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are recent, accessory acquirements which do not begin to shape the character and conduct of the individual to the degree and extent that the latter does. A study of this sort should therefore be full of suggestions to those to whom the religious training of the young is intrusted. Its aim throughout is not to destroy but to fulfill, and the thought so well expressed by Dean Farrar has been constantly in the mind of its author: "We study the past not to denounce it, not to set ourselves above it, not to dissever ourselves from its continuity, but to learn from it, and to avoid its failures. It has much to teach us by way of solemn warning. If we shall have to dwell upon its mistakes it is only that we may have grace to avoid them, and to be on our guard against similar tendencies."'1

It is the opinion of the writer that the future will not be non-religious, as an ever-increasing number of scholars predict it will, but will possess a religion which will appropriate and assimilate the good of all the religions of the past and present, and will harmonize with its stage of development and satisfy the peculiar needs which only a religion of some sort can satisfy. It is already a platitude that each age has the religion which it deserves, but during transition periods it happens that progress is made along some lines much more rapidly than along others, and the difficulty of making proper adjustments is so great that impatient spirits grow restless and strive to force the adjustment even if they have to eliminate one or two important factors entirely. If old religion and the new science cannot immediately come to terms the enthusiastic but short-sighted partisans of the latter are ready to sacrifice the former, while the religious enthusiasts are equally eager to disparage and even annihilate all science. Fortunately, these individuals are few and their power relatively small. The race moves slowly and cautiously, regardless of the goading of the few, and instinctively refuses to lose anything that may be of value to it.

That of all things it will not leave Religion, the grandest legacy of the ages, behind, no one who is conversant with Volk-psychology and the trend of the present age will deny. Science is already halting in its mad and disappointing rush, and beginning to suspect that the promised land it was so eagerly making for" is but a mirage or the phantom of an overwrought brain. Philosophy is bending all her energies 1 Hist. of Interpretation, p. 14.

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to reconcile Science and Religion, knowing that the alliance will be extremely beneficial to both, in that it will save them from pessimism, despair, and deterioration.

Clifford's Cosmic Consciousness, the Panpsychism of Fechner, Stout, Strong, and others, the Pure Experiences of James, the new Humanism of Schiller, and the Pragmatism of the Chicago School, are all efforts, I take it, to bring about this reconciliation; that is, they are tendencies away from materialism and the crude conception of law which were the offspring of an immature science toward a new idealism which is always the closest ally of religion.

It is, perhaps, another instance of the irony of fate that Science should wittingly or unwittingly become Religion's greatest benefactor. She has pruned the religious tree of all its dead and superfluous twigs and branches, has cleaned it of its many deathly parasites, so that now it is much more beautiful and healthy than it ever was, and the future may well hope to enjoy fruits, richer and more luscious than were ever possessed by the past.

I gladly take this opportunity to acknowledge my very great indebtedness to President G. Stanley Hall, who first suggested the subject to me, and without whose continued help, encouragement, and inspiration, this study, crude and imperfect as it is, could not have been completed.

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CHAPTER I.

DEFINITIONS OF RELIGION.

It is evident that just as in medicine, psychiatry, art and ethics, we must know physical and mental health, beauty, and goodness, in order to clearly understand disease, ugliness, and evil; so too, in religion, a knowledge of its healthy normal condition, is a prerequisite to a knowledge of its abnormal, pathological condition. The one is as important as the other, and both must be kept constantly in countenance of each other, in order that each may shed light upon the other. In order, therefore, to determine what pathological religion is we must first determine what normal religion is.

What is religion? The history of the attempts that have been made to answer this question forms a long and tedious chapter in the history of human thought. Almost every

writer on the subject, from the earliest times down to the present, has offered a different definition, no one being quite content with those offered by the others. The old adage, "Quot homines tot sententiæ " holds nowhere more true than here. A collection and classification of some of these definitions may not be without interest.

