The Hearts of Men

As my first book, "The Soul of a People," would probably never have been completed or published without your encouragement and assistance, so the latter part of this book would not have been written without your suggestion. This dedication is a slight acknowledgment of my indebtedness to you, but I hope that you will accept it, not as any equivalent for your unvarying kindness, but as a token that I have not forgotten.

RELIGION

"The difficulty of framing a correct definition of religion is very great. Such a definition should apply to nothing but religion, and should differentiate religion from anything else – as, for example, from imaginative idealisation, art, morality, philosophy. It should apply to everything which is naturally and commonly called religion: to religion as a subjective spiritual state, and to all religions, high or low, true or false, which have obtained objective historical realisation." —Anon.

"The principle of morality is the root of religion." —Peochal.

"It is the perception of the infinite." —Max Müller.

"A religious creed is definable as a theory of original causation." —Herbert Spencer.

"Virtue, as founded on a reverence for God and expectation of future rewards and punishment." —Johnson.

"The worship of a Deity." —Bailey.

"It has its origin in fear." —Lucretius and others.

"A desire to secure life and its goods amidst the uncertainty and evils of earth." —Retsche.

"A feeling of absolute dependence, of pure and entire passiveness." —Schleiermacher.

"Religious feeling is either a distinct primary feeling or a peculiar compound feeling." —Neuman Smyth.

"A sanction for duty." —Kant.

"A morality tinged by emotion." —Matthew Arnold.

"By religion I mean that general habit of reverence towards the divine nature whereby we are enabled to worship and serve God." —Wilkins.

"A propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man, which are supposed to control the course of nature and of human life." —J. G. Frazer.

"The modes of divine worship proper to different tribes." —Anon.

"The performance of duty to God and man."

It is to be noted that all the above are of Europeans acquainted practically with only Christianity.

The following are some that have been given me by Orientals:

"The worship of Allah." —Mahommedan.

"A knowledge of the laws of life that lead to happiness." —Buddhist.

"Doing right."

"Other-worldliness."

INTRODUCTION

Some time ago I wrote "The Soul of a People." It was an attempt to understand a people, the Burmese; to understand a religion, that of Buddha. It was not an attempt to find abstract truth, to discuss what may be true or not in the tenets of that faith, to discover the secret of all religions. It was only intended to show what Buddhism in Burma is to the people who believe in it, and how it comes into their lives.

Yet it was impossible always to confine the view to one point. It is natural – nay, it is inevitable – that when a man studies one faith, comparison with other faiths should intrude themselves. The world, even the East and West, is so bound together that you cannot treat of part and quite ignore the rest. And so thoughts arose and questions came forward that lay outside the scope of that book. I could not write of them there fully. Whatever question arose I was content then to give only the Buddhist answer, I had to leave on one side all the many answers different faiths may have propounded. I could not discuss even where truth was likely to be found. I was bound by my subject. But in this book I have gone further. This is a book, not of one religion nor of several religions, but of religion. Mainly, it is true, it treats of Christianity and Buddhism, because these are the two great representative faiths, but it is not confined to them. Man asks, and has always asked, certain questions. Religions have given many answers. Are these answers true? Which is true? Are any of them true? It is in a way a continuation of "The Soul of a People," but wider. It is of "The Hearts of Men."

Before beginning this book I have a word to say on the meanings that I attach to the word "Christianity" and a few other words, so that I may be more clearly understood.

There was a man who wrote to me once explaining why he was a Christian, and wondering how anyone could fail to be so.

"I look about me," he said, "at Christian nations, and I see that they are the leaders of the world. Pagan nations are far behind them in wealth, in happiness, in social order. I look at our Courts and I find justice administered to all alike, pure and without prejudice. Our crime decreases, our education increases, and our wealth increases even faster; the artisan now is where the middle class was a hundred years ago, the middle class now lives better than the rich did. Our science advances from marvel to marvel. Our country is a network of railroads, our ships cover the seas, our prosperity is unbounded, and in a greater or less degree all Christian nations share it. But when we turn to Pagan nations, what do we see? Anarchy and injustice, wars and rebellions, ignorance and poverty. To me no greater proof of the truth of Christianity can be than this difference. In fact, it is Christianity."

