The Hearts of Men

CHAPTER XXXI

WHAT RELIGION IS

What, then, is religion? Do any of the definitions given at the beginning explain what it really is? Is it a theory of the universe, is it morality, is it future rewards and punishments? It may be all or none of these things. Is it creeds, dogmas, speculations, or theories of any kind? It is none of these things.

Religion is the recognition and cultivation of our highest emotions, of our more beautiful instincts, of all that we know is best in us.

What these emotions may be varies in each people according to their natures, their circumstances, their stage of civilisation. In the Latins some emotions predominate, in the Teutons others, in the Hindus yet others. Each race of men has its own garden wherein grow flowers that are not found elsewhere, and of these they make their faiths.

Some of these emotions I have tried to show in this book. For the Latins they are the emotions of fatherhood, of prayer, and confession, of sacrifice and atonement, of motherhood, of art and beauty, of obedience, of rule, of mercy, of forgiveness, of the resurrection of the body, of prayer for the dead, of strong self-denial and asceticism, of many others; but those, I think, are the chief.

For the Protestant, the more rigid Protestant, it is the cultivation of the emotions of force, grandeur, prayer, justice, conduct, punishment of evil, austerity, and also many others.

With the Burman Buddhist it is the recognition and cultivation of the beauties of freedom, peace, calm, rigid self-denial, charity in thought and deed to all the world, pity to animals, the existence of the soul before and after death, with no reference to any particular body. The Mahommedan has for one of his principal emotions courage in battle, and the Hindu cleanliness of body and purity of race.

These things are religions. Out of his strongest feelings has man built up his faiths.

And the creeds are but the theories of the keener intellects of the race to explain, and codify, and organise the cultivation of these feelings.

Creeds are not religions, nor are religions proved by miracle or by prophecy, by evidence, or any reasoning of any kind. The instincts are innate or do not exist at all. Like all emotions and feelings, they cannot be created or destroyed by reason.

Why does a man fall in love? No one knows. And if he fall in love, can you cure him of it by argument? Would it be any use to say to him? "The girl you love is not beautiful, is not clever; she would be of no use to you, she does not return your love at all. You cannot really love her." He would only laugh and say, "All that may be true, and yet the fact remains unaltered. She is the woman I love. My reason may prevent my marrying her, it cannot prevent my love. And you may be right that this other woman has all the virtues, but I have no love for her." So it is with all the emotions. You either have them or have not. You do not reason about them. Reason is of things we doubt, not of things we know. Therefore are the beliefs of one religion incomprehensible to the believers in another. Nothing is so difficult to understand as an emotion you have not felt. What is perfect beauty to one man is stark ugliness to another. So it is with religion. To understand well the faith you must have in you all the chords that these faiths draw music from, and how many have that?

Religion is of the heart, not of the reason. Theologians of all creeds warn the believer against reason as a snare of the devil. A freethinker must be an Atheist. History is one long conflict between religion and science. But why is this, if they have no concern one with another? Why fight, why not exist together?

Because all men, freethinkers as well as theologians, have failed to see what religion really consists in. They think it is in the theories of creation, of God, of salvation, of heaven and hell. They look one and all to the creeds and dogmas as religion.

And none of these creeds and dogmas will, as a whole, stand criticism. They fall before the thinker into irretrievable ruin, and therefore the freethinker imagines he has destroyed religion. But religion lives on, and he wonders why. He puts it down to the blindness of men. The theologian rejoices because the continued life of religion seems to him the vindication of the creeds. Yet are they both wrong. Men are not fools, nor does religion live by the truth of its creeds. The whole initial idea has been mistaken. The creeds are but theories to explain religion. Scientific men have invented the ether and theories connected with it to explain heat and light and electricity. These theories are good now, and are universally accepted, but they are not proved. Supposing a hundred years hence wider perception and new facts should throw great doubts on whether ether exists at all as supposed, or on the present theories of heat and electricity? Suppose, too, that the old school scientists are stubborn and refuse to meet these new thoughts? What will the sensible man do? Will he say, "This theory of ether waves is untenable, exploded, foolish, and therefore I will believe it no longer; and as the theory is wrong, so too the phenomena of the theory are all imaginations. There are no such things as heat and light, and I will not warm myself in the sun." Would that be sense? I think reason would reply, "I am sorry the old theories are gone. They were true while they lasted. But now they are dead, and we have not found new ones. Yet if the theory be dead, the facts are still there. The sun still shines, and we have heat and light. These things are true. No man shall frighten me and say, 'If you will not believe our science you shall not warm yourself at our sun. You shall not light your fire or your lamp unless you admit ether waves.' Perhaps a new theory may arise. But anyhow I have the sun yet, and my lamp is not broken. They are facts still."

That is exactly the present position as regards many faiths. The creeds are theories to explain facts. The theories are very old and we have grown out of them. The theologians will not surrender them, clinging to them in the imagination that they really are religion, and that without them religion will fall, conjuring with words to try and support them.