1. A great many writers, both ancient and modern, have, as Prof. Brinton points out,1 looked upon the religious state, in se' as pathological, "a symptom of a diseased brain." Thus, Empedocles in the fifth century B. C., declared it to be a sickness of the mind," and Feuerbach, about fifty years ago, stigmatized it as "the most pernicious malady of humanity." Prof. Sergi, in his recent book, L'Origine dei Fenomeni Psichici,2 says point blank that all religions, the highest as well as the lowest, are pathological. They all spring from desire for protection against evils, present and future, and inasmuch as the protection is foolishly sought from supernatural, and therefore unnatural sources which never existed, the desire cannot be satisfied, and therefore, all forms of prayer, worship, sacrifices, in short, all religious 2 Ch. 15, pp. 264-298.

1 Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 41 ff.

beliefs and practices are a waste of time, productive of fatalism, and harmful to progress. Religion, he hopes, will in the future be supplanted by science, which will offer natural explanations of the causes of all the ills to which humanity is subject, and furnish natural remedies for them.

2. A similar view, quite prevalent in all ages, is that religion is superstition. Hobbes defines it somewhere as "superstition sanctioned by the State" and tells us that it was born of fear and ignorance. Lucretius declared it was born of a dream, while Guyau and other contemporaries tell us that it is at best only a product of the childhood of the race, which we will soon outgrow.

3. A third view is that religion is a fraud invented by priests and rulers to frighten the masses into subjection. This was a favorite view about the time of the French Revolution. In England, Shelley championed this view and declared it to be one of his missions to unveil the religious frauds by which nations have been deluded into submission." These three groups of theories and definitions may be characterized as antagonistic definitions; definitions not of religion, but against religion. They are the favorites of atheists.

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4. Still another view holds that at some far-distant time the Creator revealed himself to our forebears thereby causing Religion to be born full-grown in their souls. Present religions are mere reminiscences and degenerations of that perfect religion which was the parent of them all. Religion has not, like language, art, science, government, etc., developed according to the laws of evolution; her's was a Minerva-like birth.

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Closely akin to this view is that which holds that religion is an expression of the inner light' that light which lighteth every man who cometh into the world' disclosing unto him the existence of God and the fact of his soul. "When I say that all religions depend for their origin and continuance directly upon inspiration," writes Dr. Brinton, "I state an historic fact. It may be known under other names, of credit or discredit, as mysticism, ecstasy, rhapsody, demoniac possession, the divine afflatus, the gnosis, or in its latest christening, 'cosmic consciousness.' All are but expressions of a belief that knowledge arises, words are uttered or actions performed not through conscious ideation or reflective purpose but through the promptings of a power above or beyond the individual mind."'1 It is interesting to note in passing, Dr.

Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 52 ff.

Brinton's earlier view of the matter. 66

this

Religions, author tells us in another work, are the unaided attempts of man to find out God; they are the efforts of the reason struggling to define the infinite; they are the expressions of that yearning after the gods'' which the earliest of poets discerned in the hearts of all men.

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1

Again, there are the views of narrow-minded sectarians who hold that the only religion worthy of the name is their own; all others are base superstitions and idolatries. This view has received its best expression in Milton's Paradise Lost, and is not uncommon even to-day.

Prof. Leuba, in one of his excellent articles,2 has collected a number of scientific and philosophical definitions, and classified them into three groups as follows:

In the first group, which may be called the Noetic group, "a specific intellectual element is given as the essence, or as the distinguishing mark of religion.

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Thus, Martineau defines religion as, "a belief in an Everliving God, that is, in a Divine mind and will ruling the universe and holding moral relations with mankind.”

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Romanes: Religion is a department of thought having for its objects a self-conscious and intelligent Being."

d'Alviella Religion is, "The belief in the existence of superhuman beings who interfere in a mysterious fashion in the destiny of man."

Hegel: Religion is, "The knowledge possessed by the finite mind of its nature as absolute mind."

In the second, or Feeling and Esthetic group, "it is one or several specific feelings which are singled out as the religious differentiæ."

Schleiermacher: "Religion cannot and will not originate in the pure impulse to know. It is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling. Later he wrote: "Religion is a feeling of absolute dependence.

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Herbart: Sympathy with the universal dependence of men is the essential natural principle of all religion." Goethe, in Faust:

"Nenn's Glück! Herz! Liebe! Gott!

Ich habe keinen Namen

Dafür, Gefühl ist alles."

1 The Myths of the New World, p. 15.

2 Intro. to a Psychological Study of Religion, Monist, Jan., 1901. The reader will find here a good collection and criticism of definitions.

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