



Of this highest stage of the sense of the " numinous " we 

 cannot find a better description than Wordsworth's : 



A presence that disturbs me with a joy 

 Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime 

 Of something far more deeply interfused. 

 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. 



