Chapter VI: The English-Speaking Peoples: Action and Reaction (3)

When James's thesis shall have been fully worked out, much supposed investigation of primitive religions, which is really nothing but imagination concerning primitive religions, will be shown in its true worthlessness. We know very little about primitive man. What we learn as to primitive man, on the side of his religion, we must learn in part from the psychology of the matured and civilised, the present living, thinking, feeling man in contact with his religion. Matured religion is not to be judged by the primitive, but the reverse. The real study of the history of religions, the study of the objective phenomena, from earliest to latest times, has its place. But the history of religions is perverted when it takes for fact in the life of primitive man that which never existed save in the imagination of twentieth century students. Early Christianity, on its inner and spiritual side, is to be judged by later Christianity, by present Christianity, by the Christian experience which we see and know to-day, and not conversely, as men have always claimed. The modern man is not to be converted after the pattern which it is alleged that his grandfather followed. For, first, there is the question as to whether his grandfather did conform to this pattern. And beyond that, it is safer to try to understand the experience of the grandfather, whom we do not know, by the psychology and experience of the grandson, whom we do know, with, of course, a judicious admixture of knowledge of the history of the nineteenth century, which would occasion characteristic differences. The modern saint is not asked to be a saint like Francis. In the first place, how do we know what Francis was like? In the second place, the experience of Francis may be most easily understood by the aid of modern experience of true revolt from worldliness and of consecration to self-sacrifice, as these exist among us, with, of course, the proper background furnished by the history of the thirteenth century. Souls are one. Our souls may be, at least in some measure, known to ourselves. Even the souls of some of our fellows may be measurably known to us. What are the facts of the religious experience? How do souls react in face of the eternal? The experience of religion, the experience of the fatherhood of God, of the sonship of man, of the moving of the spirit, is surely one experience. How did even Christ's great soul react, experience, work, will, and suffer? By what possible means can we ever know how he reacted, worked, willed, suffered? In the literature we learn only how men thought that he reacted. We must inquire of our own souls. To be sure, Christ belonged to the first century, and we live in the twentieth. It is possible for us to learn something of the first century and of the concrete outward conditions which caused his life to take the shape which it did. We learn this by strict historical research. Assuredly the supreme measure in which the spirit of all truth and goodness once took possession of the Nazarene, remains to us a mystery unfathomed and unfathomable. Dwelling in Jesus, that spirit made through him a revelation of the divine such as the world has never seen. Yet that mystery leads forth along the path of that which is intelligible. And, in another sense, even such religious experience as we ourselves may have, poor though it be and sadly limited, leads back into the same mystery.

It was with this contention that religion is a fact of the inner life of man, that it is to be understood through consciousness, that it is essentially and absolutely reasonable and yet belongs to the transcendental world, it was with this contention that, in the person of Immanuel Kant, the history of modern religious thought began. It is with this contention, in one of its newest and most far-reaching applications in the work of William James, that this history continues. For no one can think of the number of questions which recent years have raised, without realising that this history is by no means concluded. It is conceivable that the changes which the twentieth century will bring may be as noteworthy as those which the nineteenth century has seen. At least we may be grateful that so great and sure a foundation has been laid.

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