The Sphere of Religion 295 



If this be a right account of the material sacred, there is no 

 more difficulty than with any other higher development in 

 explaining how it passes into the ethical sacred, which also had a 

 long progress before it could be summed upas the absolute value of 

 the true, the beautiful, and the good. The rudimentary presence 

 of the higher in the lower form is not more difficult to discover, nor 

 are the stages of the evolution of the lower into the higher less 

 closely linked than in any other kind of human progress. First, 

 the most primitive and material valuation of anything sacred mani- 

 fests the three abiding forces of ethical advance : (1} the affirma- 

 tion of a reality of absolute value ; (2) the subordination of all else 

 to it ; (3) a tendency to regard its nature less materially. There- 

 fore, ethical quality was there from the beginning. And, second, 

 in ethical progress we have in all history a singular insistence that 

 nothing is ever new, that it is in man's world and man's heart 

 already, something he has always been rejecting and not something 

 only recently brought to his notice. The prophet in all ages 

 speaks as though he were merely reviving an old religion, and the 

 more ethical the newness is, the greater is the assurance that it 

 merely comes out of the old. Nor is this either convention or 

 historical illusion, because there is no sacred which does not have 

 the values in which the ethical is potentially present. 



This is not hindered by the fact that it may, besides being 

 material, also be irrational and immoral, because a possibility of 

 good is, in all human uses, always a possibility of evil. And in 

 this case we have an explanation in the very close dependence 

 both of reason and conscience upon the sacred. This would 

 require a fuller justification than can be given here, but how can we 

 conceive them developing with no restraint upon desire beyond fear 

 of consequence ? And if that be so, religion could not use reason 

 and conscience at the start for determining its character, but had 

 to develop them in the process of exploring its territory. 



Everything that is sacred is in the sphere of religion, and every- 

 thing in the sphere of religion is sacred. Unless dogmas express 

 beliefs valued as sacred, they are mere intellectual formulas ; 

 unless rites are the worship of a power valued as sacred, they are 

 mere social ceremonies ; unless God Himself embody all we value 

 as sacred, he is a mere metaphysical hypothesis. Only when the 

 valuation as sacred accompanies the sense of awe and reverence 

 have we the religious holy, and only a reality having this absolute 