What should reason say in the face of this? "I do not believe in your theories of God and the future state, and the resurrection of the body, and so on, and therefore I won't have anything to do with any religion." Would that be reason? Yes, if you believe the creeds are religion; no, if you believe that religion lies far deeper than creeds. Or to use another simile: the creeds are the grammar of religion, they are to religion what grammar is to speech. Words are the expression of our wants; grammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speech never proceeded from grammar, but the reverse. As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow. But if not? If grammarians are hide-bound, are we to refuse to talk? In this latter case, if the reason were mine, I think reason would say, "Bother these theologians, their dogmas and creeds, their theories and grammars, what do they matter? The instinct of prayer remains, of confession, of sacrifice. They appeal to me still. They fill my heart with beauty. Shall I refuse to accept the glories of life, shall I refuse to cultivate my soul because some people who claim authority have theories about these things with which I don't agree? Not all the creeds nor theologians in the world shall prevent my making the best of myself. The garden of the soul is no close preserve of theirs.

"Religion is the satisfaction of some of the wants of the souls of men. It is a cult of some of the emotions, never of all. For the emotions are so varied, so contradictory, that all cannot live together. I do not quite know why one people includes one emotion in religion and another rejects it out of religion, while still maintaining its beauty and truth. But no religion includes more than one side of life. There are others. I, too, will cultivate these emotions which I need. But this I will not forget, that life has many sides. Life has many emotions, and all are good, though all may not come into religion. There is ambition, there is love of gaiety, of humour, of laughter, there is courage and pride, the glory of success. To live life whole none must be neglected. They are planted in our hearts for some good purpose. I will not weed them out. My garden shall grow all the flowers it can, and reason shall be the gardener to see that none grow rank and choke the others.

"Whatever things are beautiful, that make the heart to beat and the eye grow dim, whatever I know to be good, that shall I have. 'For that which toucheth the heart is beautiful to the eye.'"

CHAPTER XXXII

THE USE OF RELIGION

But granted, people may say, that religion is what you say, a cult of the emotions, of what use is it? Why should these emotions be cultivated at all? You say that they are beautiful because they are true, and that they are true because they are of use. Of what use are they? Some can be explained perhaps, but not most – not the instinct of God, for instance, nor of Law, nor the instinct of prayer. It seems to me that unless you can prove that they are true, essentially true conceptions, they cannot be beautiful. And this you say you cannot prove. "No one can prove God," you say, and prayer, surely that is against reason, and demonstrably a weakness. Certainly not a good emotion to cultivate. "You say it is beautiful. How can you prove that?"

Travelling on the Continent among those places where there are little colonies of English people who for one reason or another have left their own country, there crops up occasionally a man of peculiar kind, hardly ever to be met elsewhere. He is a man who has left England, we will suppose, for economy's sake, who has settled abroad, perhaps in one place, perhaps roaming from place to place, who has no work, no interest in life. He has drifted away from the current of our national life, he has entered no other, but he exists, he would say, as a student of man and a philosopher on motives.

One such, meeting me one day, turned his conversation upon wars and upon patriotism. The former horrified him, the latter revolted him. "Patriotism," he said, "can you defend such a feeling? Have you any reasoning to support it? Patriotism is a narrowness, a blindness. It is little better than a baseness founded on ignorance. How can it be defended? You say it is beautiful. Prove to me that it is so. I deny it."

To whom, and to men like this, it seems that there is only one answer to be made.

"My friend, the love of your own people and your own country, if it ever existed within you, is long dead or you would never ask such a question. I cannot reason with you on the subject, because it would be like reasoning with a blind man on the beauty of being able to see. He who sees knows; but if a man be blind, how can it be explained to him? Neither I nor my fellows can talk to you about patriotism, because it is a feeling we have, but of which you are ignorant. It is not a question of reason. But if you would know whether patriotism be beautiful or the ignorant foolishness you suppose, I can show you the road to learn.

"Go back to that England you have forgotten, and in your forgetfulness begun to despise. Go back there on the eve of a great victory, or a great deliverance, such a day as that on which Ladysmith was relieved. And go not into the streets if the loud rejoicings hurt your philosophic ear, but go into the homes of the people. Go to the rich, to the middle class, to the artisan, to the labourer, and mark their glowing faces, their glad eyes, the look of glory, of thanksgiving that our people have been rescued, that our flag has escaped a disaster. Look at the faces of these men and women and children, whose hearts are full at the news. And then ask them, 'Is patriotism a mean and debasing passion?' They know. Or do better even than this, go yourself to Africa, to India, to the thousand league frontiers where men die daily for their flag, for their own honour, and that of their country. Take rifle yourself and beat back those who would destroy our peace, take up your pen and give some of your life to the people whom we rule. You will find it a better life, perhaps, than at a foreign spa. Give yourself freely for your country and those your country gives in charge to you. I think you will learn, maybe, what patriotism means. But argument, reason? I think you exaggerate the power of reason. It can argue only from facts. It is necessary to know the facts first. And you are ignorant of your facts, because you have never felt them. Only those who feel them know. Go and give your life, and before it be gone you will have learnt what neither I nor any man who ever lived can tell you. You will have learnt the realities of life.