I am not concerned here to follow the writer into his arguments. He is probably one of those who thinks that all our civilisation is due to a peculiar form of Christianity. There are others who hold that all our advance has been made in spite of Christianity. I am only concerned now with the meaning of the word. The way I use the word is to denote the cult of Christ. A Christian to me means a man who follows, or who professes to follow, the example of Christ and to accept all His teaching; to be a member of a Church that calls itself Christian. I use it irrespective of sects to apply to Catholic and Greek Church, Quaker and Skopek alike. I am aware that in Christianity, as in all religions, there has been a strong tendency of the greater emotions to attract the lesser, and of the professors of any religion to assume to themselves all that is good and repudiate all that is evil in the national life. I have no quarrel here with them on the subject. Nor do I wish to use the word in any unnecessarily narrow sense. Are there not also St. Paul and the Apostles, the Early Fathers? So be it. But surely the essence of Christianity must be the teaching and example of Christ? I do not gather that any subsequent teacher has had authority to abrogate or modify either that teaching or example. As to addition, is it maintained anywhere that the teaching and example are inadequate? I do not think so. And therefore I have defined my meaning as above. Let us be sure of our words, that we may know what we are talking about.

In the word "religion" I have more difficulty. It does not carry any meaning on its face as Christianity does. It is an almost impossible word to define, or to discover the meaning of. It is so difficult that practically all the book is an attempt to discover what "religion" does mean. I nearly called the book, "What is the Meaning of Religion?"

In the beginning I have given a few of the numerous meanings that have been applied to the word. It will be seen how vague they are. And at the end I have a definition of my own to give which differs from all. But as I have frequently to use the word from the beginning of the book, I will try to define how I use it.

By "religion," then, generally I mean a scheme of the world with some theory of how man got into it and the influences, mostly supernatural, which affect him here. It usually, though not always, includes some code of morality for use here and some account of what happens after death.

This is, I think, more or less the accepted meaning.

And there are the words Spirit and Soul.

I note that in considering origins of religion the great first difficulty has been how the savage evolved the idea of "God" or "Spirit" as opposed to man. Various theories have been proposed, such as that it evolved from reasoning on dreams. To me the question is whether such an idea exists at all. It may be possible that men trained in abstract thought without reference to fact, the successors of many generations of men equally so trained, do consider themselves to have such a conception. I have met men who declared they had a clear idea of the fourth dimension in Mathematics and of unending space. There may be people who can realise a Spirit which has other qualities than man. In some creeds the idea is assumed as existing. But personally I have never found it among those who make religion as distinguished from those who theorise upon it. The gods of the simpler religious people I have met, whether East or West, have been frankly only enlarged men, with the appetites and appearances and the powers of men. They differ from men only in degree, never in kind. They require food and offerings, they have passions, sometimes they have wives. The early gods are but men. If they are invisible, so can man be; if they are powerful, so are kings. It is only a question of degree, never of kind. I do not find that the God that the Boers appeal to so passionately has any different qualities in their thoughts from a marvellous man. Truly they will say, "No, God is a Spirit." Then if you reply, "So be it; tell me how a Spirit differs from a man, what qualities a Spirit has that are inconceivable in man," they cannot go on; and the qualities they appeal to in their God are always very human qualities – partiality, forgiveness, help, and the like.

Many men will say they believe things which they do not understand. I enter into the subject so fully later I do not want to write more now. I only wish to define that the word God, as I use it, in no wise means more than "the Personality who causes things."

And again about soul. What is soul? The theologian gets up and answers at once that soul exists independent of the body. So be it. Then who has the conception? And what is it like when you have got it? Have Christians it? Then why can they not understand resurrection of the soul without also the resurrection of the body? They cannot. Look at the facts. It is such a fact it has actually forced itself into the creeds. Angels have bodies and also wings. Ghosts have bodies and also clothes. They are recognisable. I know a ghost who likes pork for supper. They sometimes have horses and all sorts of additions. The body may be filmy, but it is a body. Gas is filmy and quite as transparent as a ghost.

Perhaps the people who have put the transmigration of souls as one of their religious tenets really have the conception of a soul apart from any body. I doubt it even here. But this also will come later.

Meanwhile, when I use the word "soul" or "spirit," I do not infer that it is separable from the body or inseparable. I mean simply the essence of that which is man; the identity, the ego existing in man as he is. I think, indeed, this is the correct meaning. We say that a city has fifty thousand souls. Have they no bodies? When I wrote "The Soul of a People" I certainly did not omit their bodies or ignore them. On the contrary. And no one supposed I did. I do not either mean to postulate the inseparability of body and soul. Soul means essence.

Finally, there is the word reason. What is that? By reason I mean the faculty of arranging and grouping facts. It is the power of perspective which sees facts in their proper relation to other facts. The facts themselves are supplied as regards the outer world by the senses of sight and hearing and taste, of touch and sympathy; and as regards the inner world of sensations, such as hate, and love, and fear by the ability to feel those sensations.

Reason itself cannot supply facts. It can but arrange them. By placing a series of facts in due order the existence of other facts may be suspected, as the existence of Neptune was deduced from certain known aberrations. The observation of Neptune by the telescope followed.

In other words, reason may be called "the science of facts."

