ordinary man is by his nature immersed in the world of sense, and uses his reason in order to subjugate the material world to his own ends, to satisfy his appetites and to assert his will. He lives on the animal plane with a more than animal consciousness and purpose, and in so far, he is less religious than the animal. The life of pure spirit is religious, and the life of the animal is also religious, since it is wholly united with the life-force that is its highest capacity of being. Only man is capable of separating himself alike from God and from nature, of making himself his last end and living a purely self-regarding and irreligious existence.
And yet the man who deliberately regards self-assertion and sensual enjoyment as his sole ends, and finds complete satisfaction in them— the pure materialist—is not typical; he is almost as rare as the mystic. The normal man has an obscure sense of the existence of a spiritual reality and a consciousness of the evil and misery of an existence which is the slave of sensual impulse and self-interest and which must inevitably end in physical suffering and death. But how is he to escape from this wheel to which he is bound by the accumulated weight of his own acts and desires ? How is he to bring his life into vital relation with that spiritual reality of which he is but dimly conscious and 34
HUMANISM AND RELIGIOUS E X P E R I E N C E
which transcends all the categories of his thought and the conditions of human experience ? This is the fundamental religious problem which has perplexed and baffled the mind of man from the beginning and is, in a sense, inherent in his nature.
I have intentionally stated the problem in its fullest and most classical form, as it has been formulated by the great minds of our own civilisation, since the highest expression of an idea is usually also the most explicit and the most intelligible. But, as the writers whom I have quoted would themselves maintain, there is nothing specifically Christian about it. It is common to Christianity and to Platonism, and to the religious traditions of the ancient East.
It is the universal attitude of the anima naturaliter Christiana, of that nature which the mediaeval mystics term ” noble,” because it is incapable of resting satisfied with a finite or sensible good.
It is ” natural religion ” not, indeed, after the manner of the religion of naturalism that we have already mentioned, but in the true sense of the word.
It is, of course, obvious that such conceptions of spiritual reality presuppose a high level of intellectual development and that we cannot expect to find them in a pre-philosophic stage of civilisation. Nevertheless, however far back 35
CHRISTIANITY AND T H E N E W AGE
we go in history, and however primitive is the type of culture, we do find evidence for the existence of specifically religious needs and ideas of the supernatural which are the primitive prototypes or analogues of the conceptions which we have just described.
Primitive man believes no less firmly than the religious man of the higher civilisations in the existence of a spiritual world upon which the visible world and the life of man are dependent.
Indeed, this spiritual world is often more intensely realised and more constantly present to his mind than is the case with civilised man.
He has not attained to the conception of an autonomous natural order, and consequently supernatural forces are liable to interpose themselves at every moment of his existence.
At first sight the natural and the supernatural, the material and the spiritual, seem inextricably confused. Nevertheless, even in primitive nature-worship, the object of religious emotion and worship is never the natural phenomenon as such, but always the supernatural power which is obscurely felt to be present in and working through the natural object.
The essential difference between the religion of the primitive and that of civilised man is that for the latter the spiritual world has became a cosmos, rendered intelligible by 36