"For you and those like you mistake the power of reason, you have forgotten its limitations. Reason is but the power of arranging facts, it cannot provide them. Your eyes will give you the facts they can see, your ears what they can hear, your sympathies will give you the realities of men's lives. If you have no emotions, no sympathies, how can you get on? You are like mariners afloat upon the sea vainly waggling your rudders and boasting that you are at the mercy of no erratic winds, while the ships pass you under full sail. Where will reason alone take you? It cannot take you anywhere. A rudder is only useful to a ship that has motive power. What motive power have you? So you float and work your rudders and turn round and round, and are very bitter. Why are all philosophers so bitter, so hard to bear with, so useless? Because you are conscious unconsciously of your futility, that the world passes you by and laughs.

"The functions of reason are very narrow. You forget them. You exalt reason into the whole of life, committing the mistake for which you rail on others. Unbridled emotion is, as you say, terrible. So is unbridled reason. Where has reason alone ever led anyone save into the dreariest, driest pessimism? Was a philosopher ever a happy man? Even your Utopias, from Plato's to Bellamy's, who would desire them? Hell would be a pleasant relaxation after any of them. The functions of the senses, of which sympathy is the greatest, are to give you facts, the function of reason is to arrange them. The emotions drive man forward, reason directs and controls them. That is all.

"You say religions are founded on errors, on what are your reasonings founded? They are founded on nothings."

Of what use is patriotism? Is it beautiful or no? Of what use is religion? Is it beautiful or no? Prove to me that it is necessary or beautiful. Show me why it should be so.

Is it not the same answer in each case? It is so easy to point out the evils of exaggeration in each. Anyone can do it. But the mean. Prove to me the use and beauty of the mean.

The answer is always the same. If you have religion in you, such a question would never occur to you, for you would feel its use, you would know its beauty. And if you have not, who shall prove it to you? Who shall provide you with the facts on which to reason, who shall open your eyes? But if anyone doubts that religion is useful and is beautiful to its believers, go and watch them.

It matters not where you go, East or West, it is always the same. In England, or France, or Russia, among the Hindus, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Parsees. It makes no matter if you will but look aright. For you must know how to look and where. You must learn what to read. It is never books I would ask you to read, never creeds, never theologies, never reasons, nor arguments. You will not find what you search in libraries nor yet in places of worship, in ceremonies, in temples, great and beautiful as they may be. Not in even their inmost recesses is the secret hid, the secret of all religions. I would have you listen to no preachers, to no theologians. They are the last to know. But I would have you go to the temple of the heart of man and read what is written there, written not in words, but in the inarticulate emotions of the heart. I would have you go and kneel beside the Mahommedan as he prays at the sunset hour, and put your heart to his and wait for the echo that will surely come. Yes, surely, if you be as a man who would learn, who can learn. I would have you go to the hillman smearing the stone with butter that his god may be pleased, to the woman crying to the forest god for her sick child, to the boy before his monks learning to be good. No matter where you go, no matter what the faith is called, if you have the hearing ear, if your heart is in unison with the heart of the world, you will hear always the same song. Far down below the noises of the warring creeds, the clash of words and forms, the differences of peoples, of climes, of civilisations, of ideals, far down below all this lies that which you would hear. I know not what you would call it. Maybe it is the Voice of God telling us for ever the secret of the world, but in unknown tongue. For me it is like the unceasing surge of a shoreless sea answering to the night, a melody beyond words.

The creeds and faiths are the words that men have set to that melody; they are the interpretations of that wordless song. Each is true to him whom it suits. Every nation has translated it into his own tongue. But never forget that those are only your own interpretations. Whatever your faith may be, you have no monopoly of religion. I confess that to me there is nothing so repellent as the hate of faith for faith. To hear their professors malign and abuse each other, as if each had the monopoly of truth, is terrible. It is as a strife in families where brother is killing brother, and the younger trying to disinherit the elder. I doubt if in all this warfare they can listen for the voice that is for ever telling the secret of the world. Whence came all the faiths but from that inexplicable feeling of the heart, that surge and swell arising we know not whence? If you would malign another's faith remember your own. If you cannot understand his belief stop and consider. Can you understand your own? Do you know whence came these emotions that have risen and made your faith?

The faiths are all brothers, all born of the same mystery. There are older and younger, stronger and weaker, some babble in strange tongues maybe, different from your finer speech. But what of that? Are they the less children of the Great Father for that? Surely if there be the unforgivable offence, the sin against the Holy Ghost, it is this, to deny the truth that lies in all the faiths.

Religion is the music of the infinite echoed from the hearts of men.