I offer no apology for this introduction. Most of the confusion of thought, most of the mistiness of argument, is due to the fact that people habitually use words without any clear idea of their meaning. A reviewer of "The Soul of a People" declared that Buddhism was a philosophy, not a religion. I asked him to give me a list of what he accepted as religions, and then to furnish a definition of religion that would include all these and exclude Buddhism. I am still waiting. No doubt he had never tried to really define what he meant by his words. Instead of using words as counters of a fixed value he threw them about as blank cheques, meaning anything or nothing.

When you find confusion of argument in a book, want of clearness of expression, when you see men arguing and misunderstanding each other, there is nearly always one reason. Either they are using words in different senses or they have no clear idea themselves of what they mean by their words. Ask ten men what they mean when they say, Art, beauty, civilisation, right, wrong, or any other abstract term, and see if one can give a satisfactory explanation.

This is an error I am trying to avoid.

CHAPTER I

OF WHAT USE IS RELIGION?

Of what use is religion?

All nations, almost all men, have a religion. From the savage in the woods who has his traditions of how the world began, who has his ghosts and his devils to fear or to worship, to the Christian and the Buddhist with their religion full of beautiful conceptions and ideas – all people have a religion.

And the religion of men is determined for them by their birth. They are born into it, as they are into their complexions, their habits, their language. The Continental and Irish Celt is a Roman Catholic, the Teuton is a follower of Luther, the Slav a member of the Greek Church. The Anglo-Saxon, who is a compromise of races, has a creed which is a compromise also, and the Celt of England has his peculiar form of dissent, more akin perhaps in some ways to Romanism than to Lutheranism. A Jew is and has been a Jew, a Hindu is a Hindu, Arabs and Turks are Mahommedans.

It is so with all races of men. A man's religion to-day is that into which he is born, and those of the higher and older races who change are few, so very few they but serve strongly to emphasize the rule.

There have been, it is true, periods when this has not been so. There have been times of change, of conversions, of rapid religious evolution when the greater faiths have gathered their harvests of men, when beliefs have spread as a flood threatening to engulf a world. No one has ever done so. Each has found its own boundary and stayed there. Their spring tide once passed they have ceased to spread. They have become, indeed, many of them, but tideless oceans, dead seas of habit ceasing even to beat upon their shores. Many of them no longer even try to proselytise, having found their inability to stretch beyond their boundaries; others still labour, but their gains are few – how few only those who have watched can know.

Some savages are drawn away here or there, but that is all. The greater faiths and forms of faith, Catholicism, Lutheranism, the Greek Church, Mahommedanism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and many others, remain as they were. Their believers are neither converted nor convert. Men born into them remain as they were born. They do not change, they are satisfied with what they have.

They are more than satisfied; they are often, almost always, passionately attached to their faith.

There is nothing men value more than their religion. There is nothing so unbearable to them as an attack upon it. No one will allow it. Even the savage clings to his fetish in the mountain top and will not permit of insult to it. Men will brave all kinds of disaster and death rather than deny their faith, that which their fathers believed. It is to all their highest possession. The Catholic, the Chinese ancestor worshipper, the Hindu, the Calvinist, the Buddhist, the Jew – their names are too numerous to mention – none yields to any other in this. It is true of all faiths. No one faith has any monopoly of this enthusiasm. It is common to all.

But wherein lies the spell that religion has cast upon the souls of men? The influence is the same. What is the secret of it?

Can it be that there is some secret common to all religions, some belief, some doctrine that is the cause of this? If so, what is it? If there is such a common secret, why is it so hidden?

For hidden it certainly is.

Nothing can be more certain than that no one religion recognises any such secret in the others. It is the very reverse. The more a man clings to his own religion the more he scorns all others. Far from acknowledging any common truth, he denounces all other faiths as mistaken, as untrue; nay, more, they are to him false, deliberately false; the enthusiast believes them wicked, the fanatic in his own faith calls all others devilish. The more a man loves his religion the more he abominates all others. A Christian would scorn the idea of the essence of his faith being common to all others, or any other. If there be any common truth it is a very secret truth.

Is there any secret truth? If so, what is it?

There is a further question.

There is probably no one thing that we learn with more certainty than this, that whatever exists, whatever persists, does so because it fulfils a want, because it's of use. It is immaterial where we look, the rule is absolute. In the material world Darwin and others have shewn it to us over and over again. When anything is useless it atrophies. So have the snake and the whale lost their legs, and man his hairy skin and sense of scent. Males have lost their power of suckling their young; with females this power has increased. Need developes any thing or any quality; when it becomes needless it dies. Where we find anything flourishing and persistent we are sure always that it is so because it is wanted, because it fills a need.

Religion in some form or another has always existed, has increased and developed, has grown and gained strength.

Therefore religion, all religions that have existed have filled some need, all religions that now exist do so because they fulfil some present use. From the way their believers cherish them the need is a great and urgent one. These religions are of vital use to their believers.

What is this great common need and yearning that all men have, and which, to men in sympathy with it, every religion fulfils?

Can it be that all men have a like need and that all religions have a common quality which serves that need?

Can it be possible that all races, the Englishman, the Negro, the Italian, the Russian, the Arab, the Chinaman, and the Pathan, have the same urgent necessity, and that their urgent necessity is answered by so many varying religions? If so, what is this necessity which religion alone can fill, what is this succour that religion alone can give? What is the use of religion?

These are some of the questions I ask, other men have asked the same – not many. The majority of men never ask themselves anything of the sort. They are born into a religion, they live in it more or less, they die in it. They may question its accuracy in one point or another, for each man to some extent makes his own faith; but nearly all men take their faith much as they find it and make the best of it. It does not occur to them to say, "Why should I want a religion at all? Why not go without?" They feel the necessity of it. Even the very few who reject their own faith almost always try for some other, something they hope will meet their necessity. They will prefer one faith to another. But they do not first consider why they want a faith at all. They do not ask, "Of what use is any religion?"

Yet this is in the main the subject of this book, these questions are the ones I ask, the questions to which I seek an answer. I will repeat them.

Why are all peoples, all men religious? Is the necessity a common necessity? If so, what is it?

Why does one form of religion appeal to one people and another to another people, while remaining hateful to all the rest?

Notwithstanding their common hate, have all religions a common secret? And if so, what is that?

This book of mine is in part the story of a boy who was born into a faith and who lost it; it tries to explain why he lost it.

It is the story of a man who searched for a new faith and who did not find it, because he knew not what he sought. He knew not what religion was nor why he wanted it. He knew not his need. He sought in religion for things no religion possesses. He was ill yet he knew not his disease, and so he could find no remedy. And finally it is an attempt to discern what religion really means, what it is, what is the use of it, what men require of it.

There may be among my readers some who will read the early chapters and will then stop. They will feel hurt perhaps, they will think that there is here an attack upon their religion, upon all they hold as the Truth of God. So they will close the book and read no more. I would beg of my readers not to judge me thus. I would ask them if they read at all to read to the end. It may be that then they will understand. Even if it be not so, that the early chapters still seem to be hard, is it not better to hear such things from a friend than from an enemy? Be sure there are very many who say and who feel very much harder things than this boy did. Is it not as well to know them?

These early chapters are of a boy's life; they may be, they should be if truly written, full of the hardness of youth, its revolt from what it conceives to be untrue, its intense desire to know, its stern rejection of all that is not clear and cannot be known. Yet they must be written, for only by knowing the thoughts of the boy can the later thoughts of the man be understood?

And I am sure that those who read me to the end, though they may disagree with what I say, will admit this: that, thinking as I do of religion, I would not unnecessarily throw a stone at any faith, I would not thoughtlessly hurt the belief of any believer, no matter what his religion; because I think I have learnt not only what his faith is to him, but why it is so, because I have found the use of all religion.

CHAPTER II

EARLY BELIEFS

The boy of whom I am about to write was brought up until he was twelve entirely by women. He had masters, it is true, who taught him the usual things that are taught to boys, and he had playfellows, other boys; but the masters were with him but an hour or two each day for lessons, and of the boys he was always the eldest.

Those who have studied how it is that children form their ideas of the world, of what it is, of what has to be done in it, of how to do it, will recognise all that this means; for children obtain their ideas of everything, not from their lessons nor their books nor their teachers, but from their associates. A teacher may teach, but a boy does not believe. He believes not what he is told, but what he sees. He forms to himself rules of conduct modelled on the observed conduct of other people. Their ideas penetrate his, and he absorbs and adapts them to his own wants. In a school with other boys, or where a boy has as playfellows boys older than himself, this works out right. The knowledge and ideas of the great world filter gradually down. Young men gain it from older men, the young men pass it to the elder boys, and the bigger to the smaller, each adapting it as he takes. Thus is wisdom made digestible by the many processes it passes through, and the child can take it and find it agree with him.

But with a child brought up with adults and children younger than himself this is not so. From the latter he can learn nothing; he therefore adapts himself to the former. He listens to them, he watches them, unconsciously it is true, but with that terrible penetrative power children possess. He learns their ideas, and, tough as they may prove to him, he has to absorb them, and he has not the digestive juice, the experience that is required to assimilate them. They are unfit for his tender years, they do not yield the nourishment he requires. He suffers terribly. A man's ideas and knowledge are not fit for a boy.